In this paper we continue our previous research on ICT skills in the higher education student population. We focus on several students’ perceived ICT skills, general computer use patterns, and ...perceived computer self-efficacy. The approach taken is different from the mainstream computer literacy research in not focusing on ‘Office-based’ skills, but rather on lower-level operational skills that are often taken for granted in a the higher education curriculum. On the moment of writing, our sample holds 195 students at bachelor and master level. We scored 6 dimensions within global ICT skills: File Management, Security, Technical Issues, Legal Issues, Internet and Awareness and compared this to computer self-efficacy levels. We investigated the existence of gender effects, bachelor-master effects, the impact of the chosen study subject and computer use. The results show that students in the sample rate their own ICT skills quite high, apart from the dimensions legal and technical issues. We also found that specific computer use profiles, such as identifying oneself as a 'blogger', renders good self-efficacy predictions. While the gender and study subject effects are limited, significant differences between master and bachelor students have been revealed. The findings form a basis for the continued improvement of the higher education ICT curriculum and future research.
In a process-enabled service oriented architecture, a process engine typically stores the state of the process instances during enactment. As an alternative, stateless process enactment entails that ...process state is derived from the state of business objects, which are organized in a domain model. The business objects are referred to in pre- and post-conditions of activities, which determine when the activity is enabled and completed, respectively. Despite the fact that the latter approach has multiple benefits compared with the former, the repeated state (re)calculations deteriorate performance and the formulation of clear conditions is not self-evident if typical domain modeling techniques (e.g. UML or ER) are adopted. In this paper we show that by adopting a specific domain modeling technique, which is based on the notion of existence dependency between the business objects, the performance and comprehensibility issues can proficiently be dealt with. We illustrate the technique using a real-world case from the insurance domain and analyze the emerging duality between process modeling and domain modeling.
This paper focuses on the evaluation and positioning of a new generation of development tools containing subtools (report generators, browsers, debuggers, GUI-builders, ...) and programming languages ...that are designed to work together and have a common graphical user interface and are therefore called environments. Several trends in IT have led to a pluriform range of developments tools that can be classified in numerous categories. Examples are: object-oriented tools, GUI-tools, upper- and lower CASE-tools, client/server tools and 4GL environments. This classification does not sufficiently cover the tools subject in this paper for the simple reason that only one criterion is used to distinguish them. Modern visual development environments often fit in several categories because to a certain extent, several criteria can be applied to evaluate them. In this study, we will offer a broad classification scheme with which tools can be positioned and which can be refined through further research.
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