bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Blended teaching and learning in the School of Science and Technology of UniSIM
Authors: Toon Andrew John , Samir Attallah , Huang Mui Kheng Jennifer , Kin Chew Lim , Vythilingam Moorthy , Low Wee Kiat Stephen 
Published: December 2009

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the blended learning preferences under which adult students study mathematics, electronics and industry certificate examinations like project management and e‐SAP (systems, applications and products).Design/methodology/approachThe study is based on four case studies in mathematics, electronics and industry certificate examinations like project management and e‐SAP. Case studies are developed based on observations and feedback from students who have undergone different types of blended learning. The four different blended learning models used are: the complete e‐learning self‐study; the instructor‐led programme blended with self‐study e‐learning; the live e‐learning centred with other media added; and the simulation and laboratory‐centred model.FindingsIt is found that unmotivated adult learners may not necessarily like e‐learning courses that are unguided. The e‐learning self‐study model suits the highly motivated students who aim for industry‐based certifications like the project management or the e‐SAP certifications. Using simulation and virtual laboratory sessions does help to reduce the cost of setting up the full‐fledged laboratory and also make it more accessible to the students. In the blended learning model, the instructor and the subject matter expert are the two most important people in programme design and delivery, not the developer or the technologist.Originality/valueThis paper is useful to adult educators and those dealing with an open university type of education where there are less face‐to‐face interactions.
Placement testing: man and machine, doing the best we can?
Authors: McPherson Douglas 
Published: December 2009

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to describe how and why Texas A&M University at Qatar (TAMUQ) has developed a system aiming to effectively place students in freshman and developmental English programs. The placement system includes: triangulating data from external test scores, with scores from a panel‐marked hand‐written essay (HWE), written at the University under proctored conditions, and also data from a range of computer based tests, including a computer assessed essay. This is discussed within the broader context of placement testing in general.Design/methodology/approachNotes on the evolving process have been kept for the last three years, and this case study is written by a “placement evaluator”, using these notes as a starting point.FindingsTAMUQ has found an integrated approach to placement testing to be effective.Originality/valueThe number of institutions integrating internal and external testing for placement is growing. TAMUQ's perspective may be of value to many academic institutions. The paper outlines the types of assessments used at TAMUQ in order to appropriately place students in classes. It describes the strengths and shortcomings of both external test data and placement software, and argues that relying on either alone (or in conjunction) to decide starting points for students in English programs is a flawed approach. The need for integrating authentic HWE samples and opinion from English faculty is discussed.
Use of WebCT in online and blended modes
Authors: Yuen Allan H.K. , Deng Liping , Fox Robert 
Published: December 2009

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to compare the use of WebCT in support of online and blended learning in the Faculty of Architecture of a Hong Kong university.Design/methodology/approachPaper questionnaires are used to collect students' experiences, perceptions and attitudes towards the online course they have undertaken. Focus group interviews are conducted with two groups of students at the end of the semester. In addition, both formal and informal interviews are conducted with the instructor to understand his perceptions and perspectives.FindingsIn general, students prefer to have course management systems (CMS) as a supplement to face‐to‐face lectures rather than as its replacement. They perceive WebCT as mainly a platform for downloading materials and submitting assignments rather than a platform for teaching and learning. Learning fully online is perceived as self‐learning. The traditional lecture is considered more effective and efficient by many students to grasp concepts and principles.Research limitations/implicationsThis is an exploratory study at a Hong Kong university. However, it provides initial evidence to shed light on issues concerning the use of CMS in support of online and blended learning.Practical implicationsIn order to ensure a more engaging and rewarding online learning experience, teacher's online presence should be strengthened. Other than teacher presence, the cognitive presence could be fostered through engineering the student‐to‐student interaction in co‐located settings.Originality/valueThe paper usefully demonstrates how the blended mode of learning that combines face‐to‐face and online learning has become increasingly popular, while the courses conducted entirely online are comparatively rare at universities in Hong Kong.
Empowering learners as the owners of feedback while YouTube‐ing
Authors: Zher Ng Huey , Maznah Raja Hussain Raja 
Published: December 2009

