Purpose The explosion of social media use such as Facebook among higher education students is deemed to have great potential in widely disseminating environmental sustainability awareness. The paper aims to capture, summarise, synthesise and comment on the role of social media to garner interest of students and staff on environmental sustainability issues. Design/methodology/approach Systematic literature review technique is adopted, and three selected online databases were searched for relevant papers for review. Specific data were extracted from each paper, and the discussion section was based on the developed research questions. Findings Higher education needs to fully leverage the ubiquity of social media to extend how environmental sustainability is viewed by the students and staff. Sustainability practices conducted at the university level such as recycling, reduction of electricity and water consumptions and paper reduction in classroom and used to engage students on environmental matters. For staff, social media can be leveraged as to convey the university policy and assist in their quest to become full-fledged green universities. Research limitations/implications Some of the limitations of this research include the lack of keyword search using synonyms or related terms equivalent to the term “awareness”, lack of forward and backward searches, and the papers were searched until end of 2013 only. Future research needs to take advantage of the current limitations to investigate this topic and be empirically supported by theories using quantitative, qualitative or mixed-method-based research. Future studies could also develop relevant frameworks to propose an effective use of social media for creating environmental sustainability awareness in higher education. Practical implications Propagations of environmental sustainability awareness in higher education would be more effective with the use of social media. Social implications In principle, the increase of environmental awareness level would increase the students’ good behavioural conduct on environmental sustainability. Originality/value While the broad topic of environmental sustainability in higher education is widely discussed, the role of social media in shaping environmental sustainability awareness is still under researched. This situation provides a significant potential for exploration by sustainability researchers to craft their investigation on the effective role of social media in creating environmental awareness in higher education.

Purpose-The purpose of this paper is to investigate the information-seeking behaviour of international students in terms of their information needs and to highlight the role of social media. Design/methodology/approach-In this paper, a systematic literature survey was conducted in order to investigate information-seeking trends among international students while using social media. As a result, an exhaustive systematic literature review (SLR) was carried out in order to investigate social media as a source for the observation of the behaviours of international students. For this purpose, 71 articles were selected from various well-known sources after an intensive SLR process of searching, filtering and enforcing the inclusion and exclusion criteria. Findings-As an outcome of this study, the information-seeking behaviour of international students was highlighted with respect to social media as a source of information. In addition, this research identifies the information needs of the international students and categorizes them by the roles played by the social media in fulfilling the information needs. Practical implications-A comparative study that highlighted the dearth of studies which merge the social media and information-seeking behaviour of international students as well as identify the future direction for the researchers and for benefits of international students. Originality/value-A detail SLR which highlights the need of shifting the information seeking behaviour from libraries to social media in regard to the new environment for international students.

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Advancements in information and communication technology, and online web users have given attention to the virtual representation of each user, which is crucial for effective service personalization. Meeting users need and preferences is an ongoing challenge in service personalization. This issue can be addressed through the building of a comprehensive user profile. A user profile is the summary of the user's interests, characteristics, behaviours, and preferences, while user profiling is the system of collecting, organizing and inferring the user profile information. Many reviews on user profiling have been conducted but none focused on the effective profile modeling process. Hence, this article aims to provide a review of the recent state-of-the-art approach to user profiling. These include methods, description, characteristics, and taxonomy of the user profile. The study of the existing user profiling modeling in the aspect of data acquisition, feature extraction, profiling techniques, and profiling approaches (with the identification of their strengths and weaknesses) and the performance measures are also provided. In addition, the research challenges were also discussed with a focus on privacy, datasets, cold start issues, trust issues, and computational complexity. Moreover, the article identified an open research direction that serves as solutions to the identified challenges and motivation for further researchers in advancing user profiling. The findings showed that an effective modeling process enhances the construction of accurate user profile for service personalization.

Mobile cloud computing (MCC) is a domain that stemmed from advances in mobile technology and cloud computing. Although debate continues about the best strategies to preserve privacy and personal data protection in MCC, it is essential to explore the effects of applying privacy by design (PbD) to preserve privacy and personal data protection in MCC. PbD is a general philosophy that demonstrates privacy should not be overviewed as an afterthought, but rather as a first-class requirement in the design of IT systems. This study explores the effects of applying PbD to preserve privacy and personal data protection in MCC, and is focused on the privacy of personal data. In this exploration, a framework using PbD has been demonstrated, and seven hypotheses were formulated. Moreover, a survey was implemented where 386 responses were used to test the formulated hypotheses. The results of this study supported the perceived benefits, cues to action of PbD, and perceived threat are positively and directly related to privacy and personal data protection behavior in MCC. Moreover, the results supported that the perceived barriers are negatively and directly related to privacy and personal data protection behavior in MCC. Overall, the results support the utilization of PbD to preserve privacy and personal data protection in MCC and encourage the practitioners to utilize PbD to preserve privacy and personal data protection in MCC.