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Invitation to a research survey on the adoption of knowledge management systems
by Andrew Wat 05 Jan '09

05 Jan '09

Dear colleagues, I am conducting a research about the adoption of knowledge management systems for my PhD thesis in the University of South Australia. Previous studies of Knowledge Management Systems adoption have generally been based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). From this perspective, the main inputs to knowledge management adoption have been the attitudinal factors of perceived ease-of-use and perceived usefulness towards the technology under investigation. Empirical investigations of KMS adoption have either merely replicated TAM or included many other antecedents in the model, most of which have failed to explain why such adoption is (not) happening. A conference paper with a literature review in knowledge management adoption, characteristics of knowledge management usage behavior and proposed model using a perspective of organizational citizenship behavior is published and presented in the 4th Asia-Pacific International Conference on Knowledge Management. This survey is to collect data about the particular organizational and individual/personal factors to verify my proposed hypotheses in their effects in the adoption of knowledge management systems. If you would like to know more about the survey, please click InformationSheet.pdf<http://kmresearcher.wikispaces.com/file/view/InformationSheet.pdf> Please click the following link to participate the online survey: https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=pJP5Sg7Y-NQfvM2JzkKABQQ&hl=en Thanks Andrew

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8 Free Issues of JITP Available Online Until January 31, 2009
by Stuart Shulman 05 Jan '09

05 Jan '09

The Journal of Information Technology & Politics (JITP) has moved to informaworld: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t792306880~db=all All 8 issues of JITP published to date are *free* to everyone through the end of January via the link I have pasted above. ------------------------------------------- Dr. Stuart W. Shulman Editor, Journal of Information Technology and Politics http://www.jitp.net Assistant Professor Department of Political Science University of Massachusetts Amherst 200 Hicks Way Amherst, MA 01003

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Publication quality
by Larry Press 04 Jan '09

04 Jan '09

Murray Turoff wrote: > We have too many publishers who are pushing almost a vanity press So true. How many conferences are thinly disguised tourism? (I admit to having gone to some myself :-). There might be some relief through inter-operable means of tracking article downloads and citations, which could inform the academic promotion process. For example ACM, Google Scholar, and Berkeley Electronic Press track article downloads and citations, see: http://cis471.blogspot.com/2009/01/rating-and-reputation-in-scholarly.html This sort of data could become input to ones scholarly "reputation." Larry

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Re: [Air-L] Publication quality (Daren Carroll Brabham)
by Larry Press 04 Jan '09

04 Jan '09

Daren Carroll Brabham wrote: > I think it would be interesting to see a comprehensive list of both new media studies grad programs and journals, and/or a reputational ranking of new media studies grad programs and journals. Actually I was thinking of the reputation of a scholar, not the reputation of a journal. That being said, downloads and citations are also indicators of the value of a journal. > This would be not unlike what the National Communication Association has on their site Here are a couple of articles on ranking of IS journals: http://www.comp.dit.ie/rfitzpatrick/DT209%20DT217%20MSc%20(KM)/Ranking_of_J… http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1039573&dl=GUIDE&coll=GUIDE&CFID=1656… (Only ACM subscribers can read the latter, unfortunately (for ACM)). Larry

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Job Posting - Researcher in webbased data collection
by Anja Göritz 04 Jan '09

04 Jan '09

APOLOGIES FOR CROSS-POSTING Research position at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Bavaria, Germany in the project 'The effects of incentives on data quality in online panels' funded by the German Research Foundation to be filled with a Junior Research Fellow (0.5 salary scale 13 TV-L for 20 months). A detailed job description can be found at: http://www.goeritz.net/vacancy.pdf Please forward this e-mail to anyone who might be interested. Thank you! Kind regards, Anja Goeritz -- Dr. Anja Goeritz Erlangen-Nuremberg University Dept. of Organizational & Social Psychology Lange Gasse 20, 90403 Nuremberg, Germany www.goeritz.net

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Re: [Air-L] Publication quality
by Daren Carroll Brabham 03 Jan '09

03 Jan '09

I think it would be interesting to see a comprehensive list of both new media studies grad programs and journals, and/or a reputational ranking of new media studies grad programs and journals. This would be not unlike what the National Communication Association has on their site, and it would be very helpful, especially since new media studies programs are housed in such varied places (e.g., information science, communication, psychology...). A reputational ranking study could happen according to the method NCA used, perhaps...send some surveys out to listservs and so on and just get people to list what they think are the "10 best" journals or programs, for instance. A difficult, politically-charged task, no doubt...but a needed one. I'll help if I can, and if my graudate advisors (who read this listserv) give their blessing. :-) db --- Daren C. Brabham Graduate Teaching Fellow Department of Communication University of Utah 255 S. Central Campus Dr., Rm. 2400 Salt Lake City, UT 84112 phone: (801) 633-4796 daren.brabham(a)utah.edu www.darenbrabham.com <http://www.darenbrabham.com/>

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Re: [Air-L] Air-L Digest, Vol 54, Issue 2 responses
by Murray Turoff 03 Jan '09