PurposeThe application of a new technology (YouTube) can help lecturers in solving some of the issues related to workload and shifts support to students by giving them more responsibilities in their assessment. The purpose of this paper is to re‐characterize the role of the students in the assessment process.Design/methodology/approachReflection on open‐ended questions, observation on the feedback process which occurs in YouTube and interviews are used to approach the research objectives: to identify the occurred process when empowerment role is given to the students in the assessment process; and determine the possibility of using YouTube in addressing teacher workload and changing student roles.FindingsThe findings show that YouTube, when correctly utilized together with proper scaffolding and thorough groundwork, can help lecturers address workload problems as well as affecting change in student roles while bringing about technological change in productive ways.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper shows that assessment can be made via YouTube, a social entertainment tool, and suggests methods on how to use the features in YouTube for feedback.Practical implicationsSince YouTube is a social tool, the research indirectly guides the students or users in the appropriate use of technology, teaching them to be responsible digital citizens.Originality/valueThe paper looks into the possibility of using YouTube as an assessment tool.
Enhancing maritime education and training
Authors: Murai Koji , Wakida Shin‐Ichi , Fukushi Keiichi , Hayashi Yuji , Stone Laurie C. 
Published: December 2009

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to propose that the measurement of salivary amylase activity is an effective index to evaluate the stress of a ship navigator for safe navigation training and education.Design/methodology/approachEvaluation comes from the simulator and actual on‐board experiments. The subjects are real captains who have unlimited licenses and cadets who are senior students at Kobe University, navigation course. Stress is evaluated for several situations where a ship navigator makes a lot of decisions, in this case in a narrow passage, entering a port and leaving a port.FindingsSalivary amylase activity occurs when a ship navigator makes a decision regarding ship handling and collision avoidance. By measuring salivary amylase activity when a student is under duress, cadets' ship‐handling training can be evaluated while onboard a vessel.Research limitations/implicationsFuture research will develop cross‐indices with the salivary amylase activity and other physiological indices (nasal temperature and heart rate variability (R‐R interval)), complementary to each other. The salivary amylase activity registers the stress quickly on the spot. Then the nasal temperature and R‐R interval registers the trend and the quick response to the stress (mental workload).Practical implicationsThe paper describes an effective index which is useful for evaluating a ship navigator's stress for safe navigation.Originality/valueShip navigator's skill and cadet's on‐board training have been evaluated according to performance and a questionnaire as a quantitative evaluation; moreover, stress is evaluated using salivary amylase activity.
Effective location‐guided overlay multicast in mobile ad hoc networks
Authors: Chen Kai , Nahrstedt Klara 
Published: December 2009

PurposeGroup communication has become increasing important in mobile ad hoc networks (MANET). Current multicast routing protocols in MANET have been shown to incur large overheads due to dynamic network topology. To this end, this paper proposes an overlay multicast scheme in MANET that is more efficient.Design/methodology/approachThe approach is to construct an overlay multicast tree based on the locations of the group nodes. The paper proposes several tree construction algorithms, namely, location‐guided k‐ary (LGK) tree, location‐guided directional (LGD) tree and location‐guided Steiner (LGS) tree. All of them rely on the geometric locations of the nodes as heuristics to construct the tree. The paper also introduces several mechanisms to enhance the proposed algorithms.FindingsThe simulation results show that the location‐guided heuristics is very effective in constructing low bandwidth cost overlay multicast trees in MANET. When location information is up‐to‐date, the bandwidth cost of a LGS tree is similar to that of an optimal router‐assisted Steiner multicast tree. When location information is out‐dated, LGD tree has the lowest cost.Originality/valueThis paper demonstrates the effectiveness of location‐guided heuristics in constructing overlay multicast trees in MANET. This study strongly suggests that location‐guided heuristics can be used to design many other algorithms in a mobile network.
Autonomous broadcast pruning in wirelessad hocnetworks using coverage estimation
Authors: Bae Kichan , Yoon Hyunsoo 
Published: December 2009

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to find a practical method to minimize unnecessary rebroadcasts forad hocnetworks in a remote area.Design/methodology/approachThe authors design a theoretical coverage estimation model for autonomous broadcast pruning. To verify the effect of the model, simulations are performed to evaluate the effect of confidence level and the actual performance by using ns2 network simulator.FindingsThe algorithm used to predict the coverage area of broadcasts can minimize unnecessary rebroadcasts.Originality/valueAutonomous broadcast pruning scheme based on the local prediction of a remained coverage area in the on‐going broadcast process brings us beneficial results in terms of energy savings and limited bandwidth preservation.
WShare: an instant secure collaboration workspace over ad hoc wireless LAN
Authors: Raniwala Ashish , Zhang Gefan , Sridhar Ashwini , Zheng Jian P. , Chiueh Tzi‐cker 
Published: December 2009

