Implications

4.1.1. First study implications

The purpose of the first study is to apply the media choice factors perspective and modify the TAM to explain and predict an individual’s acceptance of the IT on blogs. An online field survey was conducted to empirically examine the proposed model. The results indicate that the blog acceptance was significantly affected by technology acceptance and media choice factors. The media choice factors included media richness, critical mass, social influence, and media experience. These findings provide some contributions to both researchers and practitioners.

For researchers, this study attempts to develop a new theory by grounding new factors in a well-accepted general model (TAM) and applying them in a new context. It is important to note that the four new media choice factors - media richness, critical mass, social influence, and media experience - are placed within the nomological structure of the original model and are compatible with TAM factors. This approach is likely to ensure a consistent model of the drivers of web-based media and stable theory development. Therefore, the proposed model makes an important contribution to the emerging literature on web-based media.

The characteristics of web-based media can affect an individual’s media acceptance behavior, but the strengths of these influences may be different at different stages. The media characteristics (such as media richness) are more important than social influence and experience characteristics at the infant stage. Given the findings of this study, it appears necessary for media researchers to compare the influences of the media choice factors at different stages by conducting a longitudinal study.

Prior studies suggested media choice factors directly influence attitudes or behavioral intentions; however, this study included an mediating factor, namely perceived usefulness.

This study found that media choice factors not only directly affect individuals’ attitude or behavioral intention, but also indirectly affect them through perceived usefulness. User interest in new media results from various different characteristics of the media. However, users may first need to perceive its usefulness or uselessness, before changing their attitude and behavioral intentions. Therefore, future research could further examine direct and indirect influences between media choice factors and individual behavior to reach a deeper understanding of the media acceptance process.

For practitioners, this study also generated some practical implications for blog-hosting service providers and bloggers. First, our study highlights the importance of media richness in blog acceptance. Blogs provide a communication channel for blog posts and readers. A blog with high media richness reduces uncertainty and equivocality between users to effectively increase interactions. Accordingly, bloggers should provide a more rapid response and more diverse information to maintain with high media richness on their blogs, and blog-hosting service providers should build in more communication functions to enable the utilization of richer forms of media. Second, social influence is an important factor in blogging that affects an individual’s acceptance behavior. Therefore, the blog-hosting service providers should strengthen the development of community applications to attract more users. Third, two beliefs, namely perceived usefulness and perceived ease-of-use, have crucial influences on an individual’s acceptance behavior. Blogs allow users to communicate to the largest number of people with the least effort, providing a useful communication environment. Bloggers prepare their blog entries without having to be familiar with special coding and upload the message to their blog by clicking on the “Publish” button. Blog-hosting service providers should be committed to providing a more user friendly and accessible environment to attract more

bloggers.

4.1.2. Second study implications

This second study describes a study involving undergraduate and graduate students, majoring in electronics, from a large university in Taiwan. Of those students, approximately 68% participated in solitary use of blogs as a supplement to traditional classroom lectures, and the remainder in interactive use of blogs that were designed to enhance peer learning experiences. In this study, student feedback was collected to conduct a quantitative survey study. Our main conclusion is that engaging in dialogues in the form of blog comments is associated with positive attitudes towards online peer interaction and academic achievements, and both groups show positive motivation to learn from peers.

The study results reported for student attitudes towards peer interaction, learning motivation, and academic achievements are limited for several reasons. In the future, we will extend our study in five major directions to address some limitations of the current study. First, the learning context was narrowly defined, focusing on learning a technical, procedure-based subject, namely Electronic Commerce and Design of Internet Applications. A plan that includes investigations of blog use in other disciplines such as Business Administration and Women's Studies would be more comprehensive. Second, blogging acted as a supplement to a traditional face-to-face course, both inside and outside of school. The value of the blog for reflective learning and peer support in distance learning settings should be investigated in a separate study. Third, although student attitudes towards peer interaction, learning motivation, and academic achievements have been investigated, in-depth content analysis with more dimensions (such as subjective perceptions of reflection, stances, and tones to contrast the empirical findings) would be interesting. Fourth, the current study was designed to last for two semesters. Our future research will emphasize a longitudinal semester-by-semester study using the same methodology to indicate the overall quality of the learning experience and

outcome. Fifth, this study did not address a general concern about shared learning platforms as plagiarism. The dark side of social learning could be its openness to potential plagiarism under the disguise of peer learning. If this is a serious issue in blogs, what strategies can tackle it? The implication of using blogs to address plagiarism can be complicated and require further research.

The primary data in the study was collected between Autumn 2006 and Spring 2007. Since then, Web 2.0 includes several new applications that enable arbitrary subsets of users to communicate with each other. Such communication increasingly occurs, not just on Facebook, but also on several smaller network applications such as Twitter. While the blog includes a solitary mode, Twitter and Facebook are intrinsically collective and social. Research has found that college students who accessed the Facebook website of a teacher with high self-disclosure anticipated higher levels of motivation and affective learning and a more positive classroom climate (Mazer, Murphy, & Simonds, 2007). Twitter also shows similar potential in the educational context, and can be appropriated for conversational interaction.

Twitter users with similar intentions connect and collaborate with each other while seeking or sharing information (Java, Song, Finin & Tseng, 2007). Our results, combined with the proliferation of social networking software, suggest that future development of educational tools should pay more attention to social networks.