Machdel C Matthee

University of Pretoria | UP · Department of Informatics

Research that employs theory provides a framework and structure in which complex phenomenon, can be understood. While many theories have been developed to study people’s technology usage, the plurality of perspectives offered are complex to navigate due to the diverse range of problems and topics addressed and the varied theoretical foundations use...

Publication on the 2021 Flexible Futures Conference roundtable discussion panelists

Technological disruption enabled by the internet revolution has resulted in an exponential increase in the growth of new technologies and the resultant technology disruptions in the workplace. Disruptive technologies are changing the rules of competition in organisations. Most chief information officers agree that there could be significant value i...

Those advocating for technology integration within education claim that teachers need to reform their pedagogic practices to make learning more engaging and relevant. While educational technology researchers claim teachers are primarily responsible for these failures, it seems teachers do not embrace technology unquestionably. This paper aims to de...

The University of Pretoria presents an introductory computer and information literacy course to large groups of first-year students. This course was born from the pressure that all students should be computer literate and information literate to diminish the digital divide inequalities. The students come from very diverse socio-economic backgrounds...

Numeracy has become a critically important skill in data rich environments. A large number of first-year ICT students entering HEIs in South Africa lack computational thinking and problem-solving skills and consequently they are not prepared for programming. Many of these students are not proficient enough in numeracy to solve programming problems...

The purpose of this study is to systematically examine the existing literature on the teaching approaches and tools used to prepare primary school teachers to integrate computational thinking (CT) in their offering. In addition, the study considers perceptions of teachers towards teaching approaches for CT. Thirty (30) journal articles and conferen...

Schools are often confronted with the complexities of change when implementing hybrid learning. Extant change theories provide a multitude of strategies to deal with change. As many of these strategies approach change in different ways, they often portray conflicting or opposing views. For schools to institutionalize hybrid learning, they require a...

With the widespread dissemination of information via digital media platforms, it is of utmost importance for individuals and societies to be able to judge the credibility of it. Fake news is not a recent concept, but it is a commonly occurring phenomenon in current times. The consequence of fake news can range from being merely annoying to influenc...

The purpose of this study is to systematically examine the existing literature on the teaching approaches and tools used to prepare primary school teachers to integrate computational thinking (CT) in their offering. In addition, the study considers perceptions of teachers towards teaching approaches for CT. Thirty (30) journal articles and conferen...

This research is in the enterprise architecture (EA) research field. EA is a developing discipline that in broad terms emphasizes all aspects of organizational design and development, including enabling information technology. However, there are various interpretations and understandings of EA, with little agreement on them. Therefore, organization...

The continual growth of big data necessitates efficient ways of analysing these large datasets. Data visualisation and visual analytics has been identified as a key tool in big data analysis because they draw on the human visual and cognitive capabilities to analyse data quickly, intuitively and interactively. However, current visualisation tools a...

The prevalence of unverified information on the internet and the associated potential adverse effect on society led to the development of a number of models and theories to assess the credibility of online information. Existing research consists of two diverse approaches: the first consists of checklist approaches or normative guidelines on how to...

This two-volume set constitutes the proceedings of the 19th IFIP WG 6.11 Conference on e-Business, e-Services, and e-Society, I3E 2020, held in Skukuza, South Africa, in April 2020.* The total of 80 full and 7 short papers presented in these volumes were carefully reviewed and selected from 191 submissions. The papers are organized in the following...

This two-volume set constitutes the proceedings of the 19th IFIP WG 6.11 Conference on e-Business, e-Services, and e-Society, I3E 2020, held in Skukuza, South Africa, in April 2020.* The total of 80 full and 7 short papers presented in these volumes were carefully reviewed and selected from 191 submissions. The papers are organized in the following...

Critical thinking and problem solving skills are included in the IS curriculum as foundational skills. IS education researchers recognize the importance of these skills for future IS practitioners given the complexity of the technology based society and economy of the future. However, there is limited work on how these skills are best taught in IS....

There is a move towards a future in which consumers of technology are untethered from the devices and technology use becomes subliminal. With this increasing device opacity, loss of user control and increasing device autonomy, there are calls for more research on users' privacy and freedom of choice. There are, however, key figures in the creation...