PurposeThis paper aims to describe the design, implementation, and evaluation of a novel file and application sharing system that enables a group of mobile stations that do not have any prior security association and infrastructure support, to form a secure collaboration workspace, and share files and application content instantly with minimal human intervention.Design/methodology/approachThe paper looks at the system implementation and experimentation.FindingsWShare can automatically establish a peer‐to‐peer network among the participating mobile stations, and provides a transparent shared file repository through which the mobile stations can securely exchange files with simple drag‐and‐drop operations. This file sharing application can also be specialized to support the same file beaming service over wireless LAN as that provided by Palm PDAs over infrared links. On the application sharing front, WShare supports a general remote execution mechanism that can synchronize the state of multiple instances of a standard productivity application, such as PowerPoint, Excel, and Word, across different machines. Finally for sharing generic applications, WShare also integrates virtual network computing with reliable wireless broadcast to provide a user‐interface level sharing mechanism. Performance measurement on the fully operational WShare prototype shows that a collaboration workspace among five mobile nodes can be set up within 3.5 seconds.Originality/valueThis paper proposes a new communication paradigm and presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of a fully‐working prototype.
Design and evaluation of a security architecture for ad hoc networks
Authors: Kraft Daniel , Bechler Marc , Hof Hans‐Joachim , Pählke Frank , Wolf Lars 
Published: December 2009

PurposeSecure communication is very important for computer networks. Thereby, authentication is one of the most eminent preconditions. In ad hoc networks, common authentication schemes are not applicable since public key infrastructures with a centralized certification authority are hard to deploy in ad hoc networking environments. This paper aims to investigate these issues.Design/methodology/approachIn order to overcome these issues, the paper proposes and evaluates a security concept based on a distributed certification facility. Thereby, a network is divided into clusters with one special head node each. These cluster head nodes perform administrative functions and hold shares of a network key used for certification. New nodes start to participate in the network as guests; they can only become full members with a network‐signed certificate after their authenticity has been warranted by some other members. Access to resources and services within the ad hoc network is controlled using authorization certificates.FindingsThe feasibility of this concept was verified by simulations. Three different models for node mobility were used in order to include realistic scenarios as well as to make the results comparable to other work. The simulation results include an evaluation of the log‐on times, availability, and communication overhead.Originality/valueThe paper introduces a cluster‐based architecture to realize a distributed public key infrastructure that is highly adapted to the characteristics of ad hoc networks.
Evaluating failure detection in mobilead‐hocnetworks
Authors: Friedman Roy , Tcharny Galya 
Published: December 2009

PurposeMobilead‐hocnetworks (MANET) are networks that are formed in anad‐hocmanner by collections of devices that are equipped with wireless communication capabilities, such as the popular WiFi (IEEE 802.11b) standard. As the hardware technology and networking protocols for MANETs become mature and ubiquitous, the main barrier for MANETs to become widely used is applications. Like in other areas of distributed computing, in order to expedite the development of applications, there is a need for middleware services that support these applications. Failure detection has been identified as a basic component for many reliable distributed middleware services and applications. This paper aims to investigate this issue.Design/methodology/approachThis paper presents an adaptation of a gossip‐based failure detection protocol to MANETs, and an evaluation by extensive simulations of this protocol's performance in such networks.FindingsThe results can be viewed as a feasibility check for implementing failure detection in MANETs, and the conclusions drawn from them can be used to motivate and improve future implementations of both a failure detection component and of applications and middleware services relying on such a component.Originality/valueThis paper presents an adaptation of a gossip‐based failure detection protocol to MANET environments, and presents an extensive simulation‐based performance study of this protocol in MANETs with various parameters.
A structural, content‐similarity measure for detecting spam documents on the web
Authors: Soledad Pera Maria , Ng Yiu‐Kai 
Published: December 2009

PurposeThe web provides its users with abundant information. Unfortunately, when a web search is performed, both users and search engines must deal with an annoying problem: the presence of spam documents that are ranked among legitimate ones. The mixed results downgrade the performance of search engines and frustrate users who are required to filter out useless information. To improve the quality of web searches, the number of spam documents on the web must be reduced, if they cannot be eradicated entirely. This paper aims to present a novel approach for identifying spam web documents, which have mismatched titles and bodies and/or low percentage of hidden content in markup data structure.Design/methodology/approachThe paper shows that by considering the degree of similarity among the words in the title and body of a web docuemnt D, which is computed by using their word‐correlation factors; using the percentage of hidden context in the markup data structure within D; and/or considering the bigram or trigram phase‐similarity values of D, it is possible to determine whether D is spam with high accuracyFindingsBy considering the content and markup of web documents, this paper develops a spam‐detection tool that is: reliable, since we can accurately detect 84.5 percent of spam/legitimate web documents; and computational inexpensive, since the word‐correlation factors used for content analysis are pre‐computed.Research limitations/implicationsSince the bigram‐correlation values employed in the spam‐detection approach are computed by using the unigram‐correlation factors, it imposes additional computational time during the spam‐detection process and could generate higher number of misclassified spam web documents.Originality/valueThe paper verifies that the spam‐detection approach outperforms existing anti‐spam methods by at least 3 percent in terms of F‐measure.
Maintaining web application: an ontology‐based reverse engineering approach
Authors: Mohamed Benslimane Sidi , Malki Mimoun , Bouchiha Djelloul 
Published: December 2009

