Gerontechnology acceptance by elderly Hong Kong Chinese: a senior technology acceptance model (STAM)

The purpose of this study was to develop and test a senior technology acceptance model (STAM) aimed at understanding the acceptance of gerontechnology by older Hong Kong Chinese people. The proposed STAM extended previous technology acceptance models and theories by adding age-related health and ability characteristics of older people. The proposed STAM was empirically tested using a cross-sectional questionnaire survey with a sample of 1012 seniors aged 55 and over in Hong Kong. The result showed that STAM was strongly supported and could explain 68% of the variance in the use of gerontechnology. For older Hong Kong Chinese, individual attributes, which include age, gender, education, gerontechnology self-efficacy and anxiety, and health and ability characteristics, as well as facilitating conditions explicitly and directly affected technology acceptance. These were better predictors of gerontechnology usage behaviour (UB) than the conventionally used attitudinal factors (usefulness and ease of use).

Practitioner Summary: Previous studies have not given much consideration to age-related health and associated abilities when examining acceptance of technology by the ageing population. By encompassing conventional technology acceptance constructs together with age-related health and ability characteristics, the present study was able to identify more factors affecting gerontechnology acceptance by older Hong Kong Chinese.     

FirstSTEP process modeler — a CIMOSA-compliant modeling tool

Since its market release in late 1994, the FirstSTEP toolset developed by Interfacing Technologies of Montreal, Canada has been proven to be one of the most practical solutions for business process management initiatives. Being a methodology independent enterprise modeling and simulation application, FirstSTEP has been adopted by industry leaders from such diversified sectors as manufacturing, finance, telecom, healthcare, public, and others. Its concept and approach are compatible to the framework. Most notably is the user front-end simplicity that has enabled its acceptance by the typical business manager who is not usually academic in his/her approach. The paper presents the FirstSTEP tool suite, its concept and approach and demonstrates its capabilities using an application with a most recent FirstSTEP user — America Online.     

Rcs — a system for version control

An important problem in program development and maintenance is version control, i.e. the task of keeping a software system consisting of many versions and configurations well organized. The Revision Control System (RCS) is a software tool that assists with that task. RCS manages revisions of text documents, in particular source programs, documentation, and test data. It automates the storing, retrieval, logging and identification of revisions, and it provides selection mechanisms for composing configurations. This paper introduces basic version control concepts and discusses the practice of version control using RCS. For conserving space, RCS stores deltas, i.e. differences between successive revisions. Several delta storage methods are discussed. Usage statistics show that RCS's delta method is space and time efficient. The paper concludes with a detailed survey of version control tools.     

SOFTLIB — a documentation management system

This paper describes a software sysem (SOFTLIB) that has been developed to assist in the management of software documentation generated during systems development projects. It provides facilities to manage large numbers of documents, to file documents when they are complete and to issue them to system developers and maintainers. It also includes an information retrieval facility that allows programming staff to find documents, to examine their contents before issue and to assess the state of the software project documentation. SOFTLIB is explicitly intended to help manage the documentation generated during software development — it is not designed for use by end-users of that software or for managing end-user documentation. The novel characteristic of this system is the approach that is taken to the consistency and completeness of documentation. The documentation associated with a software system is organized in such a way that it may be detected if document sets are complete (that is, if all documentation which should be provided for a software component is available) and if document sets are likely to be inconsistent. This means that if a document has been changed without a comparable change being made to other associated documents, this is detectable by the librarian system. In addition, a subsidiary aim of our work was to investigate the utility of menu systems to complex software tools by building a user interface to SOFTLIB. We conclude that menu systems are far from ideal in such situations because of the range of possible options which must be handled by the system.     

DIMOS — a software tool for optimizing display systems with LCDS

The Display Modelling System (DIMOS) is a software tool that was developed to evaluate the electro-elastic, electro-optic and colorimetric properties of display systems with liquid-crystal cells. DIMOS enables the user to perform a numerical analysis of the complex interdependencies between the numerous physical parameters of such display systems and the relevant output quantities. These must be known in order to optimize information content (multiplexability) and visibility of display systems with liquid-crystal cells. The structure and organisation of DIMOS is explained with special emphasis on the definition of dichroic dyes, polarizers and birefringence dispersion of LC materials. An overview is given of the numerical procedures used for the evaluation of the field-induced deformation and the optical properties of arbitrary chiral-nematic LC-configurations. The applicability of DIMOS to the optimization of supertwisted LCDs is shown in an example.     

