Narrative Scripts Embedded in Social Media Towards Empowering Digital and Self-protection Skills

Hernández‐Leo, Davinia; Theophilou, Emily; Lobo, René; Reina, Jesús Roberto Sánchez; Ognibene, Dimitri

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-86436-1_42

Cited by 15 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 14 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The Narrative Scripts for empowering digital and self-protection skills of users through the use of computer-supported collaborative learning activities and the help of a virtual companion were presented at the Sixteenth European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning in Italy (Hernández-Leo et al, 2021 ). Over 200 school workshops were conducted involving over 1.000 adolescents in private and public schools in Barcelona.…”

Section: Preliminary Experimental Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Challenging social media threats using collective well-being-aware recommendation algorithms and an educational virtual companion

Ognibene¹,

Taibi²,

Kruschwitz³

et al. 2023

Front. Artif. Intell.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

Section: Preliminary Experimental Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This approach also allows focusing on the critical educational aspect. The creation of educationally managed social media communities allows supported learning experiences and a full range of new experiments (Amarasinghe et al, 2021 ; Fulantelli et al, 2021 ; Hernández-Leo et al, 2021 ; Malzahn et al, 2021 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Challenging social media threats using collective well-being-aware recommendation algorithms and an educational virtual companion

Ognibene¹,

Taibi²,

Kruschwitz³

et al. 2023

Front. Artif. Intell.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…One of our educational activities adopts the integration of image classifiers within the educational approach of the narrative scripts [55]. The narrative scripts notion combines elements from computer supported collaborative learning script mechanisms and storytelling techniques within a simulated social media platform.…”

Section: Narrative Scriptsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Moving Beyond Benchmarks and Competitions: Towards Addressing Social Media Challenges in an Educational Context

et al. 2023

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Natural language processing and other areas of artificial intelligence have seen staggering progress in recent years, yet much of this is reported with reference to somewhat limited benchmark datasets.We see the deployment of these techniques in realistic use cases as the next step in this development. In particular, much progress is still needed in educational settings, which can strongly improve users’ safety on social media. We present our efforts to develop multi-modal machine learning algorithms to be integrated into a social media companion aimed at supporting and educating users in dealing with fake news and other social media threats.Inside the companion environment, such algorithms can automatically assess and enable users to contextualize different aspects of their social media experience. They can estimate and display different characteristics of content in supported users’ feeds, such as ‘fakeness’ and ‘sentiment’, and suggest related alternatives to enrich users’ perspectives. In addition, they can evaluate the opinions, attitudes, and neighbourhoods of the users and of those appearing in their feeds. The aim of the latter process is to raise users’ awareness and resilience to filter bubbles and echo chambers, which are almost unnoticeable and rarely understood phenomena that may affect users’ information intake unconsciously and are unexpectedly widespread.The social media environment is rapidly changing and complex. While our algorithms show state-of-the-art performance, they rely on task-specific datasets, and their reliability may decrease over time and be limited against novel threats. The negative impact of these limits may be exasperated by users’ over-reliance on algorithmic tools.Therefore, companion algorithms and educational activities are meant to increase users’ awareness of social media threats while exposing the limits of such algorithms. This will also provide an educational example of the limits affecting the machine-learning components of social media platforms.We aim to devise, implement and test the impact of the companion and connected educational activities in acquiring and supporting conscientious and autonomous social media usage.

show abstract

“…scripts that challenge previously made assumptions) scripts, have been implemented to support learning scenarios. In our studies, students were immersed in social media stories that exposed them to counter-narratives and conversations about counter-narratives, about biases, discrimination, or attitudes and behaviors in what (and how) is spread online [47]. These components direct content recommendations and educational interventions, such as triggering specific validation tests that improve the accuracy of user state estimation as well as progressing in narrative scripts, which are gamified educational activities based on the concept of interactive counter-narratives.…”

Section: Transfer Of the Virtual Learning Companion Into Practicementioning

confidence: 99%

The Role of Educational Interventions in Facing Social Media Threats: Overarching Principles of the COURAGE Project

Taibi

Börsting

Hoppe

et al. 2023

Communications in Computer and Information Science

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Social media are offering new opportunities for communication and interaction way beyond what was possible only a few years ago. However, social media are also virtual spaces where young people are exposed to a variety of threats. Digital addiction, discrimination, hate speech, misinformation, polarization as well as manipulative influences of algorithms, body stereotyping, and cyberbullying are examples of challenges that find fertile ground on social media. Educators and students are not adequately prepared to face these challenges. To this aim, the COURAGE project, presented in this paper, introduces new tools and learning methodologies that can be adopted within higher education learning paths to train educators to deal with social media threats. The overarching principles of the COURAGE project leverage the most recent advances in the fields of artificial intelligence and in the educational domain paired with social and media psychological insights to support the development of the COURAGE ecosystem. The results of the experiments currently implemented with teachers and students of secondary schools as well as the impact of the COURAGE project on societal changes and ethical questions are presented and discussed.

show abstract

Narrative Scripts Embedded in Social Media Towards Empowering Digital and Self-protection Skills

Cited by 15 publications

References 14 publications

Challenging social media threats using collective well-being-aware recommendation algorithms and an educational virtual companion

Challenging social media threats using collective well-being-aware recommendation algorithms and an educational virtual companion

Moving Beyond Benchmarks and Competitions: Towards Addressing Social Media Challenges in an Educational Context

The Role of Educational Interventions in Facing Social Media Threats: Overarching Principles of the COURAGE Project

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About