South African Computer Journal - latest Issue

The flow of papers is back to normal after disruptions from student protests in 2016, which took a while to clear the system. This time, I would like to reflect on author guidelines and writing a paper that can be sent out for review since some authors apparently do not check our requirements before submission and others appear to lack experience of what makes a paper publishable. I would also like to note that the concept of extended conference papers is still a work in progress. While we have had some success publishing extended papers out of the annual SAICSIT conference run by our own society, even this has not always eventuated as it requires a guest editor or editors willing to push things along. We have previously worked with Nicky Mostert-Phipps on extended papers out of a health informatics conference, HISA, and in 2017 tried a new approach, inviting authors to submit a journal-quality paper up front, with the option for those not able to do so to make a regular conference submission. The general idea is to allow those who have a paper of journal quality to present at a conference without an additional step to publish in a journal. This approach still needs work; only one of those submissions so far has made it through review (it appears in this issue).

Some institutions provide online courses to students to ease the courses’ workload. Online courses can also be convenient because the online course content management software conducts marking of tests and examinations. However, a few students could be willing to exploit such a system’s weaknesses in a bid to cheat in online examinations because invigilators are absent. Proactive measures are needed and measures have to be implemented in order to thwart unacceptable behaviour in situations where there is little control of students’ conduct. Digital Forensic Readiness (DFR) employs a proactive approach for an organisation to be forensically prepared for situations where there is little control over people. This can be achieved by gathering, storing and handling incident response data, with the aim of reducing the time and cost that would otherwise be spent in a post-event response process. The problem this paper addresses is that, at the time of writing this paper, there existed no known DFR architecture that can be used to collect relevant information for DFR purposes, specifically in the course of an online examination, as described in the standard published by the International Standards Organisation (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) (ISO/IEC 27043:2015) for incident investigation principles and processes. Due to the lack of DFR architecture, the authors propose an Online Examination Digital Forensic Readiness Architecture (OEDFRA) that can be used to achieve DFR when online examinations are conducted. This architecture employs already existing DFR techniques, discussed in the study, to help educational institutions achieve DFR in online examinations. This architecture, (OEDFRA), when implemented, will be tested in future research in order to confirm its contribution to the field of DFR.

The goal of this research is to develop an integrative modelling technique that is easy enough to be used by most business users with little training, but robust and structured enough to be used in subsequent Information Systems Development (ISD) modelling. This technique attempts to bridge the current gap between modelling on a business level and modelling on a technical level. The overall research methodology is design science research, embedding a grounded approach, to develop an integrative modelling technique. The resultant artefact is applied to a case study to test its applicability and suitability, and the results are evaluated. The results show that the proposed integrative modelling technique that is based on a better understanding of the fundamental entities in business and ISD modelling and their properties, attributes and relationships, can be used as a method to model business situations easily and expressively. By overcoming the divide between business and ISD modelling, the technique also advances informal, mostly textual, business modelling. The paper makes a methodological contribution by establishing a new technique that integrates business analysis with ISD, as well as demonstrating how a single case study could serve as an exemplar of a theory

Usability of software is a crucial aspect of successful applications and could give one application a competitive edge over another. Eye tracking is a popular approach to usability evaluation, but is time consuming and requires expert analysis. This paper proposes a semi-automated process for identifying usability problems in applications with a task-based focus, such as business applications, without the need for expert analysis. The approach is demonstrated on the eye tracking data from a mobile procurement application involving 33 participants. With the recent inclusion of built-in eye tracking hardware in mobile devices, the proposed approach introduces the possibility of conducting remote, large-scale usability studies for improving user experience in mobile applications.

The growing prevalence of continuous media use among university students in lecture environments has potential for detrimental effects. In this study we investigate the relationships between in-lecture media use and academic performance. Previous studies have shown that students frequently engage with digital media whilst in university lectures. Moreover, multitasking imposes cognitive costs detrimental to learning and task execution. We propose, accordingly, that the constant distractions created by digital media, interrupt the thought and communication processes of students during lectures and, subsequently, obstruct their ability to learn. To test this proposition we conducted a survey-based empirical investigation of digital media use and academic performance among undergraduate university students. A significant negative correlation was found between the number of in-lecture media use instances and academic performance. Furthermore, this effect was found to be pervasive independent of individual demographic factors and the intention with which a medium was used.

South Africa is an ideal test bed for ICT4D research, since on the one hand it has stark development challenges, and on the other hand it has well established ICT infrastructure that could be utilised towards socio-economic development. Not surprisingly, a plethora of ICT4D projects are executed in South Africa by a variety of roleplayers. This paper focuses on how effective South African researchers are in converting ICT4D research activity into significant research outputs. Since effective research is assessed by journal publications, a review was done of papers published by South African authors in the prominent international ICT4D journals. It is found that while South Africa has a prominent presence in ICT4D journals, this prominence is concentrated in one research institution and one ICT4D journal. A surprising finding is that cooperation among research institutions that leads to co-authored publications is very low, even among neighbouring institutions. Future research is suggested to investigate the good practices of the most prolific research institution, to investigate reasons for the low cooperation between institutions and to more thoroughly investigate the research contributions made by the South African authors.

The value proposition of full-scale teledermatology is evidenced in the literature. The public health sector of South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province began synchronous teledermatology in 2003, followed by spontaneous asynchronous (mobile) teledermatology in 2013. No scale-up has been formally planned. This paper establishes design requirements that will inform the identification or de novo development of a teledermatology scale-up framework. Methods: A requirements definition process with inductive reasoning approaches was applied. Analysis of semistructured interviews (19) with key teledermatology stakeholders (17) and observations from two teledermatology programmes, informed by lessons learned from prior teledermatology implementation attempts, eHealth scale-up literature and authors’ expert opinion, led to identification of themes, and iterative reflection gave rise to categories and requirements. Results: Teledermatology scale-up framework design requirements emerged comprised of themes (4), categories (12), and specific design requirements (30). Discussion: This paper describes a process and resulting evidence-based (stakeholder interviews; programme observations; literature) and experience-based (expert opinion) design requirements to inform the identification and adoption / adaptation or de novo development of a Teledermatology Scale-up Framework (TDSF) for KwaZulu- Natal’s public health sector. The proposed approach is recommended as a pre-requisite for scaling, including in other settings and for other telehealth applications.

Half a century after the emergence of computer science (a.k.a. informatics) as an academic discipline, the notion of ‘computation’ is not yet ‘settled’. On the contrary: recent developments in the natural sciences, in mathematics, as well as in computer hardware engineering have also ‘shaken’ the belief in the sufficiency of the ‘classical’ notion of ‘computation’ from the tradition of the Church-Turing-Hypothesis.