Search results

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the research trends in the field of open and distance learning (ODL) as reflected in journal articles.

It compares research articles published in 2005 and 2015. Content analysis was conducted on a total of 288 research articles published in seven peer-reviewed journals on ODL. The study covers research areas and keywords, research methodology and participant types, and author collaboration.

The results show that macro-level research on areas such as globalization and cultural aspects of ODL remain relatively scarce, and international collaboration appear uncommon in both 2005 and 2015. However, there was an increasing amount of international collaboration in developing macro-level research. Empirical research studies, especially those using quantitative methods, have become the dominant methodology. The data sources have also been broadened. Several new keywords which did not exist or were rarely used (e.g. massive open online courses) have become common in 2015.

The analysis offers insights for researchers into how they can develop their research effectively in the field and enhance the chances of their research outputs being accepted. Recommendations are also made for ODL researchers on the types of research that tend to be accepted for publication and will have a high potential impact in the future.

Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.

This article documents accounts of the tactics parents and siblings of autistic persons in Hong Kong deploy to manage social encounters. This article aims to consider the impact of such tactics and their enmeshment with factors that combine to limit satisfactory outcomes and outlines a project intent upon contriving dialogue between persons.

This qualitative project elicited stories and accounts (or narratives) produced by persons involved in encounters involving autistic persons. This project also intervened in these encounters.

Persons involved in social encounters are de-fused, in the sense of being disconnected. The emotions persons experience through these encounters (e.g. and especially anxiety) remain hidden. Dialogue has the capacity to re-fuse, not only reconnecting but also rejecting unsatisfactory arrangements.

The dialogue produced in the article may extend beyond the specific circumstances and persons considered, potentially reducing the barriers and distances between autistic persons and others.

Smart card-based E-payment systems are receiving increasing attention as the number of implementations is witnessed on the rise globally. Understanding of user adoption behavior of E-payment systems that employ smart card technology becomes a research area that is of particular value and interest to both IS researchers and professionals. However, research interest focuses mostly on why a smart card-based E-payment system results in a failure or how the system could have grown into a success. This signals the fact that researchers have not had much opportunity to critically review a smart card-based E-payment system that has gained wide support and overcome the hurdle of critical mass adoption. The Octopus in Hong Kong has provided a rare opportunity for investigating smart card-based E-payment system because of its unprecedented success. This research seeks to thoroughly analyze the Octopus from technology adoption behavior perspectives.

Cultural impacts on adoption behavior are one of the key areas that this research posits to investigate. Since the present research is conducted in Hong Kong where a majority of population is Chinese ethnicity and yet is westernized in a number of aspects, assuming that users in Hong Kong are characterized by eastern or western culture is less useful. Explicit cultural characteristics at individual level are tapped into here instead of applying generalization of cultural beliefs to users to more accurately reflect cultural bias. In this vein, the technology acceptance model (TAM) is adapted, extended, and tested for its applicability cross-culturally in Hong Kong on the Octopus. Four cultural dimensions developed by Hofstede are included in this study, namely uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, individualism, and Confucian Dynamism (long-term orientation), to explore their influence on usage behavior through the mediation of perceived usefulness.

TAM is also integrated with the innovation diffusion theory (IDT) to borrow two constructs in relation to innovative characteristics, namely relative advantage and compatibility, in order to enhance the explanatory power of the proposed research model. Besides, the normative accountability of the research model is strengthened by embracing two social influences, namely subjective norm and image. As the last antecedent to perceived usefulness, prior experience serves to bring in the time variation factor to allow level of prior experience to exert both direct and moderating effects on perceived usefulness.

The resulting research model is analyzed by partial least squares (PLS)-based Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approach. The research findings reveal that all cultural dimensions demonstrate direct effect on perceived usefulness though the influence of uncertainty avoidance is found marginally significant. Other constructs on innovative characteristics and social influences are validated to be significant as hypothesized. Prior experience does indeed significantly moderate the two influences that perceived usefulness receives from relative advantage and compatibility, respectively. The research model has demonstrated convincing explanatory power and so may be employed for further studies in other contexts. In particular, cultural effects play a key role in contributing to the uniqueness of the model, enabling it to be an effective tool to help critically understand increasingly internationalized IS system development and implementation efforts. This research also suggests several practical implications in view of the findings that could better inform managerial decisions for designing, implementing, or promoting smart card-based E-payment system.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the intra-party conflicts in Hong Kong’s Democratic Party (DP) and their implications for broader democratic processes in the territory. It also examines some other thematic issues including: the party’s policy decision-making process, candidate selection, party membership and mergers, and their overall relevance for democratisation in Hong Kong.