PurposeWeb applications are subject to continuous changes and rapid evolution triggered by increasing competition, especially in commercial domains such as electronic commerce. Unfortunately, usually they are implemented without producing any useful documentation for subsequent maintenance and evolution. Thereof, the maintenance of such systems becomes a challenging problem as the complexity of the web application grows. Reverse engineering has been heralded as one of the most promising technologies to support effective web application maintenance. This paper aims to present a reverse engineering approach that helps understanding existing undocumented web applications to be maintained or evolved.Design/methodology/approachThe proposed approach provides reverse engineering rules to generate a conceptual schema from a given domain ontology by using a set of transformation rules. The reverse engineering process consists of four phases: extracting useful information; identifying a set of ontological constructs representing the concepts of interest; enriching the identified set by additional constructs; and finally deriving a conceptual schema.FindingsThe advantage of using ontology for conceptual data modeling is the reusability of domain knowledge. As a result, the conceptual data model will be made faster, easier and with fewer errors than creating it in usual way. Designers can use the extracted conceptual schema to gain a better understanding of web applications and to assist in their maintenance.Originality/valueThe strong point of this approach is that it relies on a very rich semantic reference that is domain ontology. However, it is not possible to make a straightforward transformation of all elements from a domain ontology into a conceptual data model because ontology is semantically richer than data conceptual models.
Automation of post‐exploitation
Authors: Tabatabai Irani Mohammad , Weippl Edgar R. 
Published: December 2009

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to describe the improvements achieved in automating post‐exploit activitiesDesign/methodology/approachBased on existing frameworks such as Metasploit and Meterpreter the paper develops a prototype and uses this to automate typical post‐exploitation activities.FindingsUsing a multi‐step approach of pivoting this paper can automate the cascaded attacks on computers not directly routable.Practical implicationsBased on the findings and developed prototypes penetration tests can be made more efficient since many manual exploitation activities can now be scripted.Original/valueThe main contribution of the paper is to extend Metapreter‐scripts so that post‐exploitation can be scripted. Moreover, using a multi‐step approach (pivoting), it can automatically exploit machines that are not directly routable
Discourse analysis and corporate social responsibility: a qualitative approach
Authors: Ocler Rodolphe 
Published: December 2009

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine how firms build and develop corporate discourse in the field of corporate social responsibility (CRS). The paper has two main objectives: to clarify notions that are used when analyzing discourse; and to provide a qualitative methodology to analyze how the discourse is used to construct a CRS strategy.Design/methodology/approachThe paper presents a qualitative methodology, deconstructing four CRS reports using a story‐telling approach.FindingsThe analysis shows that firms construct their environment while marketing the report on social responsibility, in order to make of it an asset in an institutional communication system.Research limitations/implicationsFurther attention should be devoted to the specificity of qualitative approach and to discourse analysis (selection of the corpus, validity and triangulation, etc.).Originality/valueThe paper shows how discourse can be used to provide competitive advantage. It also provides a clear framework while using discourse analysis and identifies the major pitfalls that should be avoided when using such a methodology.
From folk‐tales to shareholder‐tales: semiotics analysis of the annual report
Authors: Breton Gaétan 
Published: December 2009

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the use of semiotics analysis to better understand the annual report. It starts with the idea that the annual report is telling stories to the reader. As a form of novel, it can be analysed with the same instrument.Design/methodology/approachThe goal here is methodological. It is to propose an organized body of techniques that will allow anybody to conduct analysis from it. Therefore, one example is used uniquely to illustrate the method. The advantages of semiotics over content analysis are numerous. Content analysis remains quite trivial (counting words), while semiotics analysis takes into account the structure of the story at many levels.FindingsFramed by the categories of Aristotle's rhetoric, a method is developed that is replicable with a limited background in the source disciplines. The results suggest that the annual report is clearly telling stories and respond quite positively to this kind of approach.Originality/valueAlthough it is often discussed as a general issue, there has so far been no proposal of an integrated method for analysing accounting narratives over content analysis.