Digital disruption is the phenomenon when established businesses succumb to new business models that exploit emerging technologies. Futurists often make dire predictions when discussing the impact of digital disruption, for instance that 40% of the Fortune 500 companies will disappear within the next decade. The digital disruption phenomenon was al...

Globalisation and technology advancements have disrupted the organisational landscape and with the proliferation of new technology; risk management is fundamental to transforming the business especially considering the dynamic nature of the digital society organisations now exist in. However, the challenge faced by the enterprise risk management (E...

E-textbooks are often considered as having several advantages over printed textbooks. However, research shows conflicting results regarding school learners’ satisfaction with e-textbooks. In South Africa a particular e-book platform, EduBook for e-textbooks, is currently used in 170 schools across the country. In this study the satisfaction and con...

Social media play a positive role in the lives of students by providing social networking, communication and information functionalities. However, social media also act as a distraction, resulting in multi-tasking between social media and studying which leaves fragmented time intervals for focused concentration. Self-regulation is emphasized as an...

There is a move towards a future in which consumers of technology are untethered from the devices and technology recedes to the subconscious. One way of achieving this vision is with context-aware technologies, which smartphones exemplify. Key figures in the creation of modern technologies suggest that consumers are fully informed of the implicatio...

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is an emerging field that focuses on the establishment of a conceptual blueprint that describes the structure and operation of an organization. The purpose is to enable the organization to strategically make decisions on the future state of the organization. Enterprise architects play a key role in the establishment of...

This paper presents the first step in exploring the match between IT managers’ expectations of functional creativity within an information system (IS), and the functional creativity of the information systems developed by final-year undergraduate IS students. The Creative Product Assessment Model (CPAM) is used as a means to elicit the expectations...

Parents are recognized as an important group of stakeholders to take into account when implementing technology in schools. However, very little re-search has considered the parent’s view in the learning development of his/her child, when introducing technology. This paper addresses this gap by presenting the findings of an inductive study to improv...

The Internet disruption has resulted in an exponential increase in the growth of new technologies [1] and resultant technology disruptions within the workplace [2]. With the rapid changes in the technology landscape, Chief Information Officers (CIO's) and key decision makers need to learn to maneuver though the plethora of emerging technologies tha...

Discourses, shaped by power and ideology, impact on the knowledge and actions of participants. Advertisements, a genre of discourse, are particularly influential as they are used by powerful groups to embed and perpetuate ideologies. Consumers of CATs are influenced by adverts (inter alia) in their decisions regarding the use of this technology. In...

Open badges, as the new currency of learning, has the potential to motivate learners to participate in granular, evidence-based and portable learning interventions in organisations in support of lifelong learning. However, there is surprisingly little adoption of this new digital recognition scheme in South African corporate training and educationa...

This paper explores the ways in which Facebook is used in the quest for finding missing persons in South Africa. Graphs are used to indicate differentiated roles of the Facebook communities: some communities act mainly as originators of the messages whereas others act more as distributors or end points of the messages. Crowd-sourcing is used as a c...

In this paper the authors report on a socio-technical analysis of the change caused by an e-textbook implementation in a secondary school in South Africa. The Punctuated Socio-Technical Change (PSIC) model was considered because it affirms the socio-technical nature of existing educational research on ICT enabled change, and also extends it by reco...

The development of problem solving skills is a shared goal in science, engineering, mathematics and technology education. In the applied sciences, problems are often open-ended and complex, requiring a multidisciplinary approach as well as new designs. In such cases, problem solving requires not only analytical capabilities, but also creativity and...

This paper reports on an analysis of the change caused by an e-textbook implementation in a school in South Africa. The PSIC model, a change model from ICT enabled change in organisations, was considered because it affirms existing educational research, but also extends it by recognising the episodic nature of change. On a vertical level the model...

The research reported in this paper aims to obtain a better understanding of the factors influencing the adoption of tablet-based e-textbooks by focusing on a pilot project in which e-textbooks loaded onto tablets was used to supplement formal classroom learning in a South African private school. The research adopts Cultural Historical Activity The...

