Acquiring the knowledge to assemble an integrated Information System (IS) development process that is tailored to the specific needs of a project has become increasingly important. It is therefore necessary for educators to impart to students this crucial skill. However, Situational Method Engineering (SME) is an inherently complex process that…

Despite all the speeches, articles, and meetings about data-based instructional decision making, the author's observation after more than 20 years of working with middle and high school teams is that teachers and administrators often make important instructional decisions on the basis of historical precedent, anecdotal information, experience, or…

Objectives: To map food access in the city of Preston in the north-west of England in order to determine access, availability and affordability of healthy food options. Design and methodology: The research design employed a number of distinct methods including: surveys of shops; interviews with local people and shopkeepers; a cost and availability…

InterCon provides services to health insurers of foreign tourists who travel to the United States and Canada. Management wants to implement a new information system that will deal with several operational problems, but it is having difficulty securing the capital resources to fund the system's development. After an initial failure, the chief…

Mashups, Web applications integrating data and functionality from other Web sources to provide a new service, have quickly become ubiquitous. Because of their role as a focal point in three important trends (Web 2.0, situational software applications, and end user development), mashups are a crucial emerging technology for information systems…

Deep and shallow learner approaches are useful for different purposes. Shallow learning can be good where fact memorization is appropriate, learning how to swim or play the guitar for example. Deep learning is much more appropriate when the learning material present involves going beyond simple facts and into what lies below the surface. When…

Since 2001, there has been a dramatic decline in Information Technology and Computer Science student enrolments worldwide. As a consequence, many institutions have evaluated their offerings and revamped their programs to include units designed to capture students' interests and increase subsequent enrolment. Likewise, at Victoria University the…

This study aimed at exploring how high school students deal with designing an information system, for example, for a small business or a medical clinic, the extent to which students develop as independent learners while working on their projects, and the factors that help or hinder fostering students' design skills. The three-phase dual-loop…

The study reported here examined the effectiveness of educational robotics combined with GPS/GIS technologies used as "digital manipulatives" in the teaching of concepts in science, engineering, and technology. Based on the success of previous summer camps, the study also examined a scaling-up of the intervention from 38 participants to…

School social workers have historically had a great deal of flexibility in the practices they use, yet few studies have systematically examined them. This study used data collected as part of the National School Social Work Survey to examine the practice of school social workers within the context of the principles of the response to intervention…

Integrating social presence theory and social identity theory, this study brings system design and social influence aspects together to explain their joint effects on knowledge contribution in virtual communities (VCs). Different from most prior information systems (IS) research that adopts a uni-dimensional approach and restricts social presence…

States have made dramatic progress in the past few years in implementing longitudinal data systems (LDS) to improve student achievement. These systems collect and house student educational data that make it easy for policymakers and practitioners to access and use it for reporting, policymaking and decision making. So much has happened in states…

Background: Hospital adoption of health information technology (HIT) systems is promoted as essential to decreasing medical error and their associated 44,000 annual deaths and $17 billion in healthcare costs (Institute of Medicine, 2001; Kohn, Corrigan, & Donaldson, 1999). Leading national healthcare groups, such as the Institute of Medicine,…

This dissertation aims to investigate how advanced information technologies cope with the various demands of disaster response. It consists of three essays on the exploration of micro-blogging and FOSS environments. The first essay looks at the usage of micro-blogging in the aftermath of the massive 2008 China earthquake and explores the…

Many efforts to improve the interplay between usability evaluation and software development rely either on better methods for conducting usability evaluations or on better formats for presenting evaluation results in ways that are useful for software designers and developers. Both of these approaches depend on a complete division of work between…