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- Title
- A CULTURAL-HISTORICAL ACTIVITY THEORY ANALYSIS OF FACTORS AFFECTING TECHNOLOGY ADOPTION BY HIGHER EDUCATION PROGRAM FACULTY.
- Creator
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Marquez, Rolando, Gunter, Glenda, University of Central Florida
- Abstract / Description
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Background: Researchers have revealed that among the reasons provided as barriers to the adoption of technology are: lack of technology resources, time, professional development and support (National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education, 1997; Parker, 1996; Sheldon & Jones, 1996; Sheldon & Jones, 1996; NCATE, 1997; Shelly, Gunter & Gunter, 2010, U.S. Congress, 1995). Several models used to explain the usage of technology within education such as the Technology Acceptance Model ...
Show moreBackground: Researchers have revealed that among the reasons provided as barriers to the adoption of technology are: lack of technology resources, time, professional development and support (National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education, 1997; Parker, 1996; Sheldon & Jones, 1996; Sheldon & Jones, 1996; NCATE, 1997; Shelly, Gunter & Gunter, 2010, U.S. Congress, 1995). Several models used to explain the usage of technology within education such as the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) have been somewhat ineffective in explaining or providing a holistic view of the factors that come into play when examining technology infusion and diffusion as they account for a limited percentage of variance (Legris, Ingham & Collerete, 2003; Pan, Gunter, Sivo & Cornell, 2005). Purpose: To better understand the choices that faculty members make in their use of educational technologies and media and to determine why some technologies such as blackboard have been widely adopted, but others have not. The following research question was formulated to guide the study: "Why do faculty members in higher education make the instructional choices they do with respect to educational technologies and media? Also, how can the use of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), as a more robust framework, offer an increase in explanatory power to better enable the understanding of a multitude of factors that impact the adoption and use of certain media technologies? Setting: A technology rich department at a college of a large urban university in the Southeastern United States. Participants: Three faculty members who taught in the department. Research Design: Qualitative multi-site case study informed by Engeström's CHAT(Engeström, 1987). Data Collection and Analysis: Document analysis, individual interviews, and laboratory and classroom observations provided data. Qualitative data analysis that employed qualitative inquiry research was informed by Creswell's "data analysis spiral" and Engeström's CHAT. Findings: Visits at the institution presented several of the key ideas in the CHAT framework including contradictions within the media selection activity and tensions at the primary, secondary, tertiary and quaternary levels. Additional themes included group work, autonomy, media as a tool to achieve learning goals, caring for students, early adopters, and relevance with current trends.
Show less - Date Issued
- 2011
- Identifier
- CFE0003665, ucf:48833
- Format
- Document (PDF)
- PURL
- http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0003665
- Title
- Human Group Behavior Modeling for Virtual Worlds.
- Creator
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Shah, Syed Fahad Allam, Sukthankar, Gita, Georgiopoulos, Michael, Foroosh, Hassan, Anagnostopoulos, Georgios, University of Central Florida
- Abstract / Description
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Virtual worlds and massively-multiplayer online games are rich sources of information about large-scale teams and groups, offering the tantalizing possibility of harvesting data about group formation, social networks, and network evolution. They provide new outlets for human social interaction that differ from both face-to-face interactions and non-physically-embodied social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter. We aim to study group dynamics in these virtual worlds by collecting and...
Show moreVirtual worlds and massively-multiplayer online games are rich sources of information about large-scale teams and groups, offering the tantalizing possibility of harvesting data about group formation, social networks, and network evolution. They provide new outlets for human social interaction that differ from both face-to-face interactions and non-physically-embodied social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter. We aim to study group dynamics in these virtual worlds by collecting and analyzing public conversational patterns of users grouped in close physical proximity. To do this, we created a set of tools for monitoring, partitioning, and analyzing unstructured conversations between changing groups of participants in Second Life, a massively multi-player online user-constructed environment that allows users to construct and inhabit their own 3D world. Although there are some cues in the dialog, determining social interactions from unstructured chat data alone is a difficult problem, since these environments lack many of the cues that facilitate natural language processing in other conversational settings and different types of social media. Public chat data often features players who speak simultaneously, use jargon and emoticons, and only erratically adhere to conversational norms.Humans are adept social animals capable of identifying friendship groups from a combination of linguistic cues and social network patterns. But what is more important, the content of what people say or their history of social interactions? Moreover, is it possible to identify whether people are part of a group with changing membership merely from general network properties, such as measures of centrality and latent communities? These are the questions that we aim to answer in this thesis. The contributions of this thesis include: 1) a link prediction algorithm for identifying friendship relationships from unstructured chat data 2) a method for identifying social groups based on the results of community detection and topic analysis.The output of these two algorithms (links and group membership) are useful for studying a variety of research questions about human behavior in virtual worlds. To demonstrate this we have performed a longitudinal analysis of human groups in different regions of the Second Life virtual world. We believe that studies performed with our tools in virtual worlds will be a useful stepping stone toward creating a rich computational model of human group dynamics.
Show less - Date Issued
- 2011
- Identifier
- CFE0004164, ucf:49074
- Format
- Document (PDF)
- PURL
- http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0004164