Application of Lean Manufacturing in Hospitals—the Need to Consider Maturity,Complexity, and the Value Concept

Lean is widely applied in hospitals, but the impact tends to be limited. This paper investigates three possible explanations: 1) maturity, 2) complexity, and 3) the value concept and analyses the bearing of these in a case study of lean application in a large Danish university hospital. The results indicate that lean tends to be applied in secondary and support functions with a logistic character and therefore has had a limited impact on the overall healthcare performance. The case study shows that there are constraints related to low lean maturity, the complexity of processes and operations as well as differences in value perceptions among the different professions (e.g., doctors, nurses, and managers) within the hospital. The conclusion is that lean is useful for hospitals, but the lean concept as well as its implementation methods need to be fitted to the organizational complexity and diverging values in hospitals in order to bring about a larger impact. It is therefore necessary to develop new models for the lean concept as well as the implementation of lean adapted to the particular context of hospitals with a stronger focus on patient experiences and on coordination of social relations.     

Relational database as a tool in industrial design. Experience from a human factors engineering analysis of a module for manned space-flight

A human factors engineering analysis was carried out to verify that the CUPOLA—a module developed by the European Space Agency for the International Space Station—complies with an extensive set of human factors requirements. Analysis was carried out in three steps: task analysis, computer simulation of tasks and empirical test of tasks in a physical mock up. In advance to each step the method of assessment and type of information to be obtained were determined in detail and the way of documentation was established as input forms to a relational database. Advantages and drawbacks of this early formalisation as seen by project members are discussed in the present paper.

Relevance to industry

The method of early formalisation by a relational database used throughout the project showed to be a suitable tool in this human factors analysis of a working place under design. Early formalisation of the results and documentation served as a quality system supporting a homogeneous high standard of data collection and documentation. In industry, the use of relational databases underlying Product Data Management systems increases. This makes it relevant to try and link human factors work to these methods of documentation in order to promote the integration of human factors work at an early stage of product and production development.     

The OPAL platform—a CIMOSA compliant execution environment

The FAW Research Institute has been working on integrating platforms for over 10 years now. The FAW developed an execution environment for heterogeneous distributed systems named AMBAS (Adaptive Method Base Shell). OPAL² (Integrated Information and Process Management in Manufacturing Engineering) was a large CEC project that formed part of the AIT-initiative (Advanced Information Technology for the European Automotive and Aerospace Industries). AMBAS has been enhanced in the OPAL project to implement the specification of the AIT-integration platform (AIT-IP). This paper describes how AMBAS also satisfies the requirements of the CIM Open Systems Architecture (CIMOSA)-Integrating Infrastructure (IIS) specification. AMBAS supports enterprise integration based on enterprise models. It provides transparent and uniform access to the entire body of an enterprise's data and methods (functions, services, applications and processes), which is the main aim of CIMOSA-IIS. The application environment Communication and Resource Assistant (CORA: the desktop part of AMBAS) implements a standard Web-based interface to the user. In addition to AMBAS, an enterprise engineering environment (called Ωmega (Operational Modelling Environment and Generator for AMBAS applications)) is available, which makes possible the modelling of data, functions, applications and processes and the generation of corresponding executables for AMBAS.     

The seismic kernel system — a large-scale exercise in fortran 77 portability

The portability of software has become a major commercial issue in recent times. Such portability does not come easily, as few if any computer languages are really portable in practice. An additional complicating factor, especially in the commercial environment, is that the resulting software must be efficient. This paper describes the design and successful implementation of a 500,000+ line portable FORTRAN 77 package for the processing of seismic data. The package exhibits demonstrably high efficiency on a wide variety of machines from minicomputers to the largest supercomputers. Experiences gained during this exercise throw much light on the integration of the various thought processes which occur during the software engineering cycle, especially the notion of locality.     

The development of a formative scenario-based computer assisted assessment tool in psychology for teachers: The PePCAA project

Formative computer assisted assessment has become increasingly attractive in Higher Education where providing useful feedback to large numbers of students can be difficult. However, the nature of such assessments has often been limited to objective questions such as multiple-choice. This paper reports on the development and initial trialling of a more innovative, formative use of computer assisted assessment in a Higher Education context. The European funded PePCAA (Pedagogical Psychology Computer Assisted Assessment) project developed a series of scenario-based computer-delivered formative assessments of pedagogical psychology for teachers and trainee teachers, using a range of software features, including the addition of confidence measurement. The project had a two-fold aim: to provide a tool to improve understanding of pedagogical psychology and to explore the potential of more innovative techniques of computer assisted assessment to motivate students and to assess deeper learning. The combination of computer-delivered formative assessment with innovative question styles and confidence ratings is believed to be unique for pedagogical psychology. Scenarios were based on realistic classroom situations and focused on problem solving or on utilising best practice. The PePCAA Learning Assessment Circle (PLAC) provided a framework for indexing the kinds of processes required of users. In the UK, small scale trialling involved a total of 23 teacher trainees such that each assessment was attempted by about seven participants. Participants completed evaluation questionnaires after each assessment. Responses from learners indicated that the UK scenarios were generally very well received and had at least partly achieved the aim of stimulating deeper learning. Transfer of assessments between countries proved more difficult than expected. The next stage of development should be to conduct a larger pilot, thus allowing full investigation of the reliability and validity of the assessments. There is also scope for further development of the PePCAA approach and for its application in other subjects.     

