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The 23rd EUROCALL conference was held in Cyprus from the 24th to the 27th of August 2016. The theme of the conference this year was "CALL Communities and Culture." It offered a unique opportunity to hear from real-world CALL practitioners on how they practice CALL in their communities, and how the CALL culture has developed in local and global contexts. Short papers from the conference are presented in this volume: (1) The impact of EFL teachers' mediation in wiki-mediated collaborative writing activities on student-student collaboration (Maha Alghasab); (2) Towards the development of a comprehensive pedagogical framework for pronunciation training based on adaptive automatic speech recognition systems (Saandia Ali); (3) Digital literacy and sustainability--a field study in EFL teacher development (Christopher Allen and Jan Berggren); (4) Self-evaluation using iPads in EFL teaching practice (Christopher Allen, Stella K. Hadjistassou, and David Richardson); (5) Amateur online interculturalism in foreign language education (Antonie Alm); (6) Teaching Turkish in low tech contexts: opportunities and challenges (Katerina Antoniou, Evelyn Mbah, and Antigoni Parmaxi); (7) Learning Icelandic language and culture in virtual Reykjavic: starting to talk (Branislav Bédi, Birna Arnbjörnsdóttir, Hannes Högni Vilhjálmsson, Hafdís Erla Helgadóttir, Stefán Ólafsson, and Elías Björgvinsson); (8) Investigating student choices in performing higher-level comprehension tasks using TED (Francesca Bianchi and Ivana Marenzi); (9) An evaluation of text-to-speech synthesizers in the foreign language classroom: learners' perceptions (Tiago Bione, Jennica Grimshaw, and Walcir Cardoso); (10) Quantifying CALL: significance, effect size and variation (Alex Boulton; (11) The contribution of CALL to advanced-level foreign/second language instruction (Jack Burston and Kelly Arispe); (12) Using instructional technology to integrate CEFR "can do" performance objectives into an advanced-level language course (Jack Burston, Androulla Athanasiou, and Maro Neophytou-Yiokari); (13) Exploiting behaviorist and communicative action-based methodologies in CALL applications for the teaching of pronunciation in French as a foreign language (Jack Burston, Olga Georgiadou, and Monique Monville-Burston); (14) Mobile assisted language learning of less commonly taught languages: learning in an incidental and situated way through an app (Cristiana Cervini, Olga Solovova, Annukka Jakkula, and Karolina Ruta); (15) Using object-based activities and an online inquiry platform to support learners' engagement with their heritage language and culture (Koula Charitonos, Marina Charalampidi, and Eileen Scanlon); (16) Urban explorations for language learning: a gamified approach to teaching Italian in a university context (Koula Charitonos, Luca Morini, Sylvester Arnab, Tiziana Cervi-Wilson, and Billy Brick); (17) Communicate to learn, learn to communicate: a study of engineering students' communication strategies in a mobile-based learning environment (Li Cheng and Zhihong Lu); (18) Using a dialogue system based on dialogue maps for computer assisted second language learning (Sung-Kwon Choi, Oh-Woog Kwon, Young-Kil Kim, and Yunkeun Lee); (19) Students' attitudes and motivation towards technology in a Turkish language classroom (Pelekani Chryso); (20) Vlogging: a new channel for language learning and intercultural exchanges (Christelle Combe and Tatiana Codreanu); (21) Japanese university students' self-assessment and digital literacy test results (Travis Cote and Brett Milliner); (22) Digital story (re)telling using graded readers and smartphones (Kazumichi Enokida); (23) HR4EU--a web portal for e-learning of Croatian (Matea Filko, Daša Farkaš, and Diana Hriberski); (24) Synchronous tandem language learning in a MOOC context: a study on task design and learner performance (Marta Fondo Garcia and Christine Appel); (25) What students think and what they actually do in a mobile assisted language learning context: new insights for self-directed language learning in higher education (Gustavo Garcia Botero and Frederik Questier); (26) An Audio-Lexicon Spanish-Nahuatl: using technology to promote and disseminate a native Mexican language (Rafael García-Mencía, Aurelio López-López, and Angélica Muñoz Meléndez; (27) The use of interactive whiteboards: enhancing the nature of teaching young language learners (Christina Nicole Giannikas); (28) A pre-mobility eTandem project for incoming international students at the University of Padua (Lisa Griggio and Edit Rózsavölgyi); (29) Can a "shouting" digital game help learners develop oral fluency in a second language? (Jennica Grimshaw, Walcir Cardoso, and David Waddington); (30) Feedback visualization in a grammar-based e-learning system for German: a preliminary user evaluation with the COMPASS system (Karin Harbusch and Annette Hausdörfer); (31) The multimodality of lexical explanation sequences during videoconferenced pedagogical interaction (Benjamin Holt); (32) Automatic dialogue scoring for a second language learning system (Jin-Xia Huang, Kyung-Soon Lee, Oh-Woog Kwon, and Young-Kil Kim); (33) Effects of task-based videoconferencing on speaking performance and overall proficiency (Atsushi Iino, Yukiko Yabuta, and Yoichi Nakamura); (34) Tellecollaborative games for youngsters: impact on motivation (Kristi Jauregi); (35) The Exercise: an Exercise generator tool for the SOURCe project (Kryni Kakoyianni-Doa, Eleni Tziafa, and Athanasios Naskos); (36) Students' perceptions of online apprenticeship projects at a university (Hisayo Kikuchi); (37) The effects of multimodality through storytelling using various movie clips (SoHee Kim); (38) Collaboration through blogging: the development of writing and speaking skills in ESP courses (Angela Kleanthous and Walcir Cardoso); (39) Cultivating a community of learners in a distance learning postgraduate course for language professionals (Angelos Konstantinidis and Cecilia Goria); (40) Task-oriented spoken dialog system for second-language