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Top1. Introduction
E-commerce provides the foundation, context and motivation to develop creativity and new opportunities to differentiate products or services from competitors. Due to the diverse dimensions of e-commerce, information systems address e-commerce’s technological requirements, user needs and experiences in view of risks and uncertainty. Betis (2015) and many service providers such as Huawei (Wong, 2015) envision these challenges to be greater in IEEE Smart Cities (SC) and propose to address these challenges by advancing sustainable futures. Such sustainable futures include not only green living, efficiency and community-based services, but also participatory design/citizenship and entrepreneurial innovations.
As participatory design matures into participatory citizenship, Ikeda and Bernstein (2016) hypothesize that crowdsourcing may become a pro-social, long-term sustainable career option for crowd workers. Shaping the future of crowd work would thus require more investigations into human-computer interaction, interaction design, incentives and development of motivation to learn (whether formally or informally), in order to drive meaningful and sustainable outcomes. Such investigations and outcomes would be helpful especially first in the face of advancement in distributed systems resulting in seamless strategic local/global partnerships; second, economic downturn (due to globalization or due to technological convergences, which makes it more important to maintain a progressive economy and contain social ills) and, third, in view of an increasingly aging population. We propose extending the knowledge management-e-learning framework to include incentives, not necessarily financial as Ikeda and Bernstein’s (2016) study has concluded, but what appeals. Based on our prior studies (Lee & Wong, 2015; 2016; 2017), this may involve different degrees or forms of gamification including the curiosity and desire to learn interdisciplinary but relevant knowledge and skills.
The need for such interdisciplinarity is supported by parallels to evolutions in e-commerce, i.e., in e-learning. Figure 1 highlights three paradigm shifts, which supports extensions to elearning3.0, where learning is informal and unstructured. The three paradigm shifts reflect a progression from a consumer-passive orientation to a social-participative-reflective-evidential orientation to a social co-design/co-creation thrust (Greller, 2011). In Figure 1, co-creation is emphasized with looser institutional boundaries and sense of ownership. These paradigm shifts create greater opportunities for knowledge building, deeper purposeful learning, in search of structure and meaning, especially in view of mashable product/service innovation and management.
Figure 1.
Greller’s (2011) Evolutions in eLearning with added constructionism from the Learning Sciences