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To describe an exploratory study in which an online learning system was used to provide an intercultural experience for pre‐service education students from New Jersey and Namibia.

Pre‐service education students from New Jersey and Namibia were enrolled in an online course in the fall of 2004. The following semester, spring 2005, only students from New Jersey were enrolled in the course. Online discussion postings were analyzed for both course cohorts and compared. A pre/post questionnaire of students' understanding of cross‐cultural differences in general, and in teaching in particular, was also administered to both course cohorts.

This paper focuses on the growth of New Jersey students' understanding of what teaching in Namibia is like and also looks to see if this led to a greater understanding of their own practice. While there was an indication that the former was achieved and a number of New Jersey students did show a deeper understanding of teaching in Namibia, this did not appear to then lead to a deeper understanding of their own teaching practice.

This was an exploratory pilot study, conducted principally to see if the technology supported this type of experience for students in both developed and developing nations. While this experience will never substitute for a real, in‐person, exchange program or study abroad, the technology did support a limited virtual “exchange” program.

The study indicated that an online course is a very feasible option for providing an intercultural experience for students from developed and developing nations. In order to help students reach deeper levels of understanding of both their intercultural peers and of their own practice, students may need to be exposed to a more explicit model of inter‐ and intra‐ cultural reflection.

This paper gives teacher educators and others a way of providing a virtual intercultural exchange to their students. This is particularly important for students from both developing and developed nations who do not have the financial means to participate in an actual (in‐person) exchange program.

This paper reports on a fabrication platform and extensions to deposition‐based processes that permit freeform fabrication of three‐dimensional functional assemblies with embedded conductive wiring and power sources. Structure and joints are produced by fused deposition of thermoplastics and deposition of elastomers. Conductive wiring is achieved by deposition of various low‐melting‐point alloys and conductive pastes. Batteries based on zinc‐air chemistry are produced by the deposition of zinc, electrolyte, and catalysts, with separator media and electrodes. Details of the deposition processes are provided and several printed assemblies are demonstrated.

Academic entrepreneurship is seen as a pathway for universities to create value from their knowledge. However, there has been a lack of clarity about what activities constitute academic entrepreneurship, the different type of entrepreneurial academics and how their perceptions of their environment relate to their engagement.

Drawing on a large data set of 10,836 responses across 33 countries, the empirical study investigates European academics who undertake four academic entrepreneurship activities (spin-out creation, commercialisation of R&D results, joint R&D and consulting) to determine if they perceive the environment for academic entrepreneurship differently than those who undertake only some of the activities and those undertaking none at all.

The findings show that less than 1% of academics undertake exclusively spin-offs creation or R&D commercialisation; however, the majority also engage in other entrepreneurial activities such as joint R&D and consulting and even other education and management engagement activities with industry. In addition, entrepreneurial academics in Europe perceive significantly higher motivators and more developed supporting mechanisms for academic entrepreneurship. However, their perceptions of barriers are similar.

At a managerial and policy level, the study results call into question universities prioritising a narrow view of academic entrepreneurship which focusses only on spin-offs creation and R&D commercialisation. Instead, a broader view of academic entrepreneurship is recommended and appropriate mechanisms in place to enable academics to achieve research outcomes from their entrepreneurial activity.

This paper offers an important contribution on how the perception of the environment contributes to the development of entrepreneurial behaviour in individual academics.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the factors that affect how people maintain their friendships by using information on Plurk.

This study extended the Theory of Planned Behavior model to include both interpersonal curiosity and reciprocity. Data were collected via an online survey with 220 valid samples. The respondents answered the survey questionnaire based on their past experiences using Plurk. The proposed research model was assessed using structural equation modeling as performed in the LISREL program.

The attitude toward using Plurk for maintaining friendships is the strongest predictor of intention to use, followed by perceived behavioral control. The findings indicate that reciprocity has the strongest effect on attitude toward using Plurk for maintaining friendship, followed by subjective norms and interpersonal curiosity. An analysis of the research explained 61 percent of the variance in attitude toward using Plurk for maintaining friendship, and 73 percent of the variance in intention to use Plurk for maintaining friendship.

This study only focussed on a limited number of factors, and as a result, the effects of some variables, such as personal characteristics, may have been overlooked. In the future, researchers can extend this model by incorporating more variables into the analysis of maintaining friendships via Plurk.

As microblogging firms compete for online customers, it would be useful to gain some understanding of the possible effects of reciprocity and interpersonal curiosity on users’ intention to use Plurk for maintaining friendships. As firms compete for internet marketing, managers should know the potential use of Plurk as an effective channel to promote their products and services to whoever needs them.

From the literature available in the public journal databases, no existing research model was found to explain the behavior of Plurk users on microblogs. The paper fulfills this objective.

The purpose of this paper is to study factors that affect adults' acceptance of instant messaging (IM) for social and entertainment purposes in an Arab country

An expanded version of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) was used to test the impact of four factors (subjective norms, perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, and perceived enjoyment) and a new construct, curiosity about other people, on the level of IM usage by 191 adults in Kuwait. Survey questions from prior studies were adopted and customized, and the model analyzing using Structural Equation Model with LISREL.