learning (Oh-Woog Kwon, Young-Kil Kim, and Yunkeun Lee); (41) Promoting multilingual communicative competence through multimodal academic learning situations (Anna Kyppö and Teija Natri); (42) Teacher professional learning: developing with the aid of technology (Marianna Kyprianou and Eleni Nikiforou); (43) Quizlet: what the students think--a qualitative data analysis (Bruce Lander); (44) "Just facebook me": a study on the integration of Facebook into a German language curriculum (Vera Leier and Una Cunningham); (45) A survey on Chinese students' online English language learning experience through synchronous web conferencing classrooms (Chenxi Li); (46) Identifying and activating receptive vocabulary by an online vocabulary survey and an online writing task (Ivy Chuhui Lin and Goh Kawai); (47) Exploring learners' perceptions of the use of digital letter games for language learning: the case of Magic Word (Mathieu Loiseau, Cristiana Cervini, Andrea Ceccherelli, Monica Masperi, Paola Salomoni, Marco Roccetti, Antonella Valva, and Francesca Bianco); (48) Game of Words: prototype of a digital game focusing on oral production (and comprehension) through asynchronous interaction (Mathieu Loiseau, Racha Hallal, Pauline Ballot, and Ada Gazidedja); (49) PETALL in action: latest developments and future directions of the EU-funded Pan-European Task Activities for Language Learning (António Lopes); (50) Exploring EFL learners' lexical application in AWE-based writing (Zhihong Lu and Zhenxiao Li); (51) Mobile-assisted language learning and language learner autonomy (Paul A. Lyddon); (52) YELL/TELL: online community platform for teacher professional development (Ivana Marenzi, Maria Bortoluzzi, and Rishita Kalyani); (53) Leveraging automatic speech recognition errors to detect challenging speech segments in TED talks (Maryam Sadat Mirzaei, Kourosh Meshgi, and Tatsuya Kawahara); (54) Investigating the affective learning in a 3D virtual learning environment: the case study of the Chatterdale mystery (Judith Molka-Danielsen, Stella Hadjistassou, and Gerhilde Messl-Egghart); (55) Are commercial "personal robots" ready for language learning? Focus on second language speech (Souheila Moussalli and Walcir Cardoso); (56) The Digichaint interactive game as a virtual learning environment for Irish (Neasa Ni Chiaráin and Ailbhe Ní Chasaide); (57) Mingling students' cognitive abilities and learning strategies to transform CALL (Efi Nisiforou and Antigoni Parmaxi); (58) Taking English outside of the classroom through social networking: reflections on a two-year project (Louise Ohashi); (59) Does the usage of an online EFL workbook conform to Benford's law? (Mikolaj Olszewski, Kacper Lodzikowski, Jan Zwolinski, Rasil Warnakulasooriya, and Adam Black); (60) Implications on pedagogy as a result of adopted CALL practices (James W. Pagel and Stephen G. Lambacher); (61) Exploring the benefits and disadvantages of introducing synchronous to asynchronous online technologies to facilitate flexibility in learning (Salomi Papadima-Sophocleous and Fernando Loizides); (62) A CALL for evolving teacher education through 3D microteaching (Giouli Pappa and Salomi Papadima-Sophocleous); (63) Physicality and language learning (Jaeuk Park, Paul Seedhouse, Rob Comber, and Jieun Kiaer); (64) Designing strategies for an efficient language MOOC (Maria Perifanou); (65) Worldwide state of language MOOCs (Maria Perifanou); (66) A Spanish-Finnish telecollaboration: extending intercultural competence via videoconferencing (Pasi Puranen and Ruby Vurdien); (67) Developing oral interaction skills with a digital information gap activity game (Avery Rueb, Walcir Cardoso, and Jennica Grimshaw); (68) Using WebQuests as idea banks for fostering autonomy in online language courses (Shirin Sadaghian and S. Susan Marandi); (69) Integrating mobile technologies into very young second language learners' curriculum (Gulnara Sadykova, Gulnara Gimaletdinova, Liliia Khalitova, and Albina Kayumova); (70) Investigating commercially available technology for language learners in higher education within the high functioning disability spectrum (Georgia Savvidou and Fernando Loizides); (71) Learning languages in 3D worlds with Machinima (Christel Schneider); (72) What are more effective in English classrooms: textbooks or podcasts? (Jaime Selwood, Joe Lauer, and Kazumichi Enokida); (73) Mind the gap: task design and technology in novice language teachers' practice (Tom F. H. Smits, Margret Oberhofer, and Jozef Colpaert); (74) Language immersion in the self-study mode e-course (Olga Sobolev); (75) Aligning out-of-class material with curriculum: tagging grammar in a mobile music application (Ross Sundberg and Walcir Cardoso); (76) Meeting the technology standards for language teachers (Cornelia Tschichold); (77) Mobile-assisted language learning community and culture in French-speaking Belgium: the teachers' perspective (Julie Van de Vyver); (78) Classification of Swedish learner essays by CEFR levels (Elena Volodina, Ildikó Pilán, and David Alfter); (79) Mobile assisted language learning and mnemonic mapping--the loci method revisited (Ikumi Waragai, Marco Raindl, Tatsuya Ohta, and Kosuke Miyasaka); (80) CALL and less commonly taught languages--still a way to go (Monica Ward); (81) Demystifying pronunciation with animation (Monica Ward); (82) The effects of utilizing corpus resources to correct collocation errors in L2 writing--Students' performance, corpus use and perceptions (Yi-ju Wu); (83) A social constructionist approach to teaching and learning vocabulary for Italian for academic purposes (Eftychia Xerou, Salomi Papadima-Sophocleous, and Antigoni Parmaxi); (84) Flip-J: development of the system for flipped jigsaw supported language learning (Masanori Yamada, Yoshiko Goda, Kojiro Hata, Hideya Matsukawa, and Seisuke Yasunami); and (85) "Check your Smile", prototype of a collaborative LSP website for technical vocabulary (Nadia Yassine-Diab, Charlotte Alazard-Guiu, Mathieu Loiseau, Laurent Sorin, and Charlotte Orliac). An author index is included. (Individual papers contain references.)