03 Jan '09

Some wonderful comments. Let me touch on a few things. EIES was a self contained garden because it had to be as most things were not easy to get otherwise. However, besides the Well, Planet by harry stevens, and some other systems were directly influenced by EIES and built by people who had used EIES directly even though some never admitted it. We did, for example, build for example a complete user information marketplace and i wanted to turn it on for real money but NJIT ruled we would have to pay state taxes and they did not wnat to get involved so we turned it on as grand monopoly game to sell any piece of information for play money where the provider was a person and he or she could set the price for the joke, poem, recommendation or what have you. However, anyone who paid the price had the right to attach an opinion on whether it was worth the money and the seller could not remove that from the original ad used for selling. It was great fun and still does not exist because of the lack of micro money. At the time everyone was assuming information providers were companies and not people. To some extent the investment business still has that blinder on. Collaboration still has a long way to go. The complete design does appear in the literature. It was a fore runner to ebay and recommender systems in a very real sense. Peter and Trudy Johnsen Lenz who built the "topics" system on EIES, using the language that was a virtual browser between our users and the back office system, wrote a wonderful article on the "rhythms of conferences" where they pointed out that participation is a series of peaks and valleys rather than a stable average. People shift around among different topics in different conferences and a critical mass at the right time triggers a major peak. Topics by the way supported 200 users exchanging information on scientific questions facing state legislatures and had a flow of over 200 comments a week where questions were limited to 5 lines and answers to one page and you could choose which questions you wanted to track answers to. When we turned it on everyone was asking questions and only professionals representing professional societies were answering. We created a membership list which tracked for all the users how many questions each user was asking and how many answers they had made and all of a sudden most people started to answer questions. The exchanges were archived in a database for future use if someone became interested in the questions and their answers later. Questions ranged form things like How do you define and antique? to things like Standards for burying power lines? There was usually about 15 such questions every week. Having this ability to tailor for any individual or group led to a lot of interesting things. We even had a fun feature where every user could tailor their own interface by replacing all the prompts. We had users tailor "English butler" "insults" etc. Not having the web we could meausre the time and what people did direclty and learned a lot of general things about user behavior summarized in part in a couple of CACM articles by Roxanne Hiltz including the one first major article on information overload in this technology. One of our most popular conferences, which you had to have permission to join, was one where everyone liked to insult each other. I do urge some of you to look at hte NLM report on my website on information overload. Ignore the body and just go read the 60 page appendix of the raw comments on the 34 professionals in Emergency Management on their problems on gathering and using information on the web. This is the most significant part of the report with respect to meaningful evidence. While they do not state it directly it becomes clear that they want a user controlled recommender systems even though they do not realize such a thing can be done. But clearly they as a "community" want to nominate the material to be included and to evaluate it collectively. There is alot of "communities" they have already built with volunteer newsletters and websites and about a dozen are described in our report. These are places where a lot of professionals are putting in a lot of effort for free to beneift one another using only simple tools like websites and editors. They list about 300 links they are using and the sites are active in the text of the appendix. There biggest problem is dealing with the "gray literature" which is what NLM calls non journals, but is what the practitioners want the most. An awful lot is happening among communities of practice and i think the word "communities" is still a good one. Distinguished Professor Emeritus Information Systems, NJIT homepage: http://is.njit.edu/turoff

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Re: [Air-L] the growth of some groups and not others (Murray Turoff)
by Larry Press 02 Jan '09

02 Jan '09

Tom Abeles wrote: Tom, > We see the conflict clearly with the asynchronous systems like Blackboard where choice is a zero sum game for the owners of the SN. I'm not sure what you are getting at here -- can you elaborate a bit? > Incidentally others of us had "conferences" on EIES and The Well in those days as well as Caucus. But these were early and most of us were stuck with 300 baud modems and long distance dial up costs to participate. For me, the good news was that I was using EIES at USC Information Science Institute, which was a local call from my home. The bad news was that I had a 100 bps Teletype with an acoustic coupler. If you look at the report we produced, all of my contributions are in capital letters because the TTY did not do lower case :-). Lar

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Re: [Air-L] the growth of some groups and not others
by Denise N. Rall 02 Jan '09

02 Jan '09

Dear AIR-ers - As I recall the early days of BBSs, there were clearly communities - intersecting and overlapping. But some of the most 'valued' activity - sharing passwords,, breaking servers, etc. was covert or even illegal (not me of course). Those who were REALLY in the loop even had phone numbers of other crackers that were used quite sparingly. But it was a clear sign of 'arrival' or status in the covert community that one had acquired voice access to another member - as some things clearly could not be sent by email - despite interesting encryption programs available. Also, hackers could be directed to a site to use a specific comm protocol that was not generally available to others. So there were levels of access that happened offline - How the illegals interacted with others was pretty standard. They didn't pass on details about your activities except to those in the loop - At one point we thought of making a "Hacker Hero's" calendar - with a short bio and pic of each hacker and why they were 'heroic' - mostly to do with circumventing various systems. Naturally it couldn't be done. fun idea though! Cheers, Denise Denise N. Rall, PhD. Internationalisation Project Officer Southern Cross University, Lismore NSW 2480 AUSTRALIA Office: Room T2.17, +61 (0)2 6620 3577 Mobile 0438 233 344 http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/esm/staff/pages/drall/ Presenter, Internet Research 9.0, 15-18 October 2008, Copenhagen, DK Stay connected to the people that matter most with a smarter inbox. Take a look http://au.docs.yahoo.com/mail/smarterinbox

