A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Arts in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Library and Information Science at the University Of Zululand, South Africa, 2015 / This study sets out to investigate information and knowledge sharing among academics in selected universities in Nigeria and South Africa. The areas focused upon were universities in the two countries and three each were sampled. The data was gathered through literature review, field survey, and the Bibliometric analysis of publications in Scopus, an online database. The combined techniques of purposive and probability random sampling were applied to determine the required sample frames of universities and respondents respectively. The respondents were drawn from Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Federal University of Technology Minna (FUT) and Umaru Musa Yar’adua University (UMYU) in Nigeria, and University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), Durban University of Technology (DUT) and University of Zululand (UZ) in South Africa. A Questionnaire was administered to obtain the necessary data from sampled academics in the selected universities. The questionnaire was administered to a total of 382 respondents comprising academic staff in both countries and a response rate of 311 representing 81.41% was achieved. Data was analysed using both quantitative statistical package for social sciences (SPSS) version 21 and UCINET version 6.0 to represent data obtained from the SCOPUS database. Four null hypotheses were tested at α = 0.05 using Correlation and the T-test. The demographic data revealed that majorities of the surveyed academics in Nigeria (74%) and South Africa (70.7%) were male, and had Master’s Degrees (52.5% Nigeria; 51.1% South Africa). Majority of the respondents were also in the Humanities (57.1% Nigeria; 41.3% South Africa), and had between 11 to 20 years of (42.0% Nigeria; 53.3% South Africa). The overall results revealed that the academic respondents from Nigeria (100%) and South Africa (100%) understand and participated in information and knowledge sharing through various means, such as seminars, conferences and workshops. The academics in the Nigerian universities indicated that they share and preferred information on additional jobs and scholarship availability, while the South African academics showed more interest in new technologies and collaborative initiatives. There was evidence that the surveyed academics in both countries shared information: through personal discussions; on research progress with others, both within and outside their universities and disciplines; and before undertaking research. The study determined that information and communication technologies (ICTs) are being used by the academics in the selected universities for information and knowledge sharing. All the surveyed academics indicated that they used the most common ICTs such as computers (100% Nigeria; 100% South Africa), mobile phones (100% Nigeria; 100% South Africa), internet facilities (100% Nigeria; 100% South Africa), and USBs (100% Nigeria; 100% South Africa). However, the overall utilization of ICTs was higher in the surveyed South African universities.
The top collaborating authors were found to be from South Africa, while the top two collaborating universities were from Nigeria. However, it was established that there were far more collaborative ties both within and outside the selected universities and countries in South Africa than in Nigeria. The study found that knowledge sharing positively affects academics in their teaching, research, self-development and community service, with varying magnitudes with respect to selected universities in each country and the type of effect. And the number of collaborative ties both within and outside their universities and countries are more in South Africa than in Nigeria. Many problems were found to be affecting effective information and knowledge sharing, such as poor research management; poor communication of conferences, seminars and workshops among academics; poor support services; and negative attitude to sharing on the part of some academics. The study recommended that the prevailing problems of knowledge sharing could be decreased by the provision of some basic services, in particular: effective research management and support, adequate information resources and services, and strict policies to persuade academics to undertake and publish joint research results. It is also necessary to improve awareness among academics on the importance of information and knowledge sharing. Other recommendations include:
1. Further research should be embarked upon to compare African universities with European, American universities to ascertain the real problems behind the poor research performance of academics and universities on the continent and between Europe and America.
2. Multinational initiative to encourage and support African scholars participation to international academic gatherings which are usually hindered by travel/diplomatic issues
3. African universities must ensure further training and retraining of academics especially on information literacy skills and lifelong learning to emphasize the relevance of collaborative research via social interactions such as the Web 2.0 etc. / Umaru Musa Yar'dua University
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:uzulu/oai:uzspace.unizulu.ac.za:10530/1471 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Fari, Sani Abdu |
| Contributors | Ocholla, D.N. |
| Publisher | University of Zululand |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
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