Although there is evidence that academically successful students are engaged with their studies, it has proved difficult to define student engagement clearly. Student engagement is commonly construed as having two dimensions, social and academic. The rapid adoption of social media and digital technologies has ensured increasing interest in using them for improving student engagement. This paper...

Recently, we have observed rapid growth of individual daily technologies such as microblogs, and the technology’s influence on people’s social life. To investigate such self-determined technology usage, we choose an empowerment perspective as our theoretical lens, because the empowerment concept highlights human beings’ proactive nature. We investigate a specific microblog usage, i.e. publicly ...

Traditional Web search systems have limitations due to its unrealistic assumption on users’ query formulation and lack of context-sensitivity. To overcome these limitations, we designed and implemented a social search system which is based on a social adaptive navigation system Knowledge Sea and exploits the past usage history of users. By conducting a survey and transaction log analysis, we co...

Social networks provide rich opportunities to interact with friends and other members. While research on motivations and interaction design help explain what makes online communities successful, the influence of trust on social location technologies and interactions that integrate online and off-line activities remains unclear. Drawing from research on information systems, social psychology, an...

The dissemination of information in social networks and the relative effect of ICT (Information and Communications Technology) use has long been an interesting area of study in the field of sociology, human computer interaction and computer supported cooperative work. To date, a lot of research has been conducted regarding an actor’s mobile phone usage behavior while disseminating information w...

OBJECTIVE To study how social interactions influence physician adoption of an electronic health records (EHR) system. DESIGN A social network survey was used to delineate the structure of social interactions among 40 residents and 15 attending physicians in an ambulatory primary care practice. Social network analysis was then applied to relate the interaction structures to individual physicia...

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems play an important role in collecting and disseminating information in developing countries. Recently, researchers have used IVR technology to build voice forums, in which callers leave voice messages which can be heard over the Internet and over the phone. Mobile Voices (not original name, concealed for anonymity) is one such platform that operates in ru...

We examine the role of network externalities on the use of blogs in an organization. Prior research has considered social influences such as peer pressure, but there is little prior work on how the extent of others’ actual usage can influence an individual’s use of technology. We also examine how technology usage is influenced by positive feedback from others. Finally, we look at how the relati...