Accelerating Knowledge Adoption

Learning faster is important in personal competitive advantage. However, to accelerate a group of people's learning efficiency is more complicated than individual practice. Learning efficiency is highlighting research in information systems change management as well as knowledge management. In practice, knowledge is difficult to manage directly. On the other hand, managing knowledge behaviors can achieve knowledge management. A teamwork structure is a micro-social system and internal collaboration network. Therefore, different teamwork structures conduct different knowledge behaviors. Social influence theories provide an interpretation that different social proximity distinguish contagion effects. This study applies the social network perspective to explore the knowledge behaviors of computer software developers. Therefore, the finding of this study shows that controlling network redundancy can enhance knowledge diffusion efficiency. Furthermore, if team fails to manage knowledge diffusion, they will offset the timing of competitive advantage in technological upgrade. Based on this finding, this study suggests a new thinking for implementation of information systems, change management, and strategic planning.

The Holon/Parton Theory of the Unit of Culture (or the Meme, and Narreme)

A universal problem in the disciplines of communication, creativity, philosophy, biology, psychology, sociology, anthropology, archaeology, history, linguistics, information science, cultural studies, literature, media and other domains of knowledge in both the arts and sciences has been the definition of ‘culture' (see Kroeber & Kluckhohn, 1952; Baldwin et al., 2006), including the specification of ‘the unit of culture', and, mechanisms of culture. This chapter proposes a theory of the unit of culture, or, the ‘meme' (Dawkins, 1976; Dennett, 1995; Blackmore, 1999), a unit which is also the narreme (Barthes, 1966), or ‘unit of story', or ‘unit of narrative'. The holon/parton theory of the unit of culture (Velikovsky, 2014) is a consilient (Wilson, 1998) synthesis of (Koestler, 1964, 1967, 1978) and Feynman (1975, 2005) and also the Evolutionary Systems Theory model of creativity (Csikszentmihalyi, 1988-2014; Simonton, 1984-2014). This theory of the unit of culture potentially has applications across all creative cultural domains and disciplines in the sciences, arts and communication media.

The Promise of Information and Communication Technology in Volunteer Administration

Traditional volunteer management is a bureaucratic process involving recruitment, screening, training, assignment, scheduling, recognition, retention, and reporting on volunteers. New workplace technologies provide ways to conduct these tasks with greater efficiency and increased accuracy, thereby enhancing both the volunteer experience and the impact of volunteers on organizational operations. This chapter reviews the literature regarding theories of technology acceptance and use, technology use in nonprofit organizations, and technology in volunteer programs. Three organizational case studies provide insights into both the promise and limitations of the adoption and use of Volgistics, a commonly used Web-based software designed for volunteer management in nonprofit organizations. The authors conclude by discussing what these cases suggest for the challenges and promise of adoption of new technology in the management of volunteers.

Technological Innovation and Adoptive Ability

This chapter develops a model of sustainable regional growth that encapsulates the impact of infrastructure in the adoptive ability of a region. An implication of this model is that convergence towards technologically leading regions is feasible only for regions with sufficient absorptive capacity.

An Integral Analysis of Teachers' Attitudes and Perspectives on the Integration of Technology in Teaching

This chapters explores teachers' attitudes toward, and integration of, technology from multiple perspectives. In order to gain a rich and contextualized understanding of how teachers genuinely use technology in the classroom, Wilber's (2006) Integral methodological pluralism was used as a framework to orient the study, to organize the research questions and to provide the conceptual framework for the research methodology. Four research questions were addressed in this study: (1) What is the influence of policies on teachers' use of technology? (2) What influence does the technology infrastructure have on teachers using technology? (3) What do teachers believe and think about technology? (4) What is the technological culture that teachers' experience? This chapter is an overview of the analysis of the differing and sometimes conflicting practices, beliefs and views on the adoption of technology in the classroom, from the four quadrant perspectives of the Integral Model.

