IADIS INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL ON WWW/INTERNET

14

Authors: Joshua Kofi Doe

This study examines the effect of online brand community customer engagements on brand loyalty,through various online customer-to-community relationships, and trust. Data was randomly collected from 720 members of an online brand community page using an online questionnaire and analysed with Structural Equations Modelling (SEM). The study found that online brand community activities influenced customer-product relationships, and not customer-brand nor customer-company relationships. None of the customer relationships mediate the link between online brand community and trust. Trust, however partially mediates between customer-product relationships and brand loyalty, as well as between customer-company relationships and brand loyalty. Trust of the online community was confirmed to lead to loyalty. For industry practitioners, these findings support the need to ensure favourable customer/product related activities, experience and word of mouth within the online community. It also demonstrates the possibility of brand extension and brand trust at lower costs. The paper contributes to industrial and academic knowledge of virtual brand community and its effects.

14

Authors: Mohammed Baidada, Khalifa Mansouri and Franck Poirier

Our research work falls within the context of the use of recommendation systems for the personalization of contents in e-learning environments. We present in this paper the results of a second experiment that was recently conducted to evaluate a hybrid recommendation approach in an online learning environment. The approach consists of combining the two approaches of content-based filtering and collaborative filtering to improve the relevance of the educational resources recommended to learners. A first experiment was carried out in 2019 and gave convincing results, which led us to repeat a second experimentation in order to confirm the results on the one hand, and on the other hand, to modify the way learners evaluate the resources by transforming the "like" by a voting mode from one to five, in order to verify whether this will bring an improvement in the recommendations. This second experiment was also an opportunity to integrate an engine that guides learners' searches by adding criteria relating to their preferences and to check their satisfaction with the use of this engine. The results were globally positive.

18

Authors: Guilherme Alves da Silva and Leonelo Dell Anhol Almeida

The digital divide/digital inclusion concepts have been of interest to policymakers, particularly since the 1990s. However, the social transformation promised with ICTs adoption and diffusion is more complicated than just providing access. Qualitative studies have emphasized the importance of analyzing skills, appropriation, and negotiation. Authors in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) studies and in the Science, Technology, and Society (STS) studies also argue that studying technology non-use is also valuable as it broadens the concept of user/non-user beyond a binary look, diving in to understand how people engage or disengage with technologies, besides bringing relevant outputs about why some people do not or cannot become an Internet user. In this paper, we take this approach to analyze national sample surveys carried out in the three most populated countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia). Data from those surveys have directly been used to help formulate public policies in the three countries. We seek to identify indicators related to non-use present in the surveys, analyzing them in order to suggest the broadening of their scope. Besides specific questions about each survey, we find that all of them do not provide data, for example, on people who have stopped using the Internet (as a whole or part of it); do not consider people who access the network indirectly, by other people; and often bring, among motivations for non-use, sentences that do not reveal whether non-use is voluntary or involuntary. At the background of the discussion, we propose that further studies on technology non-use should be done in order to question technology determinism, the idea that everybody should and will become an Internet user.

31

Authors: Johan Stymne

In outdoor learning with mobile technology, students use mobile technology for learning in an outdoor setting, for example in a park or a garden. To understand how mobile technology has been used in outdoor learning, a systematic review was carried out. A number of reviews on mobile learning and on specific sub-areas of mobile learning, such as language learning or computer education have been published in scientific journals and at conferences. So far, however, no systematic review has focused on outdoor learning with mobile technology. To guide the review the following research questions were posed: “Which are the educational subjects and educational levels in outdoor learning with mobile technology?” and “What types of technologies for positioning or navigation, augmentation, and methods for data collection and annotation are used in outdoor learning with mobile technology?”. In total 87 articles, published between 2004 and 2019 were included in this review. Conclusions were that biology was the most common subject, primary or elementary school the most common educational levels, GPS was the major technology used for positioning and navigation, AR was the most common technology used for augmenting the outdoor learning environment, and taking photos and taking notes were the most common methods for data collection in outdoor learning with mobile technology. Building on the conclusions of this review and on previous reviews, suggestions are made for future research.