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    The Web sites of New Zealand non-governmental development organisations : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy in Development Studies at Massey University, School of People, Environment and Planning, College of Humanities and Social Sciences
    (Massey University, 2002) Webster, John
    New Zealand Non-Governmental Development Organisations (NGOs) are facing challenges in areas of accountability, effectiveness, efficiency, and communication and sharing of information, both internally and externally. The technology of the World Wide Web has the ability to assist organisations in facing these challenges. This study examines the Web sites of NZ NGOs and evaluates them against accepted best practice criteria to see whether the sites are effective in meeting the challenges and enhancing the activities of the organisations. Looking at how NZ NGOs are currently using the Web and comparing their efforts with current 'best practice' will help organisations understand how establishing and maintaining a Web presence can best address the challenges.
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    Support for decision making on the World Wide Web : a thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Information Science in Computer Science at Massey University, Turitea Campus, Palmerston North, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2004) Alam, Jaimee
    This research explores tool support for information retrieval and comparison of multiple pieces of information on the web. The study identifies the main goals users may have in mind when using the Internet in this way, and the necessary activities users complete to fulfill their goals. The main goals web users have are information search, entertainment and consumer to business transactions. The tasks users perform on the web to fulfill their goals include collecting, comparing, filtering and processing web information. These tasks form a decision-making cycle on the web and depending on the goal at hand, users may or may not necessarily undertake all the tasks or sub-steps in any sequential order. Industry web support tools have been analyzed to find out how effective they are in supporting a common user's activities. These tools include web browsers (Netcaptor Browser and Internet Explorer), editing tools (Notes Pilot and Edit Pad), plug-ins, research tools and window management systems. Both browsers are poor at arranging multiple windows and excellent at opening web sites. The Internet Explorer browser proved to be better than the Netcaptor browser at a number of activities including, selecting web content, copying web text and images and pasting web content into editing documents. When used with either browser. Microsoft Windows is good for arranging windows but poor in switching windows views, scrolling windows and resizing and re-positioning windows. Both editing tools are poor at re-positioning and formatting web content from an HTML environment to a text-based environment. The Notes Pilot tool is also poor in making calculations and returning to the browser. It is excellent at saving work and retrieving old files. The Edit Pad tool is successful at all other activities except re-positioning and formatting web content. It can be seen that tool support is lacking or current web-based tools support the user poorly in a number of areas. The need for an integrated web support tool has been identified. The functional and non-functional requirements have been specified, the tool designed, implemented and evaluated by users. The users were requested to complete a questionnaire and conduct a think-aloud walk-through session while completing three tasks using the integrated web support tool. The sessions were observed and results recorded. Most of the users strongly agreed with the proposition that the tool would be useful for personal or academic activities. The users recognized the tool's novelty, its efficiency, and also indicated an overall level of satisfaction. The users were less satisfied about referring back to web sites, getting the software to do exactly what they wanted and arranging the work space to meet their needs. Changes were made to the tool.
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    An integrative approach to online conference review management : a thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Information System in Massey University
    (Massey University, 2003) Meng, He
    Academic conferences play an important role in modern science and technology development. They provide venues for people involved in particular research areas to communicate with each other, share research achievement, and understand the current leading edge of development in that area. They also provide opportunity to periodically summarise the past work and find new directions for future research. The peer reviewed conference papers become reference for other researchers. There are thousands of conferences organised all over the world every year. For each conference there are hundreds of paper submissions. The management of submission, review and selection process is a hard and tedious task for conference committees. This thesis discusses the design and implementation of a web-based application to facilitate an efficient and effective management of paper submission, review and selection process in academic conferences.[FROM INTRODUCTION]
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    Co-operative authoring and collaboration over the World Wide Web : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Technology in Computer Systems Engineering at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2000) Hean, Daniel Robert
    Co-operative authoring and collaboration over the World Wide Web is looking at a future development of the Web. One of the reasons that Berners-Lee created the Web in 1989 was for collaboration and collaborative design. As the Web has limited collaboration at present this thesis looks specifically at co-operative authoring (the actual creation and editing of web pages) and generally at the collaboration surrounding this authoring. The goal of this thesis is to create an engine that is capable of supporting co-operative authoring and collaboration over the Web. In addition it would be a major advantage if the engine were flexible enough to allow the future development of other access methods, especially those that are web related, such as WebDAV, WAP, etc.
