Umar Ruhi

Social media in higher education: A literature review of Facebook

The rapid adoption of social media technologies has resulted in a fundamental shift in the way communication and collaboration take place. As staff and students use social media technologies in their personal lives, it is important to explore how social media technologies are being used as an educational tool. The aim of this paper is to analyse the role of social media, in particular, Facebook, as an educational tool in higher education. Through a review of the literature, this paper explores the myriad ways in which Facebook is being used as an educational instrument for learning and teaching. Multiple benefits of Facebook usage for learning and teaching have been identified such as increased teacher-student and student-student interaction, improved performance, the convenience of learning and higher engagement. The paper also highlights the potential problems and limitations of Facebook usage ranging from educators’ dominance to privacy concerns. Finally, Facebook usage guidelines that can be adopted by educators to encourage social media adoption are proposed. As social media usage continues to grow in higher education, future empirical research is warranted.

Building government portals that work: guiding principles from Community Informatics

As governments implement new digital environments as a means of delivering better information services and resources, building rich digital spaces that encourage citizen uptake is becoming an increasing challenge. This paper addresses this issue and examines the City of Hamiltons municipal portal, called myhamilton. To understand what governments need to do to secure successful implementation of comprehensive digital spaces that are relevant to citizens, myhamilton is used to showcase practical guidelines from key managers involved in the portal project. These guidelines are discussed within the backdrop of best practices from the Community Informatics (CI) literature.

Lean Development in Design Science Research: Deliberating Principles, Prospects and Pitfalls

[Context and motivation:] As a relevant and viable research methodology that addresses the development and empirical investigation of new artifacts, design science research DSR has gained traction in the requirements and software engineering research community over the past decade. [Question/Problem:] In this paper, we deliberate the synergies between the lean mindset and DSR, and explore the application of lean development approaches in the planning and execution of software and requirements engineering research projects. [Principal idea:] The widespread adoption of lean approaches in many business and technology practices today provides the impetus to explore their application in the context of software and requirements engineering empirical research. Toward this, we offer a review of key principles underlying the lean mindset and provide an overview of the typical processes followed in DSR research projects. Subsequently, we reflect the potential for lean development approaches to facilitate DSR projects. [Contribution:] We propose a conceptual framework that integrates lean principles with DSR phases and outputs, and we aim to inspire future discussion on the application of the lean mindset in the planning and execution of empirical research projects.

Experiential Learning Spaces for Enterprise Resource Planning Courses in Business Schools

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems have experienced mainstream adoption as a comprehensive solution for business function integration and end-to-end process management. To meet industry demand, many business schools offer academic courses in ERP strategy and technology to train students to be proficient in the use of ERP systems. The extant literature on ERP education highlights the need for additional research about pedagogical techniques that can help business schools in their efforts. To be effective in the delivery of ERP courses, instructors require a deeper understanding of how they can teach ERP systems in a meaningful way and consequently foster higher levels of student engagement. This paper provides an overview of the current state of ERP academic programs and teaching practices. This is followed by a review of experiential learning theory (ELT) which is later used in this paper as a basis for pedagogical practice suggestions towards the improvement of ERP training. A pedagogical model comprising of various course activities and teaching practices is proposed. The proposed practices are justified in terms of their efficacy towards developing experiential learning spaces for students to cultivate theoretical and applied knowledge of ERP systems.

Prospects & practices for end-user development activities in business computing education

Many academic courses geared towards improving computer and information literacy (CIL) among non-IT specialists draw upon end-user development (EUD) activities where the end-user assumes a central role in creating or modifying software artefacts. Traditional examples of EUD in educational contexts include exploring and manipulating features and functions in software packages such as spreadsheets & databases, working with simulations, developing websites, utilizing content feeds from a variety of information sources, and creating mashups and widgets with diverse functionality. Although the benefits of improving computing education with EUD practices has been acknowledged in the extant literature, guidelines for the inclusion of EUD-based tasks and tools in academic programs have not been documented in as much detail. The objective of this workshop is to discuss and demonstrate use-cases for EUD based pedagogical components in business computing education, especially so as to meet the objectives set out in model curricula by ACM and AIS.