Social Collaboration Tools Research Articles

Revisiting The Usability of Personalised E-Learning Framework with Social Collaboration Support Using PCA

Personalised e-learning aims at providing a personalisation effect based on the learner’s characteristics such as knowledge level, preferences, and learning style. The support derived from using social collaboration tools like social media reflects the discovery of these characteristics from content generated during collaboration. The collaboration process is guided using different annotations equipped with the collaboration tool. This type of system needs to be evaluated in terms of usability factors including usefulness, ease of use, and System Usability Scale (SUS). These evaluation factors reflect the objectives of the system based on the different functionalities provided. Thus, the correlation between these factors and how they are related to the system objectives is needed to be validated. This validation is performed using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) utilising PerLCol framework as discussed in this paper. PerLCol is a framework that aims at providing personalisation effects by utilising the generated information during social collaboration and interaction. The result reveals the strength items as indicated by the selected components (PC1, PC2, and PC3). These components are related to three evaluated factors which are personalisation, social collaboration, and seamless design which ultimately reflect the objectives of the framework.

Business processes modelling and diagnosis

The computerization of relevant information in organizations is increasingly becoming a necessary reality in companies that want to be present in a market that is characterized by innovation, adaptability and where bigger amounts of information are increasingly available and accessible to everyone, the use of Social Collaboration tools in organizations become increasingly crucial to keep a business running (Brocke J, Maaß W, Buxmann P, et al. (2018) Future work and enterprise systems. Business & Information Systems Engineering 60(4): 357–366). In Alter(2013) Work system theory: overview of core concepts, extensions and challenges for the future. Journal of the Association for Information Systems 14(2): 72–121), work systems are described as systems ‘in which human participants and machines perform work (processes and activities) using information, technology and other resources to produce specific products/services for specific internal and external customers’. The computerization of processes is not, however, so complete because all the formal and informal relationships among employees, which underlie each organization and have a high impact on the correct definition of processes, are not correctly considered. In order to mitigate this problem, this article presents a proposal for representing, in computer systems, formal and informal relations between employees and the consequent integration in organizational processes in order to provide automatic diagnosis of highlighted processes.

Mining the Students’ Chat Conversations in a Personalized e-Learning Environment

Providing personalized e-learning environment is normally relying on a domain model representing the knowledge to be acquired by learners and learners’ characteristics to be used in the personalization process. Therefore, constructing the domain model and understanding the characteristics of the learners are very crucial in such an environment. With the inclusion of social collaboration tools for collaborative learning activities, the generated data during conversations enrich with valuable information to be used for personalization. However, when considering chat conversations as a source for constructing the domain model, there is a need to perform a mining technique for chat conversations in order to extract the semantic relations from the user-generated contents hidden inside these conversations. As well as the learner’s characteristics like learning style and knowledge level expressed during conversations. Thus in this paper, we are aiming for the best utilization of chat conversation by proposing a model containing a rule-based technique as a form of mining technique. This mining aims at extracting the semantic relations to build the domain model as an ontology-based depiction. In addition, the mining model is proposed to perform some collaborative filtering techniques to identify the learning styles and knowledge level of the learners.

Shifting standards: Participative dimensions of information literacy

ABSTRACTInformation resources and practices have always been social, but traditional information literacy instruction tends to prioritize a model of an individual searcher evaluating library‐curated resources, while social collaboration tools and user‐generated content sites provide more participative paths and practices for research at all levels. Using document analysis of the information literacy instructional materials of 42 institutions, we investigate the extent to which information literacy instruction incorporates participative standards, resources and practices. The findings suggest that while information literacy standards and frameworks are evolving to encompass participative resources and practices, only 21% of the institutions studied inscribed participative resources and practices into their instructional materials. This visual presentation will be designed to elicit discussion about the ways in which document analysis may fail to capture the participative practices in information literacy instruction, to inform our ongoing research.

Email-free collaboration: An exploratory study on the formation of new work habits among knowledge workers

Social collaboration technologies have rapidly spread across organizations, offering a unique opportunity to improve the exchange of knowledge among employees, especially in distributed work environments. The increasing popularity of social-collaboration tools as an employee-oriented communication channel, inevitably raises questions about the future of email as its intensive use by knowledge workers is more and more perceived as being inefficient and unproductive. Through a quantitative case study methodology, this study seeks to explore the role played by the notion of habit in explaining employee knowledge sharing capability for firms implementing social collaborative practices in the context of no-email initiatives. Data collected within a large international IT services company, which is among the first firms having made such shift, were used to test the developed conceptual model. The findings suggest that habit is positively influenced by relative advantage and perceived ease of use while relative advantage was found to positively impact knowledge sharing capability. Besides, habit moderates the relationships between three attributes (relative advantage, perceived ease of use, and compatibility to a lesser extent) and knowledge sharing capability. Theoretical and practical implications developed from these findings are then discussed.

A social network-based teacher model to support course construction

On line education is a student centred activity, and most of the research in this field focuses on students; yet the quality of teaching is undoubtedly the basic ingredient for a successful learning. In particular, fostering new forms of collaboration between students and teachers, i.e. pursuing co-learning aspects of e-learning, probably needs giving teachers new means of collaboration, also among themselves. In this paper, we tackle the aim of providing the teacher with social collaboration tools, to support the process of course construction. Such a process comprises several distinct steps, from concept mapping, through selection of suitable learning material, to the final stages of delivery in a Learning Management System. It is an heavy process, through which teachers have to spend a lot of time to build or to retrieve the right learning material from local databases or from specialized repositories on the web. The support we foresee should exploit the knowledge of the whole teaching community, in which the teacher acts, to help her/him in doing the above described job. By “knowledge” we mean basically a representation of the ways of usage of learning materials, by the teachers in the community for their courses. To start on a solid footing, here we address the topic of modeling the teacher. The model we define aims to give teachers a personalized support, encompassing consideration for their own pedagogy, teaching styles, and teaching experience during course creation. It is deemed to consider all those issues in a dynamic way and to guide the teacher towards the best didactic choices.

Jumpstarting the use of social technologies in your organization

How do you get your organization to start using social technologies to become more innovative and productive? Where and with whom should you begin? We interviewed over 70 managers across 30 companies and found that the most successful firms employ one of three jumpstart strategies, depending on the organization's mission, work processes, culture, and industry. Some start at the bottom of the organization, finding and enabling ‘young experimenters’ to use social technologies to enhance their individual productivity. Others start in the middle, finding and helping ‘corporate entrepreneurs’ in middle management to use social technologies to improve collaboration on teams and projects. Others begin at the top, finding ‘enlightened executives’ who are open to new technology and the potential of social tools to strengthen their organizational culture. We combine our research with concepts from change management, technology adoption, and social networks to suggest ways managers can best introduce social collaboration tools into their organizations.

The new phase of enterprise communications: When content management meets social media—An interview with David Nüscheler and Kevin Cochrane of Day

As businesses struggle to embrace social media and digital asset management into their marketing strategy, many collide with the limited capabilities of their Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems. Most systems provide basic Web Content Management and lack the capabilities required to manage external user-generated content that comes with the addition of social collaboration. How can companies join a two-way conversation with prospects, investors, customers and employees? In today's economy, few can afford to dump old ECM systems to embrace social collaboration. This article discusses new systems that incorporate centrally managed social collaboration tools and use open standards to link to old content systems.