The design and development of a computerized tool support for conducting senior projects in software engineering education

This paper presents a computerized tool support, the Meetings-Flow Project Collaboration System (MFS), for designing, directing and sustaining the collaborative teamwork required in senior projects in software engineering (SE) education. Among many schools’ SE curricula, senior projects serve as a capstone course that provides comprehensive training in collaborative project development. With the focus on collaboration training, instructors of senior projects often address issues that include how to encourage collaboration and ensure that collaborative efforts are sustained throughout the project’s development. In order to help resolve these issues, the MFS takes a holistic approach. The meetings-flow concept that undergirds the MFS introduces a novel macro-level and meeting-oriented group process to guide the proceeding of the project’s collaborative work. The design of the MFS facilitates a computerized environment that helps to institutionalize and monitor such a group process. In introducing the MFS, we focus initially on the elaboration of the concept and design, after which we present and validate the system implementation and usage. We also evaluate the MFS and receive a positive result with respect to the educational issues raised in this paper. Finally, we comparatively summarize the MFS to discuss its values and the role it plays in CSCL (computer supported collaborative learning) and PBL (project-based learning) of SE education.     

Naming the pain in requirements engineering: A design for a global family of surveys and first results from Germany

ContextFor many years, we have observed industry struggling in defining a high quality requirements engineering (RE) and researchers trying to understand industrial expectations and problems. Although we are investigating the discipline with a plethora of empirical studies, they still do not allow for empirical generalisations.ObjectiveTo lay an empirical and externally valid foundation about the state of the practice in RE, we aim at a series of open and reproducible surveys that allow us to steer future research in a problem-driven manner.MethodWe designed a globally distributed family of surveys in joint collaborations with different researchers and completed the first run in Germany. The instrument is based on a theory in the form of a set of hypotheses inferred from our experiences and available studies. We test each hypothesis in our theory and identify further candidates to extend the theory by correlation and Grounded Theory analysis.ResultsIn this article, we report on the design of the family of surveys, its underlying theory, and the full results obtained from Germany with participants from 58 companies. The results reveal, for example, a tendency to improve RE via internally defined qualitative methods rather than relying on normative approaches like CMMI. We also discovered various RE problems that are statistically significant in practice. For instance, we could corroborate communication flaws or moving targets as problems in practice. Our results are not yet fully representative but already give first insights into current practices and problems in RE, and they allow us to draw lessons learnt for future replications.ConclusionOur results obtained from this first run in Germany make us confident that the survey design and instrument are well-suited to be replicated and, thereby, to create a generalisable empirical basis of RE in practice.     

IT capability in primary schools — a case of something lost in the translation?

Abstract  This paper examines the National Curriculum guidelines for Information Technology in Key Stages 1 & 2. Problems of interpretation are identified. The results of a survey indicate that primary school teachers lack sufficient understanding, of the concepts involved, to translate guidelines into practice. In-service training is recommended. The likely outcomes of National Curriculum guidelines for information technology are also considered.     

New modalities for scientific engagement in Africa – the case for computational physics

Computational physics as a mode of studying the mathematical and physical sciences has grown world-wide over the past two decades, but this trend is yet to fully develop in Africa. The essential ingredients are there for this to happen: increasing internet connectivity, cheaper computing resources and the widespread availability of open source and freeware. The missing ingredients centre on intellectual isolation and the low levels of quality international collaborations. Low level of funding for research from local governments remains a critical issue. This paper gives a motivation for the importance of developing computational physics at the university undergraduate level, graduate level and research levels and gives suggestions on how this may be achieved within the African context. It is argued that students develop a more intuitive feel for the mathematical and physical sciences, that they learn useful, transferable skills that make our graduates well-sought after in the industrial and commercial environments, and that such graduates are better prepared to tackle research problems at the masters and doctoral levels. At the research level, the case of the African School Series on Electronic Structure Methods and Applications (ASESMA) is presented as a new multi-national modality for engaging with African scientists. There are many novel aspects to this School series, which are discussed.     

