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The main objective of this chapter is broadening the understanding of anthropomorphic artificial intelligence (AI) (e.g. avatars, humanoid robots, chatbots) in both physical and digital environments. The chapter strives to demonstrate how organisations can curate relationship marketing and enhance customer experience by employing anthropomorphic AI. To achieve this, the chapter extends existing understanding in three ways. First, it explains the interconnectivity between relationship marketing and customer experience. Second, it presents anthropomorphic AI along with its different characteristics and technologies. Third, it offers some real-life uses cases and examples of such AI drawing from practical insights into five selected industries. Overall, the chapter provides some food of thoughts concerning the successful application and deployment of anthropomorphic AI in marketing practices.

This chapter explores children’s agency in using mobile technologies at home and in school. Supporting children’s agency has been offered as a rationale for adopting personalised education worldwide. Children’s agency is also drawn upon as a justification for children’s use of personal mobile devices. This chapter considers children’s agency in light of the personalised education in one UK primary school and the children’s use of mobile technologies at school and at home. The findings are based on eight days of observations of classroom practice and interviews with six case study children in the Year 6 classroom. In sessions that were supported with mobile technologies, children’s learning was personalised to each child, but constrained by the amount of time that the activity lasted and that the technology was available for. Based on children’s accounts, their use of mobile technologies at home was constrained by their parents’ restrictions and monitoring practices. The chapter discusses the reality of children’s agency in light of adults’ mediation and children’s actual experiences of personalised learning.

During the past decade, fast-paced changes created a new environment organisations need to adapt to in an agile way. To support their transformation, organisations are rethinking their approach to learning. They are moving away from traditional instructor-centred, standardised classroom-based learning settings. Instead, learning needs to be tailored to the individuals’ needs, available anywhere at any time and needs to enable learners to build their network. The development of digital tools, specifically network technology and social collaboration platforms, has enabled these new learning concepts.

The use of these new learning concepts in organisations also has implications for higher education. The present case study, therefore, investigates how universities can best prepare future employees and leaders for these new working environments, both on a content level and a methodological level. It also investigates if these new learning concepts can support universities in dealing with a changing environment.

The investigated case is a traditional face-to-face leadership lecture for a heterogeneous group of students. It was reconceptualised as a personalised and social collaborative learning setting, delivered through a social collaboration platform as the primary learning environment. Initial evaluation results indicate positive motivational effects, experience sharing and changes in perception of the student − lecturer relationship. The findings also supported previous challenges of computer-supported collaborative learning settings, such as the perception of a higher cognitive load. The implications of these results for the future teaching and business models of higher education are discussed. In addition, the potential of these computer-supported social collaborative learning settings is outlined.

Currently, the world is experiencing the highest levels of displaced peoples ever recorded by The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (Australian Human Rights Commission, 2016). Consequently, greater numbers of refugees and asylum-seekers are being resettled in host nations in Anglophone and some European nations. An increasing body of literature is examining the consequences for educational systems as this new and increasingly diverse cohort of students enters various education sectors – preschools, schools, universities and adult education. Despite a surge of interest in this area, however, the practical and theoretical implications for school leaders’ practices and praxis remain under-examined and under-theorized. Moreover, scholarship on leadership for diversity fails to capture the complex nature of leading learning for refugee students who too frequently are homogenized and essentialized under the umbrella of immigrant or culturally diverse students. This chapter contributes to filling a critical gap in our knowledge in these areas.

As academic libraries face growing challenges from the declining economy, deteriorating administrative support, increasing patron demands and fiscal accountability, as well as the expanding competition from both technology and retail industries, there is an opportunity to be more responsive to academic library customers and more strategic in the services provided to them. A boutique service model, generally, employed in high-end retail industries, may be adapted for academic libraries to provide a proactive, specialized approach to serving faculty and students. In the context of libraries, this model is focused on service that is personalized, user-driven, and technology-enhanced. It can be employed with the efforts of subject librarians and library personnel with minimal additional cost and would have a profound impact on the customer service experience. This chapter describes how the Policy Sciences & Economics Library at Texas A&M University (TAMU) has successfully implemented a boutique services model. It discusses the emphasis on a customer-intimacy strategy, focusing on relationship building of the Library and liaison librarians with its customers, the faculty, and students of the Departments of Political Science and Economics and the Bush School of Government and Public Service. A number of collaborative projects and services have been borne out of this effort and the result has been a measure of embeddedness that permeates the curriculum and research activities of those serves and increases the effectiveness and impact of the services provided by the library. The various efforts and innovations are easily transferable and scalable to other types of libraries.

Mobile devices, through their capacity to enable anytime-anywhere learning as well as capture, annotate and share multimedia, offer entirely new ways for students to learn. This chapter provides review of mobile learning with a particular focus on learning design. First various definitions and characteristics of mobile learning are examined in order to establish a common understanding of its boundaries and meaning. Example uses of mobile learning in schools and higher education are described as a way to provide a more concrete understanding of design possibilities. Benefits of mobile learning are unpacked, as distilled from the literature, including the ability to provide flexible, accessible, authentic, personalized, ubiquitous and seamless learning. Mobile learning issues are also examined, including technical problems, cognitive load issues, distraction, equity and safety. A primary school science and a university pre-service teacher education vignette are described so as to offer a more in-depth illustration of what mobile learning can look like and achieve in practice. Finally, mobile learning research findings and observations are synthesized into recommendations, to inform and guide evidence-based mobile learning design practices. Opportunities for future research and investigation are also discussed.