The Relationship Between Social Justice Issues and Emotional Intelligence (EI)

This chapter discussed issues of injustice as often affecting the emotional, and in some cases, the physical well-being of a person. In recent years, researchers have begun to explore the role of Emotional Intelligence (EI) in creating awareness when it comes to social justice issues related to areas such as racism, sexism, heterosexism, etc. The purpose of this chapter is twofold: First, to concentrate on the area of social justice issues to find out what the literature has explored in terms of the role Emotional Intelligence (EI) might play when it comes to dealing with social oppression, and second, to advocate emotional intelligence traits that can be successfully used to cope with social oppression. We reviewed the literature as a way to deepen our understanding of how to foster “socially conscious” practices within the workplace. The chapter has implications for Human Resource Development (HRD) practitioners to remind them of the responsibility they have to encourage and welcome studies and practices addressing critical aspects such as social justice issues as a way to help ensure a productive and safe workplace. Through this review of the literature, we found that emotional intelligence traits, if practiced responsibly, can make society a better place for everyone to live and work in.

Engineering the Services of the Library through Mobile Technology

Many universities are struggling to response the needs of its users. This is attributed to the rapid change in technological innovations. The growing interest on mobile technology in organisations is at a fast pace, particularly in institutions of higher learning. Mobile technology could be used in academic libraries to provide a better service to their clients or improve the service that they currently provide. Case study research was conducted at Capital University to understand the factors that could influence and impact the adoption of mobile technology in academic library services.

Faculty Adoption of 3D Avatar-Based Virtual World Learning Environments

An exploratory, mixed methods case study was conducted within a design-based research approach to explore nursing faculty (n = 8) consideration of adopting virtual worlds as a learning environment before and after a three session Professional Development Intervention (PDI). Surveys, interviews, and session transcripts revealed the PDI did improve faculty consideration of virtual worlds but only three participants would likely pursue virtual worlds as a learning environment. Multiple adoption model constructs such as perceived ease of use were explored but no one construct was found to be an indicator of adoption intentions. However, personal innovativeness was considered a demographic likely to influence adoption. Additionally, those participants that self-identified concrete, perceivably doable learning activities for a virtual world that offered a relative advantage over current practice may be key to discerning those who may adopt a virtual world.

Resources on the Stage

This study examines the impact of firm resources on ICT adoption by the Turkish business enterprises using firm level data. The data for this study consists of 3633 firms in manufacturing and services sectors. We investigate the effect of firm resources on the adoption of ICT by using ordered logit model. Adoption of ICT is an index variable including four categories which ranges from single technology ownership to four technology ownership. These technologies are local area network (LAN), wireless local area network (WLAN), intranet, and extranet. We assume that these technologies are complementary. We find that firms do not need to use same amount of resources while adopting single technology as they would while adopting complementary technologies. In the adoption of complementary technologies, the effect of firm size, trade openness, human capital, purposes of ICT usage and environmental factors such as region and industry increases. On the other hand, full complementarity among technologies does not require the full exploitation of the firm resources. As a result of inefficient use of firm resources, single and two technology owner firms, which are composed of resource-limited small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), do not accomplish the technology adoption benefits of the three and four technology owners. We discuss a set of policy implications to promote the efficient use of firm resources for single and two technology owner firms. The effect of firm resources on the adoption of complementary technologies is analysed in this study which has not been investigated before in this context.

The Intention to Use Mobile Digital Library Technology

This paper presents a qualitative study on student adoption of mobile library technology in a developing world context. The findings support the applicability of a number of existing constructs from the technology acceptance literature, such as perceived ease of use, social influence and trust. However, they also suggest the need to modify some adoption factors previously found in the literature to fit the specific context of mobile library adoption. Perceived value was found to be a more relevant overarching adoption factor than perceived usefulness for this context. Facilitating conditions were identified as important but these differed somewhat from those covered in earlier literature. The research also uncovered the importance of trialability for this type of application. The findings provide a basis for improving theory in the area of mobile library adoption and suggest a number of practical design recommendations to help designers of mobile library technology to create applications that meet user needs.