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This paper provides a critical review to analyze the promises and important challenges of studying flow, a psychological state, in the computer-mediated environments (CME). Despite the strong interest in IS, HCI, Marketing, Education, and other research disciplines over more than a decade, adapting the phenomenon of flow to computer users shows high inconsistencies and discrepancies in the literature. In addition, few studies attempt to provide a coherent picture of the area. Based on a careful examination of the literature, we identify both conceptual and methodological challenges faced when studying flow in CME. Although not all challenges are resolved, we point out directions and possible solutions for some challenges and call for more studies in this promising area. The paper further discusses implications for research in human computing behavior in general and in flow in particular. It cautions researchers to examine hidden assumptions of theories in other disciplines before applying them to address IT related issues and concerns.

Personal Information Management (PIM) research has primarily focused on how users manage information items that are in their local collection, under their control. This investigation will broadly study PIM, additionally looking at items that users decide not to acquire, and seeks to identify factors that influence the leaving, acquiring, and retaining behavior. A theoretical framework developed for the study introduces the hoarding literature into the Personal Information Management (PIM) domain. The study uses a multiple-embedded case study design to naturalistically study students' PIM within the context of a college course. BackgroundTechnical advances in devices and tools make the personal retention of information items much easier and data storage less expensive. Nonetheless, the cost of keeping information does not decrease at the same rate; kept information demands time and potentially distracts users' attention from more worthy information (Jones, 2005).Few studies have investigated the underlying motivation of why users decide to keep information in a personal collection given how cognitively taxing it is (Lansdale, 1988) and that an immediate benefit is not always evident (Cole, 1982). In their Keeping Found Things Found research, Bruce, Jones and Dumais (2004a) uncovered that in some cases, particularly with websites, users prefer not to take any action to help them re-find a useful resource. These users merely "leave" the resource where it is, and expect it will be easily located later if needed. Bruce (2005) includes such items that a user decides "to leave in situ ('leaving')" in his definition a personal information collection.The Personal Information Management (PIM) research stream investigates "the activities a person performs in order to acquire or create, store, organize, maintain, retrieve, use and distribute the information needed to meet life's many goals (Jones, 2008)." PIM empirical studies have primarily focused on how people manage their information: how users develop keeping structures (e.g

We have developed MetaExtract, a system to automatically assign Dublin Core + GEM metadata using extraction techniques from our natural language processing research. MetaExtract is comprised of three distinct processes: eQuery and HTML-based Extraction modules and a Keyword Generator module. We conducted a Web-based survey to have users evaluate each metadata element's quality. Only two of the elements, Title and Keyword, were shown to be significantly different, with the manual quality slightly higher. The remaining elements for which we had enough data to test were shown not to be significantly

Many of the existing metadata standards use content metadata elements that are coarse-grained representations of learning resources. These metadata standards limit users' access to learning objects that may be at the component level. The authors discuss the need for component level access to learning resources and provide a conceptual framework of the knowledge representation of learning objects that would enable such access.