Evaluating Adoption of Innovations of Mobile Devices and Desktops within Collaborative Environments in a Higher Education Context

Steven Lopes Abrantes1 and Luis Borges Gouveia2

1Polytechnic Institute of Viseu, Viseu, Portugal

2University Fernando Pessoa, Porto, Portugal

Copyright © 2011 Steven Lopes Abrantes and Luis Borges Gouveia. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License unported 3.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This study aims to evaluate if students that use laptops or desktops learn when using Google Groups, involving one hundred and twelve students in a higher education context. The research main goal is to validate which of the students, involved in this study, are in the initial and the majority market of adopters and also classify which of them are more in the flow experience. This study is based on the categories proposed by Roger (1995) for the adoption of innovations, and in the flow experience concept, introduced by Csikszentmihalyi (1975). The main purpose of this study is to establish whether the laptops or desktops users in the initial and the majority market of adopters are in the flow experience when using a set of the available Google applications. At the end of the study, it was possible to conclude that students have experienced the flow state and it had a positive effect on their learning experiences both by students using laptops and those, using desktops. For both desktop and laptop users who belong to the initial market, these have a value slightly lower for the flow experience than the users who belong to the majority market. With this we can say that the users that belong to the majority market learn more when using Google Groups than the users that belong to the initial market.

Keywords: flow experience; innovation adoption; mobile devices; learning
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