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"This book brings together research from practitioners on the development, use, and importance of information technology in order to achieve organizational performance"--Provided by publisher

"This book is an authoritative reference source for the latest academic research on the implementation of various technological tools for increased organizational productivity and management, highlighting relevant case studies, empirical analyses, and critical business strategies"--

The nation's social agenda for improving education and training has converged with national economic forces (Hornbeck & Salamon, 1991). The emphasis on lifelong learning of the workforce through education, training and development, demands for ever-improving productivity and significant technological advancements have required new tools to deliver education and training at a distance when and where it is requiredneeded. With the emergence of online learning, organizations have reaped the rewards of a well-educated and trained workforce. Yet, in surveys, educators reported that strategic planning was not being conducted for online learning programs (Berge & Muilenburg, 2001; McNickle & Cameron, 2003), and what planning that was done was deficient in areas such as policy (U. S. General Accounting Office, 2003) and organizational culture (European Union, 2003). Sawyer (2005) found that the leaders and managers of online learning programs (from from the academic community, business and industry, the non-profit sector and government) needed hhelp developing and executing strategic plans for their programs, people and systemsave ha. When evaluating whether to move content to (or develop content for) an e-Learning program, deciding to purchase tools and/or content, internally designing a new distributed learning system, or beginning to plan for the future, Sawyer (2005) found that the state of the research at that time left the decision maker(s) to make critical choices based on their skill (and/or desire) to assemble and analyze the necessary information that would lead to relevant considerations being taken into account. One large area where the hleaders and managers of online learning programs needed help developing and executing strategic plans for their programs was that they needed a single source that could be located and leveraged to gain an insight into online learning's goals, benefits or problems to use as a decision aid or analysis tool. Until now, a comprehensive list did not exist. Sawyer's 2005 study was designed to present a comprehensive list of online learning's goals, benefits and problems that could be applied as a decision aid/analysis tool to aid in strategic planning. This paper presents some of the key findings from this exploratory study which used the emergent, inductive approach of content analysis to conduct a cross case analysis of 607 research reports published over a two year period to establish the existence and frequency of the dependent variables goals, benefits and problems. This analysis resulted in the identification of 61 goals that have been set for online learning programs, 131 benefits that have been documented, and 371 problems that have been encountered. Conceptual and relational analysis were concurrently applied to identify key concepts and their semantic relationships which resulted in the development of a concept map that, when combined with the content analysis, led to the identification of seven recommended online learning communities, as well as a consolidated planning and decision aid to help decision-makers in their strategic planning effort.

International audience ; To mark 50 years of research on social representations (SR), we planned both a special issue and a conference to bring together some of the most significant papers from the last 50 years. We are delighted to present the main trends of this special issue in this editorial, and are also extremely happy with the level of thought and debate it has produced. In launching the call for the special issue, rather than reduce this celebration of the 50 years of SR to an obsessive trend towards bibliometrics and impact factors, we felt it would be more informative and thought-provoking to have a collection of papers nominated by those who use them-researchers, teachers, peers, students-as the most debated, insightful, illustrative or valuable for them in their research and teaching. This issue brings together the best of these commentaries, together with the original papers chosen in those commentaries as the most significant and, in some cases, further commentary from the original authors. Hence a defining feature of this special issue was dialogue-dialogue not only between older and newer texts and protagonists in SR, but also between teachers and students, and between researchers with different perspectives, working in different contexts with different methods and politics of research and with different intervention needs and different goals for the future

International audience ; To mark 50 years of research on social representations (SR), we planned both a special issue and a conference to bring together some of the most significant papers from the last 50 years. We are delighted to present the main trends of this special issue in this editorial, and are also extremely happy with the level of thought and debate it has produced. In launching the call for the special issue, rather than reduce this celebration of the 50 years of SR to an obsessive trend towards bibliometrics and impact factors, we felt it would be more informative and thought-provoking to have a collection of papers nominated by those who use them-researchers, teachers, peers, students-as the most debated, insightful, illustrative or valuable for them in their research and teaching. This issue brings together the best of these commentaries, together with the original papers chosen in those commentaries as the most significant and, in some cases, further commentary from the original authors. Hence a defining feature of this special issue was dialogue-dialogue not only between older and newer texts and protagonists in SR, but also between teachers and students, and between researchers with different perspectives, working in different contexts with different methods and politics of research and with different intervention needs and different goals for the future

International audience ; To mark 50 years of research on social representations (SR), we planned both a special issue and a conference to bring together some of the most significant papers from the last 50 years. We are delighted to present the main trends of this special issue in this editorial, and are also extremely happy with the level of thought and debate it has produced. In launching the call for the special issue, rather than reduce this celebration of the 50 years of SR to an obsessive trend towards bibliometrics and impact factors, we felt it would be more informative and thought-provoking to have a collection of papers nominated by those who use them-researchers, teachers, peers, students-as the most debated, insightful, illustrative or valuable for them in their research and teaching. This issue brings together the best of these commentaries, together with the original papers chosen in those commentaries as the most significant and, in some cases, further commentary from the original authors. Hence a defining feature of this special issue was dialogue-dialogue not only between older and newer texts and protagonists in SR, but also between teachers and students, and between researchers with different perspectives, working in different contexts with different methods and politics of research and with different intervention needs and different goals for the future

This interdisciplinary quantitative study examines how a text mining technique that is widely used to understand financial market forecasts could also help in understanding North Atlantic Tropical Cyclone (TC) forecasts. TCs are a destructive circulation of thunderstorms over a surface low-pressure center. The C4.5 decision tree algorithm has been used successfully to aid in the understanding of financial market forecasts with accuracy rates greater than 55%. This study has examined the use of the C4.5 decision tree algorithm on a 15-year period of the National Hurricane Centers five-day TC forecasts to see if the algorithm could provide a statistically significant value to improving the overall TC forecast accuracy. Improvements in the overall TC forecast accuracy can aid in providing those impacted by a TC adequate early, relevant, and lifesaving TC watches and warnings. This study has helped identify key weather pattern components that have significant information gain, which can help both researchers and practitioners prioritize projects that could help improve TC forecasts.