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    Applying knowledge management in education : teaching database normalization : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Information Science at Massey University
    (Massey University, 2004) Zhang, Lei
    In tertiary education, Information Science has been attracting more attention in both teaching and learning. However, along the course on the database design theory, learners always find it hard to grasp the knowledge on database normalisation and hard to apply different levels of the normal forms while designing a database. This results poor database construction and difficulties in database maintenance. In regard to this teaching and learning dilemma, academic teaching staff should, on the one hand, pay more attention to organising different teaching resources on database normalisation concepts and making the best use of the existing and newly developed resources so as to make the teaching environment more adaptive and more sharable. and on the other hand, apply different teaching methods to different students according to their knowledge levels by understanding the nature of each learner's behaviour, interests and preferences concerning the existing learning resources. However, at present there is no effective Information Technology tool to use in considering the dynamic nature of knowledge discovery, creation, transfer utilisation and reuse in this area. This provides an opportunity to examine the potentiality of applying knowledge management in education with the focus on teaching database normalisation, in terms of knowledge discovering, sharing, utilisation and reuse. This thesis contains a review of knowledge management and web mining technologies in the education environment, presents a dynamic knowledge management framework for better utilising teaching resource in the area of database normalisation and diagnoses the students' learning patterns and behaviours to assist effective teaching and learning. It is argued that knowledge management-supported education can work as a value-added process which supports the different needs of teachers and learners.
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    Adapting ACME to the database caching environment : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Information Systems at Massey University
    (Massey University, 2003) Riaz-ud-Din, Faizal
    The field of database cache replacement has seen a great many replacement policies presented in the past few years. As the challenge to find the optimal replacement policy continues, new methods and techniques of determining cache victims have been proposed, with some methods having a greater effect on results than others. Adaptive algorithms attempt to adapt to changing patterns of data access by combining the benefits of other existing algorithms. Such adaptive algorithms have recently been proposed in the web-caching environment. However, there is a lack of such research in the area of database caching. This thesis investigates an attempt to adapt a recently proposed adaptive caching algorithm in the area of web-caching, known as Adaptive Caching with Multiple Experts (ACME), to the database environment. Recently proposed replacement policies are integrated into ACME'S existing policy pool, in an attempt to gauge its ability and robustness to readily incorporate new algorithms. The results suggest that ACME is indeed well-suited to the database environment, and performs as well as the best currently caching policy within its policy pool at any particular point in time in its request stream. Although execution time increases by integrating more policies into ACME, the overall time saved increases by avoiding disk reads due to higher hit rates and fewer misses on the cache.
