Investigating the anomalous states of knowledge hypothesis in a real-life problem situation: A study of history and psychology undergraduates seeking information for a course essay.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the determinants of Facebook use among university students in Jordanian universities, and its impact on collaborative learning. The study compares Facebook use between students of social sciences disciplines and students of sciences disciplines. The study used a quantitative research approach. The research instrument used is a questionnaire. The results of the study showed that the relationship between Facebook use and collaborative learning is above average, which means that the more time spent on Facebook, the better academic performance students achieve through collaborative learning. Additionally, the study revealed that Facebook use was posited to affect collaborative learning, though the level of effect varies between social sciences and science disciplines. The study proposes a model that describes the relation between collaborative learning and Facebook use, which bridges a gap in the Arabic context that lacks models showing this type of relationship.

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PurposeThis study investigates the effect of protection motivation theory (PMT) constructs on Arab women's feelings while seeking information during the COVID-19 pandemic.Design/methodology/approachThe study has adopted a mixed-method approach using semi-structured interviews and a questionnaire to explore PMT constructs' impact on women's feelings while seeking information on COVID-19. Several tests, such as standard deviation, mean, skewness, kurtosis and persons, were used to check the reliability of data and inter-relationships between constructs.FindingsThe study results show a significant positive correlation between PMT constructs (perceived vulnerability, perceived severity, response efficacy, self-efficacy and response cost) with the feelings of Arab women during information seeking on COVID-19. However, the relationship between threat appraisal and feelings during information seeking was more substantial than coping appraisal and feelings during information seeking. The researchers hope that this study creates a baseline of cross-cultural studies on PMT constructs' effect on women's feelings while seeking health information.Research limitations/implicationsThe current study was conducted on female participants only. While the study intended to examine Arab women's feelings during information seeking with PMT's application, the results may be affected by other factors that were not considered in the current study. Furthermore, the questionnaire was distributed in three Arab countries, which means that the results cannot be generalized in other geographical contexts. Therefore, similar studies need to be conducted in larger geographical areas as cultural factors may produce different results.Originality/valueThis study explores women's feelings while seeking COVID-19 information using the PMT constructs. As far as we know, this study is the first study to investigate Arab women's feelings while seeking health information during pandemics. PMT utilization is considered a new approach to discover and measure informational needs and feelings associated with it during pandemics.

Purpose This paper aims to use the technology acceptance model 2 (TAM2) to investigate the perceived ease of use, perceived benefits, barriers to use and acceptance of Arab scholars of informal communication tools in research writing. Design/methodology/approach This study adopted a quantitative approach using a questionnaire distributed among Arab scholars in Jordan, Egypt and Oman. The questionnaire based on the TAM2 model aimed to measure the acceptance of the sample of informal scholarly communication tools. Findings The study’s findings confirmed that the sample is considering informal scholarly communication tools are useful for their research. Informal scholarly communication tools increase the papers’ visibility, leading to a higher number of citations, building scholars’ reputation, creating new collaboration opportunities and maintaining the established collaboration. Research limitations/implications The study’s findings can only be generalized on Arab scholars. The sample size could be one of the limitations, and the sample’s distribution was limited to three Arab universities in Jordan, Oman and Egypt. The authors recommend that future researchers use TAM2 model as a framework for studying the adoption of informal scholarly communication tools in different cultural contexts to achieve a better understanding of factors influencing the adoption of such tools. Practical implications A practical implication of this research is in drawing the attention of higher education institutions for the potentials of these scholarly communication tools in increasing the availability of publications of their scholars and increasing the citation of these publications, which would help in increasing the ranking of scholars, and the rank of these institutions which opens new opportunities of international research collaboration. Social implications The outcomes of this research have several implications for the successful adoption of the TAM2 model. This study brings new knowledge to the literature related to informal scholarly communication adoption by the application of TAM2 constructs to determine the adoption behavior; the findings offered evidence of the TAM2 success in predicting adoption of such tools. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, adopting TAM2 in this research will add to knowledge by being one of the first studies to adopt TAM2 to measure acceptance of informal scholarly communication tools.