About

This blog is intended to serve multiple purposes (perhaps that means I will end up with various blogs, but for now all will be combined into one and I hope you bear with me). I guess it would make sense to describe the various audiences in which this blog is intended.

First, this blog is intended as a supplemental tool for the courses that I teach at the University of Central Florida, in the Kenneth G. Dixon School of Accounting. I teach an undergraduate class, ACG2021 Financial Accounting which is the 1st accounting course that students (all business students and many non-business students as well) are required to take. The Financial Accounting and Screencast pages will be used to support this class by providing a place to chronicle the importance of accounting in today’s business environment, and one of the places that students can access the screencasts for the course. I also teach ACG5045, a graduate level Advanced Accounting Information Systems course.

Second, this blog will chronicle by experimentation into the use of various supportive learning technologies all of which I hope will create an engaging learning environment for my students. The technologies to be incorporated will be the use of this Blog (of course), the use of Wiki’s (primarily for my graduate course), concept map software (C-maps) , and more experimental technologies: Twitter (a constant contact media, Web2.0), and Second Life (a 3-D online digital world). All of these but mostly the latter center around The Horizon Project, part of the New Media Consortium’s Emerging Technologies Initiative.

Who am I?

My name is Steven Hornik, and I received my Ph.D. from Florida International University in 1999. Since then my research has led me to examine the influence of the use of technology on decision making and eventually to focus on the relevance of technology in educational settings, specifically virtual learning environments. A list of some of my recent publications follows:

• When technology does not support learning: The negative consequences of dissonance of individual epistemic beliefs in technology mediated learning

•  Culture’s impact on technology mediated learning: The role of Horizontal and Vertical Individualism and Collectivism

• Do Chickering and Gamson’s Seven Principles Also Apply to Online MBAs?