"Proceedings of International Conference on Studies in Education and Social Sciences" includes full papers presented at the International Conference on Studies in Education and Social Sciences (ICSES) which took place on October 20-23, 2023, in Antalya, Turkey. The aim of the conference is to offer opportunities to share ideas, to discuss theoretical and practical issues and to connect with the leaders in the fields of education and social sciences. The conference is organized annually by the International Society for Technology, Education, and Science (ISTES). The ICSES invites submissions which address the theory, research, or applications in all disciplines of education and social sciences. The ICSES is organized for: faculty members in all disciplines of education and social sciences, graduate students, K-12 administrators, teachers, principals and all interested in education and social sciences. After peer-reviewing process, all full papers are published in the Conference Proceedings. [Individual papers are indexed in ERIC. The month of the conference on the cover page (November) is incorrect. The correct month is October.]

"Proceedings of International Conference on Social and Education Sciences" includes full papers presented at the International Conference on Social and Education Sciences (IConSES), which took place on October 13-16, 2022, in Austin, Texas. The aim of the conference is to offer opportunities to share ideas, discuss theoretical and practical issues, and to connect with the leaders in the fields of education and social sciences. The IConSES invites submissions that address the theory, research, or applications in all disciplines of education and social sciences. The IConSES is organized for: faculty members in all disciplines of education and social sciences, graduate students, K-12 administrators, teachers, principals, and all interested in education and social sciences. [Individual papers are indexed in ERIC.]