Mobile Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has taken the consumer market by storm and throughout the past two decades it has spilled into the corporate world. Since mobile ICT exists in complex technological, social and organisational environments, mobility deployments mostly remain piecemeal, existing as islands of independent technolog...

Mobile Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has taken the consumer market by storm and throughout the past two decades it has spilled into the corporate world. Since mobile ICT exists in complex technological, social and organisational environments, mobility deployments mostly remain piecemeal, existing as islands of independent technolog...

With numerous enterprise architecture management (EAM) methodologies, frameworks, and tools, there are still no universally excepted standard on what Enterprise Architecture (EA) really means to practicing architects. Traditionally practitioners concentrated on specific aspects of EA, such as tools, repositories, components and frameworks. However,...

Expatriate adjustment research has identified a number of challenges that expatriates experience when adjusting to the host country. These include spousal influence, cultural training/understanding, fluency in the host language and the personality or emotional readiness of the expatriate. These challenges are amplified when considered in the Kingdo...

The mining industry in South Africa contributes significantly to its economy. Training is an important component in these environments and e-Learning is often used to train the large workforce. In the face of current labour unrest and job cuts in this sector, it is foreseen that e-Learning might play an increasing important role to upskill the rema...

This article reports on the influence of an important project of our time, the creation of thinking machines or cyborgs, on the essence of human spirituality. The popular work of Kurzweil was used as a starting point. Kurzweil believes that the cyborgs or man-machine hybrids will not only be a simulation of human cognition but also of consciousness...

This article reports on the influence of an important project of our time, the creation of thinking machines or cyborgs, on the essence of human spirituality. The popular work of Kurzweil was used as a starting point. Kurzweil believes that the cyborgs or man-machine hybrids will not only be a simulation of human cognition but also of consciousness...

Expatriate adjustment research has identified a number of challenges that expatriates experience when adjusting to the host country such as spousal influence, cultural training/understanding, fluency in the host language and personality or emotional readiness of the expatriate need to be accounted for. These challenges are amplified when it is cons...

The subject Information Systems Analysis and Design forms part of a first year's BCom degree at a large urban university in the administrative capital of South Africa. This paper describes the way creativity teaching is included in this course, namely as traditional lecturing supplemented with the use of other media and class exercises in a blended...

E-Learning can be described as instruction that is delivered using computer and communication technology, and its potential to liberate learners from the limitations of other forms of learning is uniformly acknowledged. However, there is surprisingly high resistance to e-Learning in corporate training environments. The purpose of this study is to e...

Expatriate research has indicated that expatriate adjustment is a complex problem given that factors such as the influence of the spouse, cultural training/understanding, fluency in the host language and personality or emotional readiness of the expatriate are key. Considering these challenges in a culturally diverse environment such as Kingdom of...

p>ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) enables organisations to let their business drive their IT strategy, and creates a technology strategy that is aligned with that of the business. SOA is an architectural style that enables the integration of disparate systems, independent of the implementation technology or physical location,...

Ericsson initiated a project called "Connect to Learn? (C2L), where a mobile learning solution focused on introducing creativity and interactivity into the classrooms of South Africa using various mobile technologies and applications, was developed. Ericsson has employed this solution in various schools in and around Johannesburg, South Africa. Thi...

Expatriate research has indicated that expatriates often experience a number of difficulties, which can impact on their successful assimilation in host countries. This failure to adjust can impact on an individual level, for example upheaval of family life, and on organizational level, for example loss of investment in expatriate development upon p...

This paper describes the implementation of a mobile platform for post-training support as part of the Basic Health Information Systems for Data Capturers programme of the National Department of Health in South Africa. Actor-network theory is used to show how the phases of problematisation, interessement, enrolment and mobilisation are negotiated by...

The career choice model of Adya and Kaiser posits the availability of technology resources as a structural element impacting on career choice. The model distinguishes between accessibility at school and at home. Based on this theoretical point of departure and by arguing a link between choice of major and choice of field of career, this paper explo...

The number of student enrolments in computer-related courses remains a serious concern worldwide with far reaching consequences. This paper reports on an extensive survey about career choice and associated motivational factors amongst new students, only some of whom intend to major in computer-related courses, at two South African universities. The...

