Social media and self-curatorship : Reflections on identity and pedagogy through blogging on a masters module

El uso de los medios sociales se ha extendido notablemente y se considera ya como una oportunidad única para el diseño de entornos innovadores de aprendizaje, donde los estudiantes se conviertan en protagonistas de experiencias de multialfabetización participativas y entre iguales. El trabajo cuestiona la conexión entre los usos sociales de los nuevos medios y las prácticas educativas relevantes, y propone marcos teóricos más rigurosos que puedan orientar en futuras investigaciones sobre el papel de los medios sociales en la educación. El trabajo reflexiona sobre el estudio de caso llevado a cabo en un grupo de alumnos en un módulo on-line como parte de un programa de máster sobre medios de comunicación, cultura y comunicación. Se invitó a los estudiantes a desenvolverse en estrategias de evaluación más allá de las convencionales, con el fin de teorizar y reflexionar sobre sus experiencias con los medios sociales como soporte y materia del curso. El artículo analiza la experiencia de los estudiantes evaluados en el conjunto del proyecto. Durante la exposición de resultados, los autores situaron los argumentos en el contexto del debate sobre las nuevas alfabetizaciones, la pedagogía y los medios sociales, así como en el marco de la teoría emergente de la autogestión del individuo en estos contextos, como marco metafórico para comprender la producción y la representación de la identidad en los medios digitales.The widespread uses of social media have been celebrated as a unique opportunity to redesign innovative learning environments that position students at the center of a participatory, multiliteracy and peer learning experience. This article problemitizes the connection between the social uses of new media and relevant educational practices and proposes more rigorous theoretical frames that can be used to guide future research into the role of social media in education. This article reports on a case study of a small group of students who use an online module to study media, culture and communication as part of a wider master’s programme. The students were invited to reflect in a more reflexive and theoretical manner than is commonly used in a standard course evaluation about their experiences of engaging with social media as both the medium and the subject of the course. The article discusses the student experience as it unfolded in the context of an assessed piece of project work. In discussing the findings the authors locate the arguments in the context of debates about new literacies, pedagogy and social media as well as in an emergent theory of self-curatorship as a metaphorical frame for understanding the production and representation of identity in digital media

Fake News Detection in Social Networks via Crowd Signals

Our work considers leveraging crowd signals for detecting fake news and is motivated by tools recently introduced by Facebook that enable users to flag fake news. By aggregating users' flags, our goal is to select a small subset of news every day, send them to an expert (e.g., via a third-party fact-checking organization), and stop the spread of news identified as fake by an expert. The main objective of our work is to minimize the spread of misinformation by stopping the propagation of fake news in the network. It is especially challenging to achieve this objective as it requires detecting fake news with high-confidence as quickly as possible. We show that in order to leverage users' flags efficiently, it is crucial to learn about users' flagging accuracy. We develop a novel algorithm, DETECTIVE, that performs Bayesian inference for detecting fake news and jointly learns about users' flagging accuracy over time. Our algorithm employs posterior sampling to actively trade off exploitation (selecting news that maximize the objective value at a given epoch) and exploration (selecting news that maximize the value of information towards learning about users' flagging accuracy). We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach via extensive experiments and show the power of leveraging community signals for fake news detection

Astrobiology and Society in Europe Today

This book describes the state of astrobiology in Europe today and its relation to the European society at large. With contributions from authors in more than 20 countries and over 30 scientific institutions worldwide, the document illustrates the societal implications of astrobiology and the positive contribution that astrobiology can make to European society. The book has two main objectives: 1. It recommends the establishment of a European Astrobiology Institute (EAI) as an answer to a series of challenges relating to astrobiology but also European research, education, and society at large. 2. It also acknowledges the societal implications of astrobiology, and thus the role of the social sciences and humanities in optimizing the positive contribution that astrobiology can make to the lives of the people of Europe and the challenges they face

Telling the market story through organic information interaction design and broadcast media : submitted to the College of Creative Arts as requirement for the degree of Master of Design, Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand, 2007

Interaction Design, which is essentially story-creating and telling, is at once both and ancient art and a new technology. Media have always effected the telling of stories and the creation of experiences. (Shedroff, N., 1994, p. 2) Advances with visual representations within broadcast design have been applied to areas such as weather simulations, sporting events, and historical reconstruction's. However, financial market information presentation is fairly uniform in television news broadcasting, showing little progression in pace with other news information catego­ries. While stock market news segments make limited use of supporting graphics, addi­ tional information that may assist the viewer is filtered out, effecting viewers interest, understanding and decision making process often associated with market related stories. Research to date has been limited to single visualisations. There has been little re­search into the use of multiple information views that are composed to support news presentations. People use many different information sources on a daily basis. News sources are used to stay informed about events, to some sources, viewer evaluation of informa­tion is a part of that process. News information and other data commodity sources are now more accessible, allowing designers to look at ways of transforming them into new or improved information services. This research explores the display of stock market information by looking at ap­propriate media delivery methods combined with Organic Information Interaction Design to enhance information relationships. Organic Design and Information Inter­action Design 1 principles are combined. This denotes a 'living' relationship between elements, incorporating hierarchy principles with enhanced information delivery and user experiences. Four themes are tied together through the use of a conceptual prototype. [FROM INTRO

How do interactive tabletop systems influence collaboration?

This paper examines some aspects of the usefulness of interactive tabletop systems, if and how these impact collaboration. We chose creative problem solving such as brainstorming as an application framework to test several collaborative media: the use of pen-and-paper tools, the ‘‘around-the-table’’ form factor, the digital tabletop interface, the attractiveness of interaction styles. Eighty subjects in total (20 groups of four members) participated in the experiments. The evaluation criteria were task performance, collaboration patterns (especially equity of contributions), and users’ subjective experience. The ‘‘aroundthe-table’’ form factor, which is hypothesized to promote social comparison, increased performance and improved collaboration through an increase of equity. Moreover, the attractiveness of the tabletop device improved subjective experience and increased motivation to engage in the task. However, designing attractiveness seems a highly challenging issue, since overly attractive interfaces may distract users from the task