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This paper aims to describe the implementation of a blended learning approach in a Stage 2 management accounting course at a university in New Zealand. The paper reports on student participation and engagement in the course and reflects on students’ learning experiences. The blended learning approach was implemented in response to low student attendance and poor preparation for face-to-face tutorial sessions, along with demand from students to be able to access learning resources off-campus.

Data were collected from formal course evaluations, the learning management system and a student focus group, with particular emphasis on three of the online activities introduced – lessons, quizzes and chat rooms.

The study finds that while learners value online activities, they are nevertheless still unwilling to forgo the opportunities which face-to-face contact with both peers and faculty members present. This finding provides support for the continuation of a blended learning approach in the course, as well as its implementation in others.

This paper has several limitations. These include the small sample size and the absence of reflection on the process and outcome(s) of implementation of the blended learning course by the responsible academic. Furthermore, the paper also did not consider the impact of blended learning on students’ soft, or generic, skills. These are topics for future research.

The findings highlight the importance of offering not only a mixture of online activities, but also a blend of face-to-face and online activities.

This study focuses on student participation and engagement in a blended learning accounting course.

In light of the sea change brought about by advancing technology in the way broker‐dealers communicate with clients, this article is a timely discussion of the current federal and self‐regulatory organization (SRO) requirements for a broker‐dealer's supervision of its employees' electronic business communications. Forms of communication, and the regulatory guidelines covering them, include e‐mail, off‐premises messages, group email, web site content, hyperlinks to other home pages, and chat rooms.

In the first of two articles, the potential of the internet for child victimisation by paedophiles and the challenges for controls that the technology poses are discussed. The concept of the internet and ‘cyberspace’ are explained and the consequences for new forms of sexual deviancy. The risks should be an issue for community safety.

Peer‐to‐Peer computing offers many attractive features, such as collaboration, self‐organization, load balancing, availability, fault tolerance and anonymity. However, it also faces many serious challenges. In our previous work, we implemented a synchronous P2P collaboration platform called TOMSCOP. However, the TOMSCOP was implemented only in Windows XPOS. In this work, we extend our previous work and present a multi‐platform Peer‐to‐Peer system. The proposed system operates very smoothly in UNIX Solaris 9 OS, Linux Suse 9.1 OS, Mac OSX, and Windows XP. In this paper, we present the design of proposed system and four web application tools: info, joint draw pad, shared web browser and subaru avatar.

In this paper we provide evidence of successful online learning experience with UAE students at Zayed University in the UAE. First we describe the processes and technologies used in delivering the online course "Virtual Business Challenges". Based on survey results we discuss students’ evaluations and experience and the technologies used. Overall, students had a positive learning experience in the course.

Purpose – In order to explore how gender and sexual politics are played out in everyday practice within both the extreme right and jihadi-Salafist movements online, this chapter analyzes the content of two women’s only forums: The Women’s Forum on Stormfront.org and Women Dawah, a Turkish language pro-IS group chat on Telegram.

Methodology – The Women’s Forum and the Women Dawah data sets were analyzed using structural topic modeling to uncover the differences and similarities in salient topics between White Nationalist and Islamic State women-only forums.

Findings – The cross-ideological and multi-linguistic thematic analysis suggests that the safety of online spaces enables women to be more active, and serves digital support network for like-minding individuals. It also highlights that religion and ideology, whilst interwoven throughout posts on both platforms, they were more explicitly discussed within Women Dawah data.

Originality/Value – This research uses a unique data set which was collected over one year to conduct a cross-ideological and multi-linguistic thematic analysis, a relatively uncommon approach.

Distance education has been an important research issue of multimedia computing and communication. Since the instructional activities are implemented on cyberspace, how to control behaviors of students and to increase the degree of communication awareness have been a challenging issue. We propose a system based on the scaffolding theory. Behaviors of students are supervised by an intelligent control system, which is programmed by the instructor under our generic interface. The interface is built based on virtual reality and real‐time communication technologies. Students and instructors have their individual avatars that are controlled by a video game like navigation. Those behaviors that violate virtual campus regulations are detected and interceptive actions are performed. The proposed system is implemented on a Windows system and can be used for general purpose of distance education.

The purpose of this research is to study the characteristics of chat messages from analysing a collection of 33,121 sample messages gathered from 1,700 sessions of conversations of 72 pairs of MSN Messenger users over a four month duration from June to September of 2005. The primary objective of chat message characterization is to understand the properties of chat messages for effective message analysis, such as message topic detection.

From the study on chat message characteristics, an indicative term‐based categorization approach for chat topic detection is proposed. In the proposed approach, different techniques such as sessionalisation of chat messages and extraction of features from icon texts and URLs are incorporated for message pre‐processing. Naïve Bayes, Associative Classification, and Support Vector Machine are employed as classifiers for categorizing topics from chat sessions.

Indicative term‐based approach is superior to the traditional document frequency based approach, for feature selection in chat topic categorization.

This paper studies the characteristics of chat messages and proposes an indicative term‐based categorization approach for chat topic detection.

The computer has evolved from a tool used solely for business, research and governmental purposes to an instrument characterized by social interaction in virtual worlds. In this context, like‐minded people can converse and interact online in ways that are both enjoyable and satisfying. However, virtual worlds also bring with them cause for concern. These concerns include – but are not limited to – the loss of one's privacy, the fear of being exploited, and the loss of identity. This paper seeks to investigate the current state of affairs of online virtual worlds in terms of what many people deem acceptable and unacceptable forms of behavior.

A study is presented that explores the unmonitored distribution of electronic materials through the internet. Available technologies are surveyed and recommendations made based on these analyses.

This paper has shown that effective enforcement of online behavior is, at least, a very complicated undertaking – not one that will be quickly or easily solved. However, it demonstrates a number of techniques people may use today to protect themselves and those around them.

A number of techniques are described to help people traverse virtual worlds in a safe, secure and confident manner. This includes recommendations for people of all ages, from children through to adults.