This volume includes three sections of the 2022 NORDSCI international conference proceedings: (1) Education and Educational Research; (2) Language and Linguistics; and (3) Sociology and Healthcare. Education and Educational Research includes 7 papers covering a full spectrum of education, including history, sociology and economy of education, educational policy, strategy and technologies. The category covers also pedagogy and special education. Language and Linguistics includes 3 papers related to theoretical, literary and historical linguistics as well as stylistics and philology. Sociology and Healthcare includes 11 papers related to human society, social structures, and social change, healthcare systems and healthcare services. [Individual papers from the Education and Educational Research section of these proceedings are indexed in ERIC.]

These proceedings contain the papers and posters of the International Conferences on: Educational Technologies 2022 (ICEduTech 2022), Sustainability, Technology and Education 2022 (STE 2022), Internet Technologies & Society 2022 (ITS 2022), and Applied Management Advances in the 21st Century 2022 (AMA21 2022) held virtually, from December 14-16, 2022, and organized by the International Association for Development of the Information Society (IADIS). The International Conference on Educational Technologies 2022 (ICEduTech 2022) is the scientific conference addressing the real topics as seen by teachers, students, parents and school leaders. Topics for this conference were: (1) Education in Context; (2) Education as Professional Field; (3) Curricular Evolution; (4) Learner Orientation; (5) Integrating Educational Technologies; and (6) International Higher Education. The International Conference on Sustainability, Technology and Education 2022 (STE 2022) has the purpose to address the main issues which occur by evaluating the relationship between Sustainability, Education, and Technology. The main areas of interest for this conference are: (1) Sustainability and Leadership; (2) Sustainability and Green IT; and (3) Sustainability and Education. The International Conference on Internet Technologies & Society 2022 (ITS 2022) aims to address the main issues of concern within WWW/Internet as well as to assess the influence of Internet in the Information Society. Broad areas of interest are Internet Technologies, Information Management, e-Society and Digital Divide, e-Business/e-Commerce, e-Learning, New Media and e-Society, Digital Services in e-Society, e-Government/e-Governance and e-Health. The International Conference on Applied Management Advances in the 21st Century 2022 (AMA21 2022) seeks to provide a unique forum for presentation and discussion of the last research developments and solutions for the current issues of the world economy. Its core areas of interest are: (1) Managing with ICT; (2) E-Marketing & Digital Communication; (3) Digital Economy; (4) Entrepreneurship & Innovation; (5) Finances & Fintech; and (6) Teaching & Learning in Business. [Individual papers are indexed in ERIC.]

