Florence Mwagwabi

The role of information systems (IS) in sustainability has increased, and so has the demand for sustainability skills and competencies as organisations and people pursue sustainable ways of operating and living for the planet, the plants, the people, and the profit. Educational institutions are critical in enabling sustainable development as they provide learning environments for sustainability education (SE). Universities worldwide are integrating SE into curricula to enable learners to develop essential sustainability competencies for various industries.

The IS curricula need a clear agenda for integrating SE to develop the essential skills and competencies for sustainable design and use of IS. Yet, the IS discipline lays the foundation for rethinking diverse information technologies (IT) in organisations and the everyday lives of individuals and groups.

We propose a critical investigation of how IS academics integrate SE into the current IS curricula. The study will reveal how the integrations are mapped to the Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs), the economic, social and governance (ESG) framework, and the external curricular bodies such as the Australian Computer Society (ACS) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The investigation will reveal the targeted sustainability competencies essential for IS practice. The anticipated outcomes are intended to guide the integration of SE in IS curricula in universities and develop critical sustainability competencies for enduring IS practice.

Drawing on lessons learned from research prior to COVID-19 and our study since the onset of the pandemic in 2020, we discuss insights into how older adults have adjusted to living in technologically advanced societies like Singapore. In this seminar we share lessons learned from our research, interviews with older adults as well as our experience training older adults how to use technology. We discuss key factors that influence use of ICT and new media in older adults and the role these factors play in providing better opportunity for life-long learning and quality of life. Recognizing the diverse social contexts of older adults’ use of technology, their interests and motivations, we share why some older adults use or do not use available ICT and new media apps to engage in learning and leisure activities. The session will conclude with guidelines on how to strengthen media literacy skills (such as tackling online misinformation), and how to better design, customize, and encourage older adults’ online learning and improve training experiences for them.

Our proposed study seeks to investigate how technology can improve quality of life in older people. In particular, we aim to advance our understanding of the role ICT and new media-related leisure activities such as social networking, mental games and language learning apps play as a source of meaning and well-being in older people. In doing so, we seek to identify key characteristics of the ICT and new media-related leisure activities that provide a source of wellbeing to older people, and the social norms and attitudes that motivate them to adopt and domesticate these technologies. We address three key questions. First, what kinds of leisure activities older people consider more desirable than others, and what make these leisure activities desirable. Second, we explore how social norms, technology attitudes and dispositions encourage or discourage older Asians’ to participate in the identified leisure activities. Third, we seek to identify individual characteristics beyond social norms, technology attitudes and dispositions, that differentiate elderly ICT and new media users and non-users, and how non-users can be motivated to adopt ICT and new media related leisure activities in their pursuit for well-being. A mixed method, longitudinal approach is proposed: (a) a survey to determine attitudes, norms, and other salient variables, (b) focus groups and (c) interviews of older people over the age of 55, in Asia. This will allow us to investigate the long-term effects of ICT and new media leisure activities on well-being and the extent of their adoption in their domestic life.

We examined factors that inspire teenagers to comply with cyber security guidelines. We used protection motivation theory (PMT), and extended the model to include personal norms and normative beliefs. For teenage computer users, believing they are susceptible to hacking or that the consequences of being hacked would be severe, had no bearing on their password choices. This is an interesting finding highlighting a potential difference between adults and teenagers. We found personal norms is a better predictor of teenagers’ security behaviour than PMT’s threat perceptions. This is an important finding which opens new avenues for future research, particularly in explaining teenagers’ security behaviour. This study contributes to finding ways to improve security practices at an early age. To the best of our knowledge this is the first password security study that applies PMT to examine security behaviours in teenagers.

Passwords have long been the preferred method of user authentication, yet poor password practices cause security issues. The study described in this paper investigates how user perceptions of passwords and security threats affect intended compliance with guidelines and explores how these perceptions might be altered in order to improve compliance. It tests a research model based on protection motivation theory [24]. Two groups of internet users were surveyed, one of which received password security information and an exercise to reinforce it. This study suggests effective ways that trainers or employers can improve compliance with password guidelines. In particular, training programs should aim to enhance IS security coping appraisal. The research model proposed in this study has also been shown to be a useful model for explaining IS security behavioral intentions.