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The purpose of this paper is to examine how pregnant women with type 1 diabetes integrate new information technology (IT) into their health management activities, using activity theory as an analytical framework.

The research is a multiple case design, based on interviews with 15 women with type 1 diabetes who were pregnant, considering pregnancy, or had recently given birth. A thematic analysis, sensitised by activity theory, was used to analyse the data.

Health management in this setting involves negotiations and contradictions across boundaries of interacting activities. Participants play an active role in managing their health and using new IT tools in particular ways to support their health management. Using new technologies creates both opportunities and challenges. IT-enabled healthcare devices and other information systems open up new treatment possibilities, but also generate new contradictions between interacting activity systems.

The research was conducted with a small sample in a specific context of health management. Further research is needed to extend the findings to other contexts.

Healthcare providers need to accommodate a bottom-up approach to the adoption and use of new technologies in settings where empowered patients play an active role in managing their health.

The findings highlight opportunities to further develop activity theory to accommodate the central role that individuals play in resolving inherent contradictions and achieving alignment between multiple interacting activity systems when incorporating new IT tools into health management activities.

The growing use of internet-based learning (IBL) platforms in institutions of higher education is producing profound changes in the traditional teaching learning process worldwide. This paper aims to identify and understand the ways in which higher education institutions draw benefits by the use of such means, synthesizing the literature research.

The study synthesized the literature research by using a mixed method approach in which both Web of Science (WoS) and bibliographic techniques were used to retrieve the relevant data base.

The comprehensive review of the literature suggests that communication technology (CT), massive open online courseware (MOOCs), social networking sites (SNSs), blogs, real simple syndication (RSS) and YouTube are creating new possibilities and avenues of collaborative learning by transforming the traditional class and teacher-centric system.

Multiplicity of the IBL platforms and rapid technological obsolesce are some of the limitations of this paper.

The findings of this study are highly useful in developing a strategic framework to accelerate the integration of IBL platforms to make teaching learning process more interactive and informative.

Mobile technologies, such as QR codes, play a particularly important role in scaffolding the child user’s active learning in informal environments. The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of QR code scanning on two informal learning outcomes: increased interest and greater knowledge understanding.

In total, 91 children and their families participated in the study as part of the iQ Zoo Project. Children in both the smartphone group and the control group completed were assessed qualitatively and quantitatively before and then after their zoo visits.

Qualitative findings suggest that most children’s interest in learning about animals was sustained as a result of the experience. Quantitative results reveal that QR code scanning was effective in promoting knowledge gains, especially on subjects that are challenging for the informal learner. Findings were comparable across the younger (5–8) and older (9–12) age groups.

This study provides empirical support for the value and usefulness of mobile technologies such as QR code scanning for children's learning in informal environments.

This study introduces Social Contribution Value per Share (SCVPS), an indicator devised by the Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE), as an easy-to-interpret Measurement of Corporate Social Performance (MCSP) to the international research arena. The authors first explore the informativeness role of voluntary disclosure of SCVPS in the stock market. The authors then go one step further to demonstrate the relationship between corporate value creation quantified by SCVPS and firm value.

The study takes a new perspective – a quasi-natural experiment of SCVPS disclosure in 2008 and uses a Propensity Score Matched Difference in Difference model (PSM-DiD) to investigate the impact of SCVPS disclosure policy on stock price synchronization and firm value. Through manually recalculating all the values of SCVPS and its components, this study enables us to further investigate the relationship between corporate value creation for various stakeholders and firm value.

This study reveals that voluntary disclosure of SCVPS can signal firm-specific information to the market and reduce noise in returns, thus affecting stock price synchronization. The findings further demonstrate that such firm-specific information has value relevance to firm performance. Moreover, the authors demonstrate that corporate value creation for different stakeholders measured by SCVPS can significantly affect firm value. The moderating effects of ownership structures and industry types are also investigated, and an endogeneity test confirms the robustness of the findings.

This study argues that SCVPS offers an economically viable way for firms, including small-and-medium-sized enterprises, in emerging economies to disclose corporate value creation and provide the public with a direct understanding and appreciation of the values created by corporations for stakeholders.

The result makes contributions to the MCSP literature and explores the informativeness of SCVPS disclosure. Besides, this paper demonstrates that SCVPS offers a good setting to explore the effect of corporate value creation on firm performance in an emerging market.