‘Best’ for whom?: the tension between ‘best practice’ ERP packages and diverse epistemic cultures in a university context

The idea that so-called ‘best’ business practices can be transferred to organizations when they purchase enterprise resource planning (ERP) software packages is a major selling point of these packages. Yet recent research has illustrated a gap between the espoused theory of a best practice solution and the theory-in-use experienced by those who install software with such a design. As researchers begin to examine the difficult process by which organizations recast the best practices model handed down to them by consultancies and software vendors in an effort to make the software ‘work for them’ in practice, it is equally important that we begin to understand the reasons that such a gap exists. To this end, we analyze the strategic partnership between a multinational software vendor and a university who together designed a ‘best practice’ ERP package for the higher education industry. Through the theoretical lens of ‘epistemic cultures’ we argue that in organizational contexts made up of more than one epistemic culture, the use of a best practice model will be problematic because, by definition, the model mandates one epistemological position through the software design. This is counter to a university's loosely coupled organizational form.     

The main features of BAHUS — biometeorological system for messages on the occurrence of diseases in fruits and vines

Recently, there has been an increasing demand for providing a high level of production of wholesome plant food but without losing its quality from the consumer's point of view. In this regard, it is required to provide reliable information about the occurrence of plant diseases so as to ensure their efficient control. The reliability of this information increases substantially if both the meteorological and the biological quantities, measured or modelled, are properly integrated in a prognostic system. By the joint efforts of the authors' institutions the biometeorological system BAHUS for messages on the occurrence of the most important diseases in fruits and vines has been developed. This system has been developed in Microsoft FoxPro 2.6(X) following standards of analysis of a large amount of data. It consists of two modules. The first provides input for prediction in the form of the measured or modelled meteorological and biological data, while the second, on the basis of available input data, selects the corresponding method for messages on the occurrence of disease. Depending on the method selected, the meteorological data can be assimilated either from weather stations, atmospheric models or software packages LAPS (land–air parameterization schemes providing 10 min prognostic values) and KARLOS (providing their climatological values) integrated in the system as a whole. The BAHUS has been designed as an open system giving a wide range of possibilities for increasing its level of sophistication.     

Development of a Moodle course for schoolchildren’s table tennis learning based on Competence Motivation Theory: Its effectiveness in comparison to traditional training method

Based on Competence Motivation Theory (CMT), a Moodle course for schoolchildren’s table tennis learning was developed (The URL is http://www.bssepp.com, and this course allows guest access). The effects of the course on students’ knowledge, perceived competence and interest were evaluated through quantitative methods. The sample of the study consisted of 32 primary school students, who were randomly assigned to two groups, one of which used the Moodle course (Group M, N = 16) and the other one (Group C, N = 16) didn’t, and the intervention lasted 6 weeks. The result showed that (1) students made significant learning gains and demonstrated statistically significant higher perceived competence by participating in the Moodle course, (2) there was no statistically significant mean difference in table tennis interest between the two intervention groups. These positive effects on knowledge and perceived competence suggest that Moodle can be used as a tool to supplement traditional motor learning.     

The Enriched UTAUT Model for the Acceptance of Software Engineering Tools in Academic Education

This article provides an enriched technology acceptance model explaining the impact of both classic and additional variables on software engineering tools acceptance within Information Systems Development courses. Two novel, domain-specific variables were identified (i.e., Professional Training Diffusion and Model Interchange). Statistical verification of the proposed model and study regarding the influence of the variables on students’ intention to use specific tools were conducted—providing users with enhanced means of selecting optimal software for real-life projects.     

Developing a scale for teacher integration of information and communication technology in grades 1–9

There is no unified view about how teachers' integration of information and communication technology (ICT) should be measured. While many instruments have focused on the technological aspects, recent studies have suggested teachers' pedagogical considerations, professional development, and emerging ethical and safety issues should be included when assessing teachers' ICT literacy. Using the performance standards created by the International Society for Technology in Education, a group of Taiwanese teachers developed equivalent items. After consulting expert panels and interviewing teachers, a scale was constructed. Using this instrument, 3729 teachers from grades 1 through 9 in Taiwan were sampled. Half of the data was analysed by exploratory factor analysis to find the underpinning structure, and the second half was analysed by confirmatory factor analysis to verify the subscales. The results confirmed six subscales for teachers' ICT integration: (1) information collection and preparation; (2) material production and troubleshooting; (3) communication and sharing; (4) planning, teaching and evaluation; (5) professional development and self‐study; and (6) ethical, health and safety issues. Using two teacher attributes, school levels and course or degree obtained, the scale was further verified for its feasibility. The established scale examines the existing concerns for technology, pedagogy and professional development at once with a new addition of ethical and safety issues, which demand growing attention in teachers of future generation.