Australian Computer Society: ACS Digital Library
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Student Use of the Internet: an extension of TAM in technical and vocational institutions in Brunei Darussalam
Get PDFIn the educational setting, the Internet is profiteering among academics and students. In fact, this has changed the functioning of the educational establishments. However, the success of use of the Internet is largely dependent upon the user’s behaviour that in turn affects their attitudes. Even when the formidable opportunities exist for the deployment of technology, adverse attitude can inhibit the use.
Keeping this in view, survey of 266 students of four technical and vocational colleges was conducted to study the attitudes of the students toward the use of the Internet. The present study develop a normative model by using Davis’s Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and validates two specific attitudinal variables; perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use that are hypothesized to be fundamental determinants of the attitude that in turn predict the students’ use of the Internet. By adding external variables such as; demographics, task characteristics, computer exposure, and institutional support further test the parsimony of the model. A Structural Equation Modelling technique is used to validate the model.
The study has confirmed that majority of the students (85%) are using the Internet. In the final model the external variables do contribute towards both of belief parts: perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness that further affects the attitude of the students in predicting the Internet usage
Considering the Problem of Insider IT Misuse
Get PDFIn recent years the Internet connection has become a frequent point of attack for most organisations. However, the loss due to insider misuse is far greater than the loss due to external abuse. This paper focuses on the problem of insider misuse, the scale of it, and how it has effected the organisations. The paper also discusses why access controls alone cannot be used to address the problem, and proceeds to consider how techniques currently associated with Intrusion Detection Systems can potentially be applied for insider misuse detection. General guidelines for countermeasures against insider misuse are also provided to protect data and systems
The Extent to Which Information Communication Technology Careers Fulfil the Career Ideals of Girls
Get PDFThe aim of this research is to make a contribution to knowledge in relation to women as a minority group in the Information Communication and Technology (ICT) industry. The research presented in this paper represents a minor component of a much larger research project conducted under the auspices of Women in IT Tasmania (WIITT) and supported by funding from the Intelligent Island. The focus of the current research is on Year Nine students throughout Tasmania. It will involve a detailed examination of the results in relation to the perceptions of Year Nine girls and boys in relation to the career characteristics of their ideal careers and their views of careers in ICT. The objective is to identify areas that need to be specifically promoted to girls to attract them to careers in ICT. In addition existing research has shown that parents and relatives have a considerable influence on girls when they are making a career choice. This can mean that if the information girls obtain from this advice is inaccurate or out of date, then many could reject a career in ICT as a viable career option. Accordingly a secondary objective is to consider the means by which such information can be most effectively distributed
A Critical Analysis of the Knowledge Creation Process
Get PDFThe topic of knowledge creation (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995) will be analysed from a philosophical perspective. To begin with, the key motivations behind the discourse of knowledge creation and management are briefly discussed. The contemporary distinction between tacit and explicit knowledge is then explored. Following this, the work of Lyotard on knowledge in a (post)modern economy will be summarised. The paper then explores how some of the work by Foucault and Adorno may provide a new direction for developing research approaches in this area
The Co-Regulatory Scheme for Internet Content Regulation: operational effectiveness
Get PDFThe debate about the likely effectives of a Scheme to regulate the access to certain Internet content during the hearings of the Select Senate Select Committee and during the parliamentary debates was characterized by a great diversity of opinion. This paper describes these opinions and then examines the claims made about the operational effectiveness of the Co-Regulatory Scheme for Internet Content Regulation since its inception on 1 January 2000
Evaluating Distributed Usability: the role of user interfaces in an activity system
Get PDFTraditional definitions of usability localise this fundamental Human Computer Interaction (HCI) concept in the user interface and reduce it to a variety of qualitative and quantitative attributes of the computer system. This simplistic view of usability has been used as the basis for developing design and evaluation methods in the discipline. This paper argues that, as a result, HCI methods are ineffective and suffer from various shortcomings. It is proposed that the notion of usability must be extended to include contextual factors, and viewed as being distributed across an activity system. Adopting this notion of distributed usability then requires a review of existing HCI methods. Usability testing, as a complete and self-contained HCI method, was chosen for this purpose, and the result, a distributed usability evaluation method (DUEM), is presented in this paper
Employing Interpretive Research to Build Theory of Information Systems Practice
Get PDFThis paper provides guidance and an example for carrying out research using an interpretive framework. Until quite recently, there has been little available in the IS literature to guide the interpretive researcher to build theory of IS practice. While structured as a typical research paper, this paper is different in that the focus is on conceptual issues and the research methods rather than the findings. Unlike positivist research, there is no accepted general model for communicating interpretive research. Similarly, few guidelines exist for conducting the inductive process central to interpretive research. Throughout the paper, issues relating to the choice and application of the methods in terms of conducting inductive research are discussed. Overall, the focus provides an in-depth discussion of the particular interpretive research that I undertook so that other researchers can read of an example that may be similar to their own and therefore guide their work
The Australian Government's Abandoned Infrastructure Outsourcing Program: what can be learned?
Get PDFEarly in 2001, after a damning public report by the Auditor-General, the Australian Federal Government abandoned its highly promoted “whole of government” IT infrastructure outsourcing initiative. This about-face was greeted in the press with reports that the initiative was a “fiasco”. Yet a four-year case study conducted by the authors suggests a more complex picture. Like many other “selective” outsourcers of IT, the Federal Government had been led to believe that it was adopting a relatively low risk strategy that would, if well managed, lead to significant cost savings and operational benefits. Instead, despite having implemented many widely promoted “best practices”, the Federal Government found a substantial discrepancy between what outsourcing promised to deliver, and what was actually achieved. In this respect their experiences were no different from those of many other large IT organizations engaged in selective IT outsourcing, who responded to a substantial contemporaneous survey. This case study examines why the Government’s expectations were not achieved, and arrives at conclusions that have important implications for decision makers confronted with choices about sourcing IT service delivery
Investigating the Partial Relationships Between Testability and the Dynamic Range-to-Domain Ratio
Get PDFThe word ‘testability’ has been used variously in the software community to represent a number of different concepts such as how easy it is to test a program or how easy it is to achieve execution coverage of certain program components. Voas and colleagues have used the word to capture a slightly different notion, namely the ease with which faults, if present in a program, can be revealed by the testing process. The significance of this concept is twofold. First, if it is possible to measure or estimate testability, it can guide the tester in deciding where to focus the testing effort. Secondly, knowledge about what makes some programs more testable than others can guide the developer so that design-for-test features are built in to the software. The propagation, infection and execution (PIE) analysis technique has been proposed as a way of estimating the Voas notion of testability. Unfortunately, estimating testability via the PIE technique is a difficult and costly process. However, Voas has suggested a link with the metric, domain-to-range ratio (DRR).
This paper reviews the various testability concepts and summarises the PIE technique. A prototype tool developed by the authors to automate part of the PIE analysis is described and a method is proposed for dynamically determining the inverse of the domain-to-range ratio. This inverse ratio can be considered more natural in some sense and the idea of calculating its value from program execution leads to the possibility of automating its determination. Some experiments have been performed to investigate empirically whether there is a partial link between testability and this dynamic range-to-domain ratio (DRDR). Statistical tests have shown that for some programs and computational functions there is a strong relationship, but for others the relationship is weak