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GSS technology, extensively applied in decision-making contexts, is now seeing increased application in the educational sector. Previous work has suggested that GSS applications can have significant positive effects on both the process and outcome of collaborative learning. This study extends this work to examine the importance of content and process facilitation in GSS-supported collaborative learning. Our results indicate that content facilitation has no significant bearing on student learning. Process facilitation is more influential, with knowledge acquisition by students requiring a less restrictive environment.

While research findings regarding learning are somewhat mixed, early indications are encouraging and suggest sociocultural learning is useful in improving student learning under certain situations. It is suggested that future research efforts may be enhanced by more closely linking research to theory, building on the research from the field of education, and developing appropriate instruments to measure learning. The paper includes a summary of methodological issues as well as empirical findings. The purpose is to assess sociocultural learning from positivist and interpretivist perspectives and to identify issues that researchers may wish to address when designing future research projects. The research and theory presented in the paper serve as a catalyst for future exploration of electronic collaboration related to student learning and educational reform.

Why should a conference on information systems and technology feature a track on IT in developing countries (ITDC)? The developing world, where more than 80% of the world's population live, currently owns a mere 4% of the world's computers. Moreover, more than half of humanity has never made a telephone call. Thus, a wide variety of implementation issues exist that are different from those experienced by more developed countries.In developing countries, an information famine of sizeable proportions exists, yet this is seldom recognized in developed countries. Although the information overloading of the digital age brings its own set of problems, it sits in stark contrast to the emaciated state of the information resources available to most of mankind. The IS profession often claims that the discipline is global in nature, but for this to be true, the importance of addressing the issues connected with ITDC must be recognized, while researchers and practitioners from the developing world need to play a more significant role in the IS mainstream.Increasingly, awareness is growing among IS professionals, and others, of the disparities in information access. The UN is greatly concerned about the imbalance in access to communication facilities, expressing its "profound concern" at the "deepening mal-distribution of access, resources and opportunities in the information and communication field". Following its beginning at HICSS-31, interest in IT in Developing Countries surged at HICSS-32. The numbers of papers submitted to HICSS-33 is slightly down and a recurring problem of finance has emerged.Although we originally accepted six papers for this minitrack, three have had to withdraw very late in the day due to a lack of funds. Academics and practitioners in developing countries are seldom able to receive the very considerable funds required for a flight to Hawaii, quite apart from conference fees and hotel bills. To pay for this out of their own pockets would represent several months salary. This unfortunate situation means that the appropriateness of running a minitrack on IT in Developing Countries in venues like Hawaii must be scrutinized carefully.

Over the course of the last decade, the role played by collaborative technology applications has become increasingly important. The range of contexts in which these applications have been used includes (inter)-organisational communication and decision making, through distributed software inspections, to virtual education initiatives. The applications themselves include various forms of groupware technology such as group (decision) support systems, electronic mail, shared calendaring applications, document management systems, video and audio conferencing, and the like. Much of the technology has been developed within the cultural milieu of North America, and to a lesser extent Western Europe and Australasia. This is evidently important, since the technology has been imbued with the values present in these cultures, and consequently the technologies themselves may be culturally attuned to the needs and preferences of workers in these contexts. Nevertheless, the application domain is geographically and culturally much broader. Thus, not only do we see distributed groups within a single country, but also groups with members from many different countries. The application contexts thus span both time zones and cultures, involving considerable adaptation, interpretation and structuration of the technology to fit local norms and behaviours. In the future, we believe that these distributed applications of the technology will become increasingly prevalent as the globalisation of work intensifies and receives increased attention. We are delighted to present two papers in this minitrack which address some of the key issues in the Global Application of Collaborative Technology from a variety of perspectives. In our first paper, Suprateek Sarker and Sundeep Sahay consider IS development as conducted by USNorwegian virtual teams. They employ an ethnographic approach to focus on the communication patterns of the individual team members and identify some critical inhibitors of successful collaboration. In the second paper, V. Ramesh and Alan Dennis write about global software development using cases from three Indian multinational technology firms. Given the specific characteristics of the ways in which their teams developed, they suggest that these teams should be re-characterised as object oriented teams. Such teams strive to de-couple team members through the use of well-defined processes and semantically rich media. These media added meaning to the information by clarifying, extending, and constraining the information itself, and enriching it by collecting statistics, and providing the ability to filter and view the information in other forms.

In information systems (IS), the ethical conduct of research may be something which we take for granted, or perhaps simply ignore. Given the seriousness of ethical dilemmas that can arise, however; it is important to pay attention to ethical issues. A personal perspective is given on the nature of ethics in information systems research. The philosophical theories of teleology and deontology are reviewed and then applied in the IS context. Three fictitious scenarios are employed to illustrate the existence of ethical issues in IS research and suggestions are made for improving the quality of IS research from an ethical perspective.

Information systems (ISs) are implemented within a social context made up of economic, political, cultural and behavioural factors which differ greatly between societies. Failure to account for such differences can inhibit information technology (IT) adoption. The social contexts of developing countries differ from each other and from those of developed nations. To illustrate some of the behavioural differences between developing societies which contribute to the social context of IS implementations, this study examined the computer anxiety and involvement with personal computers (PCs) of six groups of computer-using students from China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, New Zealand, Tanzania and Thailand. Differences were found to exist between the computer anxiety of some of the groups but they were probably attributable to demographic factors. Differences were found to exist between the PC involvement of some of the groups which could be attributed to ethnic factors. Implications for research and practice are drawn.