Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Librarian/Lecturer: Successful Course Development Based On Km Principles, Stuart Basefsky

Stuart Basefsky

This presentation focuses on a highly successful and award winning course taught by a librarian/lecturer. It was specifically designed to serve the knowledge needs and aspirations of students, faculty, companies, publishers and the educational institution to which all these parties are connected. The unique manner in which the KM needs of the parties are met by establishing synergies is highlighted as well as how it is assessed.

"Apps"—An Innovative Way To Share Extension Knowledge, Joseph S. Dvorak, Tanya C. Franke-Dvorak, Randy R. Price

Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering Faculty Publications

Extension professionals across the country are continuously seeking innovative ways to reach clientele and to disseminate timely, educational information. A new avenue to reach clientele includes the use of smartphone "apps." The "Machinery Sizing" app, which was developed to ease the estimation of tractor horsepower to implement sizing for Extension clientele anytime, anywhere, is explained as a key example for Extension professionals to utilize apps in disseminating information to clientele. There are many benefits to using apps, including information availability wherever Internet service is available on the smartphone, ease of computations of equations, and automatic updates being sent to users.

Ieee T&S Magazine: Undergoing Transformation, Katina Michael

Professor Katina Michael

Our Magazine is in a transformative period, not only because we are ‘Going Green’ in 2013 but because we are experiencing tremendous growth in quality international submissions. This means that we are increasingly appealing to an international audience with transdisciplinary interests. This has not gone unnoticed by the media, nor by our SSIT readership or wider engineering community.

The Development Of A User Self-Help Knowledge Management System For Help Desk: Deployment Of Knowledge Management Approach And Software Agent Technology, Kar Yin Leung, Sim K. Lau

Dr Sim Kim Lau

Most help desks have admitted their call volume has increased in the past decade while “help unavailable when needed” is the major reason for service delivery failure and user dissatisfaction. The habit of calling help desk for simple problems has prompted the investigation of transferring part of first-level troubleshooting duty from help desk to user. This research proposes the development of user self-help knowledge management system that allows user to solve simple and routine technical enquiries. The proposed approach incorporates software agent to allow autonomous handling of enquiries so that the most appropriate solution and user communication can be facilitated.

Knowledge Management In Information Technology Help Desk: Past, Present And Future, Kar Yin Leung, Sim K. Lau

Dr Sim Kim Lau

Information technology has changed the way organizations function. This resulted in the reliance of help desks to deal with information technology related areas such as hardware, software, and telecommunication. Besides, the adoption of business process reengineering and downsizing have led to the shrinkage of the size of help desk. The shorter information technology product life cycle has worsened the situation by increasing the already sizeable help desk’s user base. Consequently, the help desk has to cover more information technology products and resolute more technical enquiries with less staff. Thus, the outcome is clear that users have to wait comparably longer …

The Customization Of Knowledge Management Techniques In Information Technology Help Desk, Kar Yin Leung, Sim Lau, Geng Liang

Dr Sim Kim Lau

Information Technology (IT) has converted a majority of organizational activities to automatic and electronicbased. This conversion greatly increases Help Desk (HD)'s coverage on IT related areas. Alternatively, the adoption of business process reengineering and downsizing has led to the shrinkage of the size of HD. This not only leads to the loss of priceless knowledge, but also coerces HD to provide more service with less staff - the outcome is clear that users have to wait comparably longer before HD staff is available. This paper describes how generic Knowledge Management process can be customized to improve support process in HD.

Decision Making Concerning The Acquisition And Use Of Information And Communication Technology (Ict) In Medical Practices, Robert Macgregor, Peter Hyland, Charles Harvie

Associate Professor Peter Hyland

A number of studies both within medical practices as well as the wider small business sector suggest that gender plays a role in both decision-making and the running of the business. Yet despite these apparent differences, the role of gender in the adoption of ICT in medical practices has remained largely ignored. This paper presents a study of 196 GPs (128 males, 68 females) who have adopted ICT in their practice. The results of this study show that the perception of drivers of ICT adoption and use in medical practices appear to differ depending on the gender of the GP. …

Competition In Information Technologies: Standards-Essential Patents, Non-Practicing Entities And Frand Bidding, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Standard Setting is omnipresent in networked information technologies. Virtually every cellular phone, computer, digital camera or similar device contains technologies governed by a collaboratively developed standard. If these technologies are to perform competitively, the processes by which standards are developed and implemented must be competitive. In this case attaining competitive results requires a mixture of antitrust and non-antitrust legal tools.