The study gives a historical review of intra-party conflicts. The concept of factionalism is applied to better understand the DP in Hong Kong’s political space.

Hong Kong is unique and popular models of party conflicts are hardly applicable to the country. Intra-party conflict is an obvious, expected conflict because of differences in formation, leadership, manifestoes and ideologies. The present author tries to examine the case with a view to making a novel contribution.

The study of political factionalism is not uncommon in Hong Kong but this paper intends to study intra-party elite conflicts and self-democratisation of the Hong Kong DP as a case study which is seldom addressed. Consolidation is a possible scenario and its presence is evident when political elites increasingly demonstrate commitment towards creating a democratic regime and when they hold strong beliefs in democratic procedures and institutions as crucial to governing public life.

This study aims to understand of the role that teacher entrepreneurial behavior plays in developing teacher professional capital. The extant concepts around school leadership mostly encompass the transformative and instructional roles of school leaders in managing, mobilizing and supporting teachers for student achievement. However, school leadership has not focused strongly on promoting innovation and risk-taking for schools in a knowledge economy. As a timely promising response to the increasingly demanding and competitive school context, teacher entrepreneurial behaviour (TEB), which emphasizes teachers' willingness to take risks and be daring, has started to gain recognition in the school leadership literature, yet a nuanced understanding of TEB's potential impacts on schools is lacking.

Based on a combined consideration of institutionalized recognition and expert judgement, this study identified three innovative entrepreneurial teachers/teacher groups that had won the most competitive teaching award in Hong Kong. Employing a multiple-site case study design, this study conducted semi-structured interviews with 23 informants and collected supplementary school documents and records.

This study found that TEB enables the implementation of innovation and promotes cross-subject alignment. It cultivates trusting and coherent relationships among teachers. Teachers with TEB scaled up innovation among other teachers. Furthermore, entrepreneurial teachers enhance school attractiveness by creating competitive advantages.

This analysis showed that TEB enables formal and informal school leaders to bring forth critical school outcomes. This study elaborates how TEB enhances teachers' professional capital through building trusting and coherent relationships. It also adds to the research on school innovation by demonstrating that TEB fosters teachers' capacity for bottom-up innovation in the community.

This paper uses a probit model to analyse 100 observations in terms of three hypotheses about the formation of owners’ corporations in high‐density private housing estates in Hong Kong within the context of Mancur Olson’s group theory. The findings do not reject the theory, revealing that it is more likely for an older urban estate with fewer owners to form owners’ corporations. The discussion includes a brief introduction to Olson’s group theory and the development of the probit analysis. Some speculative thoughts about public participation in local level urban management and planning are offered in the conclusion.

Molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) have aroused focus in medicinal chemistry in recent decades, especially for biomedical applications. Considering the exceptional abilities to immobilize any guest of medical interest (antibodies, enzymes, etc.), MIPs is attractive to substantial research efforts in complementing the quest of biomimetic recognition systems. This study aims to review the key-concepts of molecular imprinting, particularly emphasizes on the conformational adaptability of MIPs beyond the usual description of molecular recognition. The optimal morphological integrity was also outlined in this review to acknowledge the successful sensing activities by MIPs.

This review highlighted the fundamental mechanisms and underlying challenges of MIPs from the preparation stage to sensor applications. The progress of electrochemical and optical sensing using molecularly imprinted assays has also been furnished, with the evolvement of molecular imprinting as a research hotspot.

The lack of standard synthesis protocol has brought about an intriguing open question in the selection of building blocks that are biocompatible to the imprint species of medical interest. Thus, in this paper, the shortcomings associated with the applications of MIPs in electrochemical and optical sensing were addressed using the existing literature besides pointing out possible solutions. Future perspectives in the vast development of MIPs also been postulated in this paper.

The present review intends to furnish the underlying mechanisms of MIPs in biomedical diagnostics, with the aim in electrochemical and optical sensing while hypothesizing on future possibilities.

The key concepts to be explored in this article include the blurring boundary between “indie” and “pop”; the significance of digital media in contemporary music industry and the distinctive socio-political nature of indie music in Hong Kong. To a large extent, it discusses the social functions of music – a subject discussed by Simon Frith (2007), a leading scholar in popular music studies.

In order to expound on some observations of the connections between music cultures and socio-political development in Hong Kong, a selection of musical works by indie musicians will be looked into closely.

A focus of discussion will be given to the difference between mainstream Cantopop and indie music in a way that the latter mentions socio-political matters overtly while the former downplays sensitive political issues, particularly in the post-colonial era after the handover of Hong Kong to mainland China in 1997.

Originality of research can be evidenced by the author's textual analysis of the musical styles and lyrics produced by various local indie artists' musical works through primary sources.