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    Cognitive trait model for persistent and fine-tuned student modelling in adaptive virtual learning environments : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Information Science in Information Systems at Massey University
    (Massey University, 2003) Lin, Tai-Yu
    The increasing need for individualised instructional in both academic and corporate training environment encourages the emergence and popularity of adaptivity in virtual learning environments (VLEs). Adaptivity can be applied in VLEs as adaptivity content presentation, which generates the learning content adaptively to suit the particular learner's aptitude, and as adaptive navigational control, which dynamically modifies the structure of the virtual learning environment presented to the learner in order to prevent overloading the learner's cognitive load. Techniques for both adaptive content presentation and adaptive navigational control need to be integrated in a conceptual framework so their benefits can be synthesised to obtain a synergic result. Exploration space control (ESC) theory attempts to adjust the learning space, called exploration space, to allow the learners to reach an adequate amount of information that their cognitive load is not overloaded. Multiple presentation (MR) approach provides guidelines for the selection of multimedia objects for both the learning content presentation and as navigational links. ESC is further formalised by including the consideration of individual learner's cognitive traits, which are the cognitive characteristics and abilities the learner relevant in the process of learning. Cognitive traits selected in the formalisation include working memory capacity, inductive reasoning skill, associative learning skill, and information processing speed. The formalisation attempts to formulate a guideline on how the learning content and navigational space should be adjusted in order to support a learner with a particular set of cognitive traits. However, in order to support the provision of adaptivity, the learners and their activities in the VLEs need to be profiled; the profiling process is called student modelling. Student models nowadays can be categorised into state models, and process models. State models record learners' progress as states (e.g. learned, not learned), whereas a process model represents the learners in term of both the knowledge they learned in the domain, and the inference procedures they used for completing a process (task). State models and process models are both competence-based, and they do not provide the information of an individual's cognitive abilities required by the formalisation of exploration space control. A new approach of student modelling is required, and this approach is called cognitive trait model (CTM). The basis of CTM lies in the field of cognitive science. The process for the creation of CTM includes the following subtasks. The cognitive trait under inquiry is studied in order to find its indicative signs (e.g. sign A indicates high working memory capacity). The signs are called the manifests of the cognitive trait. Manifests are always in pairs, i.e. if manifest A indicates high working memory capacity, A's inverse, B, would indicates low working memory capacity. The manifests are then translated into implementation patterns which are observable patterns in the records of learner-system interaction. Implementation patterns are regarded as machine-recognisable manifests. The manifests are used to create nodes in a neural network like structure called individualised temperament network (ITN). Every node in the ITN has its weight that conditions and is conditioned by the overall result of the execution of ITN. The output of the ITN's execution is used to update the CTM. A formative evaluation was carried out for a prototype created in this work. The positive results of the evaluation show the educational potential of the CTM approach. The current CTM only cater for the working memory capacity, in the future research more cognitive traits will be studied and included into the CTM.
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    Visually representative web history browser : a thesis submitted to the College of Creative Arts, Massey University, New Zealand, as fulfilment for the degree Master of Design
    (Massey University, 2007) Hodgkinson, Gray
    The familiar computer graphic user interface (GUI) makes extensive use of visually representative devices such as folders and files. These symbols help the user deal with computer data and operations that otherwise have little or no physical form. The computer’s underlying complexity is symbolised for the user, who is then able to manipulate the computer by interacting directly with the interface. The early development of computer interface design was largely the domain of software and hardware developers. Many sound principles of user interaction and testing were established and provided essential guidance for new generations of interface designers. As computer technology and its tools became more widely available, a broader range of designers began contributing, including those from product design and visual communication. This study is written from the point of view of a “visual designer” – a designer who began his career in graphic design and who has moved towards interface design out of curiosity and a desire to proffer a different attitude and approach to interface issues. The study therefore will demonstrate a design process that many visual designers will be able to identify with. The process includes research, analysis, methodical progression and artistic inspiration. The artistic inspiration in this case comes from the Constructivist artist El Lissitzky, and will illustrate the significant contribution that art can make to interface design. This art-influenced design process was presented at the 2005 Ed-Media World Conference on Educational Multimedia, (Montreal, 2005). The enthusiastic response and discussion provided encouragement to continue in this direction. In the following year another presentation, which included the working prototype, was presented as part of a keynote speaker presentation at the 2006 Siggraph Taipei Conference, National Chiao Tung University, Taipei. The specific task chosen to work with in this study is that of Web browser history. As a user browses the Web the computer records a list of visited websites. The first few generations of browsers presented this information as a simple list, but this approach incorporated many flaws and caused problems for users. More recent browsers provide more options, but significant issues remain. This study offers solutions to several of these problems. The resulting design prototype is named “isoBrowser”. It is the result of the alternative design process outlined above and offers alternative methods of visualising, organising and manipulating data. The prototype is not intended to be fully functional nor “live”. However, it is sufficiently operable so as to test interface interaction and user response. A fully functional version, operably and aesthetically complete, would be the subject of further development.