FRAND refers to a firm’s ex ante commitment to make its technology available at a “fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory royalty.” The FRAND commitment results from bidding to have one’s own technology selected as a standard. Typically the FRAND commitment is …

Slides: Meeting The Needs Of Women Through Clean Cooking Solutions, Corinne Hart

2012 Energy Justice Conference and Technology Exposition (September 17-18)

Presenter: Corinne Hart, Program Manager, Gender and Markets, Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves

20 slides

Editorial: Social Implications Of Technology- “Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo”, Katina Michael

Professor Katina Michael

Late last year, IEEE SSIT was invited to put together a paper for the centennial edition of Proceedings of the IEEE that was published in May 2012. The paper titled, “Social Implications of Technology: The Past, the Present, and the Future,” brought together five members of SSIT with varying backgrounds, and two intense months of collaboration and exchange of ideas. I personally felt privileged to be working with Karl D. Stephan, Emily Anesta, Laura Jacobs and M.G. Michael on this project.

Overcoming Organisational Resistance To Using Wiki Technology For Knowledge Management, Charmaine C. Pfaff, Helen M. Hasan

Helen Hasan

Although Wikis emerged in the public domain more than a decade ago, a number of business organisations are now discovering the advantages of using Wiki technology to manage knowledge. However, there are many who are not convinced about the merits of this relatively new Wiki technology and are not yet prepared to risk its adoption because it exhibits many ideas that have yet to be tested and many issues that have yet to be resolved. This paper studies the merits of using a Wiki for knowledge management. While some cases of corporate adoption of Wiki technology have been reported, cases …

Conceptualizing The Creative Tourist Class: Technology, Mobility And Tourism Experiences, Ulrike Gretzel, Jamal Tazim

Ulrike Gretzel

Increasing mobilities and an ever greater amount of technologies that support creativity have led to the emergence of a so-called Creative Class in our postmodern society. Creative Class members have distinctive experiences that blur the boundaries between everyday and touristic life. These experiences challenge conventional typologies of the tourist experience and have tremendous implications for tourism research and practice. In this article we discuss first what the Creative Class is, what experiences it has, and how it uses emerging technologies to create, mediate, and reconstruct these experiences. A special emphasis is placed on the relationship the Creative Class has with …

Enterprise Gis & Architecture, Nevin Gaudet

Geography and the Environment: Graduate Student Capstones

Enterprise GIS solutions are becoming more attractive to companies to implement because of the ability to leverage system of record portals. Information is largely regarded as a company’s competitive advantage enabling organizational capability to operate and build capital and equity within a business. And with good reason large amounts of data and information are difficult to collect and organize within a digital framework. Building a GIS enterprise is a solution for data organization and management. Workflows must be in place to collect, process, calculate, and store data with high regard to timeliness and accuracy. Business decisions are made based on …

Commentary On: Mann, Steve (2012): Wearable Computing, Katina Michael, M.G. Michael

Associate Professor Katina Michael

In Professor Steve Mann- inventor, physicist, engineer, mathematician, scientist, designer, developer, project director, filmmaker, artist, instrumentalist, author, photographer, actor, activist- we see so much of the paradigmatic classical Greek philosopher. I recall asking Steve if technology shaped society or society shaped technology. He replied along the lines that the question was superfluous. Steve instead pointed to praxis, from which all theory, lessons or skills stem, are practiced, embodied and realized. Steve has always been preoccupied by the application of his ideas into form. In this way too, he can be considered a modern day Leonardo Da Vinci.

Humanistic Redesign And Technological Politics In Organizations, R. Badham, Karin Garrety, Christina Kirsch

Karin Garrety

The political nature of technology design and implementation is explicitly addressed in human centered projects to introduce technologies that support job enrichment, group autonomy and industrial democracy. Yet the political meaning of such projects does not simply manifest itself in pure form from the methods employed or the intentions of the humanistic actors but, rather, from the complex configuration of these and other factors present in the design and implementation context. This paper illustrates this theme in an analysis of a case study human centered project. It argues that an improved understanding of the configurational politics surrounding such projects is …

The Way It Really Happened: Competing Narratives In The Political Process Of Technological Change, Patrick M. Dawson, D. Buchanan

Patrick Dawson

Corporate narratives concerning technological change are often constructed around a linear series of events that show the organization in a positive light to internal and external observers. These narratives often sanitize the change process, and present data from which commentators can formulate neat linear prescriptions on how to implement new technology. In contrast, this paper draws on processual-contextual theoretical perspectives to argue that technological change is a more complex political process represented by multiple ongoing narratives which compete with each other for dominance as definitive change accounts. A central aim of this paper, therefore, is to demonstrate the analytical significance …

Slides: Unconventional Gas And Oil – Potential Air Emissions, John Imse

Air Quality Impacts from Oil and Gas Development (January 27)

Presenter: John Imse, Hydrogeologist, ENVIRON International Corporation presents an overview of the current methods for developing a shale play and the typical site operations

10 slides

Friedrich Nietzsche: The Abyss And Technology, Mary Willis

Mary Willis

Friedrich Nietzsche, while being an extremely interesting man, shall only be a part of the focus of this thesis. Nietzsche was famous for an often misquoted quote which goes like this: “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” I would like to take this quote and borrow from Nietzsche’s philosophical ideas about life to compare modern technology to the abyss. Nietzsche claims that the principle of “life” is a more pressing and higher concern than that of “knowledge,” …