Jinwei Cao

Interactions Between System Evaluation And Theory Testing: A Demonstration of the Power of a Mulitfaceted Approach to Systems Research

Historically, information systems (IS) researchers have questioned which research paradigms, activities, and methods IS research should follow. In this paper, we argue that different research methods and activities may interact with each other, different research paradigms may complement each other due to such interactions, and therefore, a multimethodological, cross-paradigm research approach may result in better IS research than a singular approach. Three existing multimethodological IS research frameworks are reviewed and summarized into an integrated approach. Two types of interactions between different research methods across system evaluation and theory testing research activities are identified. A three-year research study about a computer-based training system for deception detection (Agent99 Trainer) provides a concrete example to demonstrate the existence and research benefits of these two types of interactions, as well as the benefits of a multimethodological, cross-paradigm IS research approach.

A Blog Mining Framework

New blogs appear every day, and a lot of their content is useful for applications in various domains. The authors propose a framework for mining blogs to gather this information automatically.

Learning by Browsing: A Web-Based Multimedia Browsing System for Learning

Multimedia, especially video, is widely used in educational applications. More and more universities and corporations now provide videotaped lectures online for knowledge sharing and learning. However, people often have difficulties in finding specific information in these lecture videos because of the unstructured and linear nature of video. Segmenting the videos into short clips based on topic transition and organizing these video segments into well-formed browsing structures will facilitate information searching and may further enhance learning. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a Web-based multimedia learning system with automatically generated browsing structures such as hierarchical tables of contents, index and hyperlink. A pilot study was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the system in supporting learning.