Balakrishnan Muniandy

Academic Use of Internet among Undergraduate Students: A Preliminary Case Study in a Malaysian University

The year 1995 was considered the beginning of the Internet age in Malaysia. The growth in the number of Internet hosts in Malaysia began around 1996. Since then, the use of Internet has grown tremendously and, the use of Internet by students at universities now is common in Malaysia. Students use the Internet for social, entertainment, and educational purposes. This paper presents the findings from a preliminary study on how undergraduate students at a local university in Malaysia use the Internet for academic purposes. The research questions answered in this paper are: (i) what is the level of Internet usage skill? (ii) How is the Internet used for academic purposes? (iii) To what extent are Internet facilities used for academic purposes? (iv) What are the pathways and search engines used to find information? and (v) What is the perception of students toward the quality of learning by using the Internet for academic purposes? The answers to these questions are obtained through the use of a questionnaire completed by 92 undergraduate students at a local university. The data collected were analyzed by using descriptive statistics. The results obtained provide some information about the extent of Internet use for academic purposes by graduate students.

Visualization of invariant bot behavior for effective botnet traffic detection

Due to the sharp rise in computer network attacks through botnets, current security monitoring tools will be insufficient for effective botnet traffic detection. In fact, most of the existing tools are text-based and there is a lack of effective user friendly interface that can facilitate detection of botnet traffic in large datasets. Moreover, most of these tools are based on reactive approaches and will be triggered only after an attack is detected. Therefore, enhancement of botnet traffic detection is highly demanded. Knowledge discovery through information visualization is an avenue to solve these issues effectively. The aim of this research is to propose a proactive approach by adopting proper visualization techniques to increase the visibility of network traffic related to invariant bot behavior and botnet activities. The visualization techniques used in this research consist of graphs, scatter plots, and histograms. These visualization techniques are easy to interpret and good for visualizing large datasets. By adopting these techniques for invariant bot behavior visualization, it is possible to provide visual notification of bot existence in a network without distracting the user with huge volumes of data. In fact, the visual illustration of typical bot behavior improves the botnet traffic detection process by engaging human perception and intellectual capabilities. Overall, this visual approach can assist the security personnel to proactively detect invariant bot behaviors and botnet activities during the benign state of a botnet by providing a graphical user friendly interface. Exploiting the visual information, human analysts and security personnel will be able to gain more insights into their networks, leading to make correct decisions in critical situations and to prevent catastrophic botnet attacks.

The Impacts of Demographic Variables on Technological and Contextual Challenges of E-learning Implementation

Information technology has achieved robust growth which has made it possible for learning to occur quickly. The rapid development of information, communication and technologies (ICT) has initiated an unparalleled transformation in universities all over the world. This development of technology and learning is offering new techniques to represent knowledge, new practices, and new global communities of learners. As a result, todays economic and social changes force universities to try to find new learning approaches and systems. E-learning seems to be an appropriate approach in this aspect. However, the implementation of e-learning systems in universities is not an easy task because of some challenges related to context, technology, and other challenges. This paper studied the impacts of demographic data and reported the critical points for the decision makers to consider when planning and implementing e-learning in universities. A quantitative approach was used to study the effects of technological and contextual challenges on e-learning implementation in which a questionnaire was used for the data collection. According to the findings of the study, the most important challenges of the implementation of e-learning are related either to organizational (Contextual) and technological (technical) issues. The demographic variables have been found to play a direct and indirect role with the technological and contextual challenges of implementing e-learning. This paper showed that there are some significant differences in the two challenges faced by instructors in terms of the demographic variables. The result revealed that some significant differences exist between demographic variables and the two challenges of e-learning in terms of gender, age, teaching experience, ICT experience and e-learning experience. However, there is no significant difference in terms of e-learning experience. The obtained data, from such study, can provide information about what academic institutions can do before implementing e-learning to reduce and overcome the challenges in implementing e-learning in universities. So, university administrators interested in implementing e-learning should recognize the challenges that their instructors are facing and to provide the necessary policy and support to help overcome these challenges.

Design issues and challenges for web-based history learning system for adolescents in Malaysia

In the first section of this paper, we discussed the challenges and issues in designing and developing a web-based history learning system, namely Chrono-Map Web-based Learning System for secondary school students in Malaysia. In section two, we described the main contribution of this paper, the communicability of the learning sites for adolescent which are form four secondary school students aged from 16 to 17 years old in which specific features such as digital cultural marker was included. At the end of the section, the evaluation methods such as the selection of sample size and respondents in the secondary school in a multicultural and multiracial community were discussed.