Social media have become an integral part of our lives, expanding our interlinking capabilities to new levels. There is plenty to be said about their positive effects. On the other hand, however, some serious negative implications of social media have been repeatedly highlighted in recent years, pointing at various threats to society and its more vulnerable members, such as teenagers, in particular, ranging from much-discussed problems such as digital addiction and polarization to manipulative influences of algorithms and further to more teenager-specific issues (e.g., body stereotyping). The impact of social media—both at an individual and societal level—is characterized by the complex interplay between the users' interactions and the intelligent components of the platform. Thus, users' understanding of social media mechanisms plays a determinant role. We thus propose a theoretical framework based on an adaptive “Social Media Virtual Companion” for educating and supporting an entire community, teenage students, to interact in social media environments in order to achieve desirable conditions, defined in terms of a community-specific and participatory designed measure of Collective Well-Being (CWB). This Companion combines automatic processing with expert intervention and guidance. The virtual Companion will be powered by a Recommender System (CWB-RS) that will optimize a CWB metric instead of engagement or platform profit, which currently largely drives recommender systems thereby disregarding any societal collateral effect. CWB-RS will optimize CWB both in the short term by balancing the level of social media threats the users are exposed to, and in the long term by adopting an Intelligent Tutor System role and enabling adaptive and personalized sequencing of playful learning activities. We put an emphasis on experts and educators in the educationally managed social media community of the Companion. They play five key roles: (a) use the Companion in classroom-based educational activities; (b) guide the definition of the CWB; (c) provide a hierarchical structure of learning strategies, objectives and activities that will support and contain the adaptive sequencing algorithms of the CWB-RS based on hierarchical reinforcement learning; (d) act as moderators of direct conflicts between the members of the community; and, finally, (e) monitor and address ethical and educational issues that are beyond the intelligent agent's competence and control. This framework offers a possible approach to understanding how to design social media systems and embedded educational interventions that favor a more healthy and positive society. Preliminary results on the performance of the Companion's components and studies of the educational and psychological underlying principles are presented.
Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) scripts aim to structure the process of collaboration creating opportunities for productive social interaction and learning. Despite CSCL research has shown these benefits for some scripts in particular contexts, more evidence is needed about to what extent learning gains are actually achieved for more families of scripts and in different conditions of implementation. This paper studies how three CSCL scripts based on the Pyramid collaborative learning flow pattern facilitate students learning in online classes. Learning gains are measured in terms of precision and confusion assessment criteria. Students' behaviour in the learning process, regarding agreement in the knowledge exchange, is also analysed in relation to the learning gains. Results bring out several factors, and implications for the design of fruitful Pyramid scripts implementation, that related to the pedagogical envelope, the type of tasks, pyramid design elements, the need for epistemic orchestration, and debriefing.
El objetivo de esta investigación fue diseñar, desarrollar e implementar un sistema de monitoreo remoto para biobancos con fines de investigación utilizando tecnologías del internet de las cosas, sensores digitales y analógicos, como también microcontroladores y comunicación inalámbrica. Los biobancos son establecimientos sin ánimo de lucro, que gestionan colecciones de muestras biológicas humanas con fines diagnósticos o de investigación biomédica. Dada la gran relevancia del material resguardado, la seguridad, integridad y correcto almacenamiento son factores críticos y de trascendental importancia para garantizar el éxito de las investigaciones basadas en biobancos. Nuestro desafío consistió en acoplar exitosamente sensores de temperatura, humedad, voltaje, fuerza y sonido en una sola unidad, e implementar un sistema de software con un visor web y un módulo de alertas en tiempo real. Este sistema permite monitorear un biobanco, garantizando la calidad del material biológico almacenado sin incrementar sustancialmente los costos de implementación y funcionamiento.
In this study we investigate the benefits that debriefing can add to collaborative Pyramid script with open-ended tasks. The openended task allows students to produce multiple possible solutions to a given problem and requires learners to express personal opinions based on previous experiences and intuitions. In this sense, misconceptions and gaps can appear in the collaboration process, demanding a teacher intervention. Debriefing, as part of teacher orchestration tasks, enables teachers to facilitate students' reflection about the learning experience, correcting mistakes and filling gaps. Qualitative analysis of students' answers through concepts and their relations was developed. The examination of concepts and relations supported the benefits of the Pyramid script with open-ended tasks and debriefing to learning. The results of the study indicate that students increased the concepts mentioned and built more relations between concepts after debriefinLg.
La forma tradicional de enseñar programación ha resultado ser ineficiente a la hora de motivar a las nuevas generaciones de ingenieros para encontrar su camino profesional. En la Universidad Autónoma de Bucaramanga se tomó la decisión de crear una estrategia para resolver este problema, con el objetivo de mejorar las métricas de desempeño sobre los alumnos y profesores, así como orientar el currículo hacia las tendencias específicas de la disciplina (apps, IoT, web, IA y videojuegos) y, por último, hacer una revisión de las herramientas, plataformas y lenguajes de programación que estaban en tendencia a nivel mundial para incluirlos en el plan docente en conjunto con una metodología de gamificación experimental diseñada por los mismos docentes. Como resultado, las calificaciones generales mejoraron, las tasas de deserción disminuyeron y la población estudiantil en general aumentó.
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