The Significance of Cyberlearning in Economic Education

We analyze the potentials of web-based and mobile-based digital technology to disseminate, inform, transmit, instruct, and exchange course content in the teaching of economics. Cyberlearning is the use of networked computer technology to enhance the mode of educational content delivery to learners, and involves personal, social, and distributed learning that is mediated by a variety of rapidly evolving computational devices such as computers, tablets, and smart phones, and involving other media such as the Web, and the Cloud. Yet cyberlearning is not only about learning to use computers or to think computationally; social networking has made it clear that the need is much more encompassing, including new modes of collaborating and learning for the full variety of human experiences mediated by networked computing and communications technologies. Educators have continued to search for answers about how new digital tools and environments can be utilized to enhance learning among students of our contemporary “New Age” generation. In the present paper we examine the potentials of cyberlearning and the opportunities it offers for promoting and assessing learning, made possible by new technologies; and how it can help learners to capitalize on those opportunities and the new practices that are made possible by these learning technologies. In particular, we examine ways of using technology for economics education to promote effective learning that result in deep rooted grasping of content, practices, and skills that will ultimately shape attitudes and contribute to enhanced policy and progress in economic matters of society.

Shaping a Smart Transportation System for Sustainable Value Co-Creation

The smart transportation system (STS) leverages ubiquitous and networked computing to improve the efficiency of urban mobility. Whilst existing IS work has explored various factors influencing STS development, there is a lack of consideration of how value can be created for building a more sustainable STS. Drawing upon the value co-creation theory and stakeholder theory, we seek to understand the socio-technical shaping of the STS ecosystem and how government, firms and citizens collaboratively create sustainable value for designing and implementing STS initiatives. To reach this aim, we carry out a longitudinal case study over 2016–2018 in Shijiazhuang, China. We offer both theoretical and practical explanations on (i) key value facets with regard to sustainable STS design and implementation; and (ii) a holistic view of iterative value co-creation process pushed by key stakeholders. This study makes particular contributions to the IS, marketing and transportation literature by offering a critical understanding of the social dynamics for shaping a big data-driven STS ecosystem.

Folding and Friction

The internet of things (IoT)—the embedding of networked computing into the material world around us—seeks to reshape our everyday lives. To address the IoT is to address the material interface between the global digital networks of the twenty-first-century economy and the mundane doings, affects, and experiences which occupy the great majority of our existence. Taking domestic IoT, the so-called smart home, as a focus, the author argues that the IoT is more than simply an intensification of existing trends, the ongoing extension of computing connectivity which has already jumped from desktop to laptop to smartphone. In breaking out of the constraints of any single personal device, no matter how mobile, the IoT not only further dissolves the spatial and temporal distance between different social domains but also profoundly implicates social life within those domains, between the members of the setting. The IoT is constitutionally social in a way in which no type of social media is. The chapter provides a consideration of the political economy at play in the smart home, before addressing everyday life and the IoT in terms of information management, control, domestic labor, and resistance. In concluding, two key features of the IoT are highlighted: world folding, whereby incommensurate social domains are layered through one another with often problematic—even absurd—results and its misconceived efforts to erase the social frictions of everyday life, which fails to recognize that it is in these frictions that so much of what is socially valuable resides.

To Believe in Siri

AI voice assistants are based on software that enters into dialogue with users through speech in order to provide replies to the users’ queries or execute tasks such as sending emails, searching on the web, or turning on a lamp. Every assistant is represented as an individual character or persona (e.g., “Siri” or “Alexa”) that despite being nonhuman can be imagined and interacted with as such. Focusing on the cases of Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant, this chapter argues that voice assistants activate an ambivalent relationship with users, giving them the illusion of control in their interactions with the assistants while at the same time withdrawing them from actual control over the computing systems that lie behind these interfaces. The chapter illustrates how this is made possible at the interface level by mechanisms of projection that expect users to contribute to the construction of the assistant as a persona, and how this construction ultimately conceals the networked computing systems administered by the powerful corporations who developed these tools.

Correlations for computation and computation for correlations

Quantum correlations are central to the foundations of quantum physics and form the basis of quantum technologies. Here, our goal is to connect quantum correlations and computation: using quantum correlations as a resource for computation—and vice versa, using computation to test quantum correlations. We derive Bell-type inequalities that test the capacity of quantum states for computing Boolean functions within a specific model of computation and experimentally investigate them using 4-photon Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger (GHZ) states. Furthermore, we show how the resource states can be used to specifically compute Boolean functions—which can be used to test and verify the non-classicality of the underlying quantum states. The connection between quantum correlation and computability shown here has applications in quantum technologies, and is important for networked computing being performed by measurements on distributed multipartite quantum states.

Digital Organizations Enhancement With Information and Operational Technologies Convergence

The new digital technologies open the space for changing the way that business works creating new demands on information processing in organizations. Organization response to technological changes was enabled by information technology improvements and digital organizations should develop new capabilities that anticipate and respond to new opportunities in their business ecosystems. In the context of transformative trends driving with the information technology development, ubiquitous computing creates an environment where embedded processors, computers, sensors, and digital communication technologies are available everywhere. Further, the Internet-of-things creates a new form of networked computing where advanced applications intelligently monitor and control remote sensors, mobile devices, and smart machines. Along with the information technology development digital organizations need to develop operational technology in the same way. Thus, the process of convergence is needed, and it strongly depends on harmonization of information and operational technologies strategies.

The role of computer forensics in the fight against terrorism

In this paper, the authors examine the adequacy of the counter-terrorism concept, which does not envisage institutional responsibility for collecting, processing, and fixing traces of cyber-related terrorist activities. The starting point is the fact that today numerous human activities and communication take place in the cyberspace. Firstly, the focus is on the aspects of terrorism that present a generator of challenges to social stability and, in this context, the elements of the approach adopted by the current National Security Strategy of the Republic of Serbia. In this analysis, adequacy is evaluated from the point of view of functionality. In this sense, it is an attempt to present elements that influence the effectiveness of counter-terrorism in the information age. Related to this is the specification of the role that digital forensics can play in this area. The conclusion is that an effective counter-terrorism strategy must necessarily encompass the institutional incorporation of digital forensics since it alone can contribute to the timely detection or assertion of responsibility for terrorism in a networked computing environment.

To Extend Vision Beyond the Horizon, to See the Unseen: Industrial Television in the Post-War Era

“Industrial television” (closed-circuit television referred to as ITV) was the first initiative to recognize the potential of television tailored specifically to the needs of industry. This chapter shows how ITV was positioned as a mechanism to extend bodies, adapting workers to match increased physical demands of post-war (1940s–1950s) industrial and informational architectures. ITV as prosthesis made working bodies stronger, bigger, and more tightly bound into automated information systems. Faster than a speeding assembly line, more powerful than a six-story furnace, able to retrieve dispersed data with a single command, these supermen appealed to industries seeking production and workforce efficiencies. In the mediated office, television transformed humans into nodes within complex human-machine hybrid information networks that anticipated networked computing. This chapter (keyword: flow) contributes to studies of how “work systems” produce people, socializing them to the conditions and expectations of capitalism.