A language-oriented, multi-dimensional database of the linguistic charactersitics of the Hebrew text of the Old Testament can enable researchers to do ad hoc queries. XML is a suitable technology to transform free text into a database. A clause's word order can be kept intact while other features such as syntactic and semantic functions can be mark...

World wide, a number of far-reaching decisions regarding ways to address the ICT skills shortage are made by both the public and private sectors. These are based on information obtained from various sources and in various ways including quantitative research reports commissioned by government authorities. This paper reports on findings of a systema...

This article provides an alternative view to questions of technological inclusion and exclusion in sub-Saharan Africa via an analysis of the South African governmental discourse on indigenous knowledge systems (IKS). The concept of 'selective exclusion' (SE) is developed in relation to the digital divide, highlighting that technology is not always...

This paper is situated within the context of the challenges related to the processes currently being undertaken in South Africa by the government to stimulate e-Skills capacity. The paper reports on findings of a systematic textual examination of existing ICT skills shortage research reports. Acknowledging the shortcoming of existing e-skills categ...

The paper discusses a series of related techniques that prepare and transform raw linguistic data for advanced processing in order to unveil hidden grammatical patterns. It identifies XML as a suitable mark-up language to build an exploitable data bank of multi-dimensional data in the Hebrew text of the Old Testament. This concept is illustrated by...

This paper investigates the visualization of the mapping of semantic and syntactic functions that were marked up in an XML-database containing linguistic data of the Biblical Hebrew text of Genesis 1:1-2:3. It focuses on two- dimensional topic maps as a graphical data-mining utility. The visual information is used to prompt the reconsideration of s...

This article presents the findings of research that was conducted amongst Enterprise Architecture (EA) practitioners in the South African financial services sector. Due to the duration and cost implications of EA projects, factors that contribute to the success and failure of EA initiatives need to be investigated and identified. The research was l...

Data mining can be viewed as the process of extracting previously unknown information from large databases and utilising this information to make crucial business decisions (Simoudis, 1996: 26). This paper considers the viability of using data mining tools and techniques in sports, particularly with regard to mining the sports match itself. An inte...

Businesses are beginning to realise that knowledge discovery, and data mining in particular, are becoming an essential part of day-today operations. Yet, fundamentally technical and statistical techniques are not usually part of the expertise of the user in a business environment. Techniques that do not rely so heavily on such specialist knowledge...

When a new discipline emerges, it usually takes some time and a great deal of academic discussion before concepts and terms become standardized. Text mining is one such new discipline. In a groundbreaking article, Untangling text data mining, Hearst tackled the problem of clarifying text-mining concepts and terminology. This article, a conceptual s...

When a new discipline emerges it usually takes some time and lots of academic discussion before concepts and terms get standardised. Such a new discipline is text mining. In a groundbreaking paper, Untangling text data mining, Hearst [1999] tackled the problem of clarifying text-mining concepts and terminology. This essay aims to build on Hearst's...

Many developments in the information systems world, such as Knowledge Discovery in Databases (including data warehousing, data mining, and on-line analytical processing) have implications for the way in which businesses will use geographical data. The problem that this paper will focus on is the influence of spatial data and analysis on data mining...

This paper explores the idea of using Mobile Learning Engine (MLE) as a platform for a mobile learning project to form part of the systems architecture course for second year Information Systems undergraduates. We believe that the use of this platform will not only support the learning outcomes of the systems architecture course, but will also resu...

This paper discusses research in progress on the challenges and opportunities for technology enhanced learning; specifically mobile learning in a South African context, where PC penetration is limited but where about three million teenagers have Java enabled cell phones. It provides a brief discussion of the South African landscape with specific re...

This paper investigates the possibility of implementing a program of mentoring students majoring in Information Systems (IS) who have completed their studies at a tertiary institution. The idea is based on the experiences of the authors with students who after completion of their studies, request consultation, direction and general advice from thei...

Knowledge workers, including Biblical Hebrew computational linguists, should look into the possibilities offered by graphical visualisation techniques to allow explorative investigation of available linguistic data, since this may prompt new hypotheses, which may then be examined in more traditional, empirical ways. This article experiments with tw...

Thesis (MSc)-Universiteit van Pretoria,1991.