IM usage is a different type of technology usage than work‐related forms of ICT since it is employed for social and recreational usage. Unlike prior studies that employed TAM in a work‐related setting, perceived usefulness was not a significant antecedent of usage; however, perceived enjoyment, social norms, curiosity about other people, and perceived ease of use were all important antecedents of IM usage.

This study focused on IM usage outside the workplace for social purposes and was restricted to adults within one country (Kuwait). Additional studies across Arab countries are encouraged as well as comparatives studies about IM usage for different contexts (work‐related use of IM from home and IM usage in the workplace).

This study is useful for researchers willing to highlight the factors that motivate users' ICT adoption outside the workplace and for social purposes. It also has implications for managers and software vendors seeking to enhance the adoption of communication‐oriented forms of ICT in the Arab world

The study highlights motives of ICT usage among Arab adults, which has not been widely studied. It also describes Arab culture and shows how certain aspects of culture affect ICT usage.

When ITS Belfast decided to introduce the Deming approach into the company, bells began to ring for one department. The support staff realised that this approach could be the key to alleviating many of their problems.

In this paper we address research issues related to the economics of electronic, Internet‐based markets. First, what are the consumer cost‐based differences for traditional and electronic markets? Second, what revenue implications does increased electronic market utilization have for sellers and transaction intermediaries? Based on an empirical, survey‐based study of an electronic market in the sports trading card industry we find that prices, search costs, and sales taxes are lower in the electronic markets, while risk costs, distribution costs, and market costs are lower in traditional markets. We discuss the implications this has for seller, intermediary and government revenue sources.

This paper adopts a response hierarchy model to examine drivers' intrinsic and extrinsic motivations for using mobile digital television (MDTV) while on the move.

The study used a regional quota sampling method to examine the viewing habits of drivers who have a mobile digital television installed in their vehicles and was carried out in two steps. The first stage had interviews with eight car stereo distributors, and the second stage used a questionnaire to ascertain the viewing habits and content selection of drivers watching TV in their vehicles.

SEM analysis of a survey of 480 MDTV‐using drivers in Taiwan revealed an enjoyment‐based model of MDTV use since enjoyment has the most significant effect on drivers' affect, intention to use, and use behavior. Perceived ease of use and subjective norms had a lesser effect. The non‐significant effect of concentration and perceived risk imply that while drivers enjoy watching MDTV, they do not believe they switch their primary attention from driving to programs. Since drivers do not think they concentrate on watching MDTV, program content has little chance to induce curiosity and increase viewing time, the real communicative effect of watching TV while driving must be sharply discounted.

The paper focuses exclusively on use of front‐seat MDTV equipment by drivers, and does not attempt to examine MDTV use by other passengers in the same vehicle.

This is the first study that has been undertaken of mobile digital television viewers, and the paper will be useful as a reference for those who are developing the mobile digital television market as they work to understand the needs and viewing habits of their audience.

The field for Intellectual Capital (IC) and the related philosophy of Knowledge Management (KM) has arisen recently to an interesting research object worldwide. Researchers round the globe presented interesting realistic contributions to the “intellectual” matter like Tobin’s “q”, Intangible Assets Monitor ‐IAM or “Skandia Navigator”. Increasingly the metrication of the intellectual intangibility, the visualization of the invisible intellectual brain power or the calculation of the intellectual potentiality provoked many “serious” researchers to fight like the hero of La Mancha “again wind, light and sound”. A. Pulic “VAIC™ – Value Added Intellectual Capital Method” is one way to bridge the distance from “tacit to ex plicit” because it helps to understand the metrics of intangibility. In the present research the data (published balance sheet and profit/loss account information) of seventeen main Greek banks for the period 1996 to 1999 is analyzed. The focus is put on the used human capital (HC) and physical capital (CA) of the Greek banking sector and their impact on firms’ value added (VA) based performance is discussed. The predictive (regression analysis) impact on the “intellectual” value added (VA) based performance confirms the existence of value added (VA) based performance differences among the various banks – always due to their potential of intellectual and physical capital.

This paper describes the forms of knowledge used by players of fantasy sports, games where players create ideal sports teams and compete to accumulate points based on professional athletes’ statistical performances. Messages from a discussion forum associated with a popular fantasy basketball game were analyzed to understand how players described their decision‐making strategies to their peers. The focus of the research was to understand if players use mathematical concepts such as optimization and statistical analyses when assembling their team or if they base their decisions on personal preferences, beliefs, and biases. The analyses in this paper suggest the latter, that players rely on informal, domain‐specific heuristics that often lead to the creation of competitive teams. These heuristics and other forms of player discourse related to knowledge use are described. The paper also suggests ways that analyses of existing practices might provide a foundation for creating gaming environments that assist the acquisition of more formal reasoning skills.