This study investigates the influence of citizens' socio-economic characteristics on the presence of social media in county-level government. E-government is ostensibly citizen-driven and therefore variation in an area's demographics would likely impact a government's utilization of emerging technology, such as social media. Despite its transformative potential and widespread adoption, e-government development beyond basic stages has been sluggish. Social media is transforming the nature of interaction among individuals and organizations and has the potential to overcome some of the restrictive challenges of e-government. Understanding if, how, and to what end governments are harnessing social media will help make e-government a citizen-driven, democratic, transparent, and trustworthy platform. County governments are challenged by their size, resource scarcity, heterogeneous service area (urban and rural), and varying population density; thereby preventing them from gaining a critical mass of online users. By exploring social media's role in e-government as related to citizen demographic factors, this study reveals an important paradoxical role of social media in government: operational ineffectiveness as a necessary precursor for exception events. Additional results reveal the presence of digital divide - counties with higher median household income and educational qualification tend to have social media presence in their e-government sites, which is also not related to population growth of the counties.
PurposeThis paper aims to address the long-standing problem of suboptimal student team experiences for instructors and students by incorporating the student voice by co-creating a virtual team collaborative environment to improve team collaboration in the online classroom.Design/methodology/approachThis paper presents a novel design science research approach and relates two elaborated action design science research (eADSR) cycles that design, implement and evaluate the student team experience in online courses requiring teamwork.FindingsThe outcome is a holistic view of a virtual team classroom environment specified with technologies and practices that may be employed to optimize the student team experience. The eADSR process yields non-obvious diagnoses and actionable steps for continually incorporating the ever-changing social aspects unique to students in addition to the evolving technological landscape.Practical implicationsThis paper is valuable to faculty members interested in applying eADSR processes to incorporate the student voice to address pedagogical and learning challenges in the classroom. Additionally, it provides a DSR-based model that can be implemented in the classroom to improve student team collaboration as well as transparency for the instructor and the students in terms of team member contributions with the goal to alleviate student and faculty frustrations. This topic is particularly relevant in light of COVID-19 as students and faculty alike are thrust into new online classroom environments.Originality/valueEmploying eADSR in the classroom is a novel and unique approach to create a replicable model for virtual team collaboration that can be added to the classroom.
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