The differences of information technology visions between the faculty and students in the engineering laptop institution.

Abstract

The main purpose of this study was to examine the Information Technology Visions of the faculty and the students in the engineering college with atleast five years of history of being a laptop institution.A survey was conducted in the Division of Human Information Sciences at Kanazawa Institute of Technology in Kanazawa,Japan which has been a laptop institution since 1993.Furthermore,the relationship between the Information Technology Vision(henceforth,IT Visions)and computer skills was examined independently at the faculty's level and at the student's level.An original instrument was developed from Delcourt et al.(1994) and Janz(1999) as the basis for the survey.The instrument contained four parts:Part I included questions about demographic information;Part II included questions regarding prior experience in Information Technology;Part III included questions about the IT Vision;Part IV included questions about computer skills.The uniqueness of this instrument was that both the faculty and the students were examined using the same instrument.The participants in the survey were all faculty members in the Division of Human Information Science:24 male professors and 644 students.All 24 professors were selected as the faculty sample.50 students were randomly selected from a completed survey pool with the method of a stratified sampling conforming to the student population radio of 91% male and 9% female.This study was composed of three examinations:The difference of the IT Vision between the faculty sample and the stratified student sample;the relationship between the IT Vision and computer skills in the faculty sample;the relationship between the IT Vision and computer skills in the stratified student sample.Results showed that the IT Vision of the faculty and that of the students were significantly different.The student's IT Vision was higher than the faculty's.Further,the correlation results showed that the faculty's IT Vision was not significantly correlated with their computer skills,while the student's IT Visions was significantly correlated with their computer skills.