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Re: [Air-L] Air-L Digest, Vol 54, Issue 1
by Murray Turoff 02 Jan '09

02 Jan '09

Tom, fancy meeting you here as we usually interact on the Sloan list. Computing, whether it is called IS (systems), IS (science), CS, IT, ECE, MIS, etc is not what I would called a mature academic field like Physics (where I came from). In one of the papers I have I listed about 20 different names for Computer Mediated Communications under which related work was published in the 20 years since 1975 including things like CSCW, Groupware, Group Decision Support Systems, etc. It seems every application of computers to a particular application for using the computer for human communications has a different name even though the fundamental requirements and supporting theories are common to all the applications. The real problem is that we are part of a commercial field and each company building a new system wants to come up with name for what they are doing to make it sound like it is a completely new concept. Unfortunately the young members of the academic community are quick to jump on the band wagon and use the terminology even if it duplicates older efforts. In physics there was always a strong emphasis on and recognition for those that did careful state of the art reviews of the literature and had the knack to point out what had been accomplished and where the uncertainties still existed. We do not have much of a tradition in computing for that sort of emphasis. I think Poole's classic in the 60's on the growing proliferation of journals and the ultimate swamping of the capacity of professional communities to keep up with their fields is truer today as a major problem than it was then as our National Library of Medicine study shows form the Emergency Management community of practice. We have too many publishers who are pushing almost a vanity press excess since electronic publishing and publishing on demand make cheap publishing by individual item cost effective. The attempt my many academic libraries to go electronic is now forcing them to cut out electronic subscriptions because of growing costs rather than decreasing costs which the technology would allow but the current printing industry is not going along. I think those disciplines like physics and many biological and medical ones that have gone open source for all academic publications in the wave of the future. I also think that the sooner we can get a true universal mico-money systems on the total Web so individuals can be their own publishers with a cent for a poem and where the writer sets is own fees and the provider gets only a 10-15% as opposed to the author getting only 10-15% is far more inline with real economic costs. I have said this in papers twenty years ago. Researchers on the web need to take a normative view the future of the Web. The Web and its evolution is the process of designing social systems (Also in earlier papers). Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2008 23:30:57 -0600 > From: tom abeles <tabeles(a)hotmail.com> > Subject: Re: [Air-L] Air-L Digest, Vol 53, Issue 27 > To: <air-l(a)listserv.aoir.org> > Message-ID: <BAY108-W271099AF0FE805C943354EA7E50(a)phx.gbl> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" > > > Hi Murray > > You raise a critical issue about government "memory". We were contacted > several years after we did a report for the USEPA. A consulting firm had a > contract to do what we did as a separate publication under a broader > contract. We gave the caller the document number in the EPA publications > list and never heard from them again. > > A parallel experience happens in The Academy when professors assign > research papers. Now with analysis programs, many of these plagerized papers > are spotted. But, still, it is clear that: > > a) that there is a lot of duplication, including papers in scholarly > journals by academics who should know better > b) with the proliferation of materials in all media, good searching is hard > to do even if the searchers wanted to take the time to plumb the depth of > what is out "there". I was once booted off a listserv on ICT's for pointing > out both the insufficient searching for materials and the trivial nature of > much of the published works. In the past, one would collect and verify > before publishing. With pressure to pub/perish today, the publication of a > data point and the further publishing of a second point or a deepeer > analysis would count as two papers while the past lies buried waiting for > some archivist to uncover. In fact it was specifically pointed out that a > new journal was needed because the academics needed the space. It is > estimated that there are over 20,000 academic type journals extant. Open > access databases are now also expanding. > > This becomes critical for internet researchers given the increasing ability > for "bots" or intelligent search engines to scour the entire literature, > both formal and informal, mainstream and fugitive which sits outside the > traditional search stream. This changes the roll of the researcher. It > should also change the form and substance of an academic publication since > it is no longer necessary to have documents which have less than 10% new > material. All should only need a hot link to the past history. This should > reduce a publication to a single page, reducing the literature and turning > most publications into a "note". The problem is that The Academy doesn't > know how to deal with pub/perish for promo and tenure without the default to > a count of annual publications, many of which could be footnotes in the > scheme of the universe. > > tom > > tom abeles, editor > On the Horizon > http://www.emeraldinsight.com/oth.htm > > -- Distinguished Professor Emeritus Information Systems, NJIT homepage: http://is.njit.edu/turoff

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