What drives students to continue using social mindtools? The perspectives of social support and social influence

Social mindtools are cloud-based and visual thinking-oriented tools capable of facilitating synchronous collaboration. Such services have been widely applied to enhancing students' collaborative learning. However, students' continuance intention to use these services has received little scholarly attention. To remedy this limitation, we employed a social mindtool to support participants' collaborative learning regarding game design, and developed a research model as a means to examine their continuance intention to use it. In this model, social support and social influence had direct effects on continuance intention, while perceived synchronicity affected the latter indirectly. Our research findings suggest that social influence exerted the most significant and direct influence on continuance intention, while perceived synchmnicity, having a critical role though, had indirect impact on continuance intention via social support and social influence. These results imply that the synchmnicity social mindtools offer (e.g., seeing others' action in real time and receiving others' prompt assistance) will affect students' interactions when the tools are applied to students' collaborative learning, which will further impact on students' continuance intention to use the tools, and peer opinions will be most valued.