These proceedings contain the papers and poster of the 17th International Conference on Mobile Learning (ML 2021) and 8th International Conference on Educational Technologies (ICEduTech 2021), which were organised by the International Association for Development of the Information Society (IADIS). Due to an unprecedented situation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, this year the conference was hosted virtually during 3 to 5 March. The 2021 edition comprised a special theme: "COVID-19 Opportunities and Challenges for Teaching and Learning Innovation in a Global Pandemic." The Mobile Learning 2021 Conference seeks to provide a forum for the presentation and discussion of mobile learning research which illustrate developments in the field. This conference explores the theme of mobile learning under the following topics: (1) Learning analytics and mobile learning; (2) Cloud computing and mobile learning; (3) Pedagogical approaches, models and theories for mLearning; (4) mLearning in and across formal and informal settings; (5) Strategies and challenges for integrating mLearning in broader educational scenarios; (6) User Studies in mLearning; (7) Learner mobility and transitions afforded by mLearning; (8) Socio-cultural context and implications of mLearning; (9) Mobile social media and user generated content; (10) Enabling mLearning technologies, applications and uses; (11) Evaluation and assessment of mLearning; (12) Research methods, ethics and implementation of mLearning; (13) Innovative mLearning approaches; (14) Tools, technologies and platforms for mLearning; and (15) mLearning: where to next and how? [Individual papers are indexed in ERIC.]

"Proceedings of International Conference on Studies in Education and Social Sciences" includes full papers presented at the International Conference on Studies in Education and Social Sciences (ICSES) which took place on November 11-14, 2021 in Antalya, Turkey. The aim of the conference is to offer opportunities to share ideas, to discuss theoretical and practical issues and to connect with the leaders in the fields of education and social sciences. The conference is organized annually by the International Society for Technology, Education, and Science (ISTES). The ICSES invites submissions which address the theory, research or applications in all disciplines of education and social sciences. The ICSES is organized for: faculty members in all disciplines of education and social sciences, graduate students, K-12 administrators, teachers, principals and all interested in education and social sciences. After peer-reviewing process, all full papers are published in the Conference Proceedings. [Individual papers are indexed in ERIC.]

"Proceedings of International Conference on Studies in Education and Social Sciences" includes full papers presented at the International Conference on Studies in Education and Social Sciences (ICSES) which took place on November 11-14, 2021 in Antalya, Turkey. The aim of the conference is to offer opportunities to share ideas, to discuss theoretical and practical issues and to connect with the leaders in the fields of education and social sciences. The conference is organized annually by the International Society for Technology, Education, and Science (ISTES). The ICSES invites submissions which address the theory, research or applications in all disciplines of education and social sciences. The ICSES is organized for: faculty members in all disciplines of education and social sciences, graduate students, K-12 administrators, teachers, principals and all interested in education and social sciences. After peer-reviewing process, all full papers are published in the Conference Proceedings.

This volume contains selected papers submitted to the 18th Annual International Conference of the Bulgarian Comparative Education Society (BCES) held virtually in June 2020. The 18th BCES Conference theme is "Educational Reforms Worldwide." This year's book includes 38 papers written by 73 authors from 19 countries. The volume starts with an introductory piece on school reforms in Bulgaria from the 9th to the 21st century written by the keynote speakers Nikolay Popov and Marina Pironkova. The authors present the cornerstones of school reforms during the First, Second, and Third Bulgarian State. They also discuss various cultural, social and political factors determining school development in Bulgaria. The other 37 papers are divided into six parts: (1) Comparative and International Education & History of Education; (2) International Organizations and Education; (3) School Education: Policies, Innovations, Practices & Entrepreneurship; (4) Higher Education & Teacher Education and Training; (5) Law and Education; and (6) Research Education & Research Practice. [Individual papers are indexed in ERIC.]

This edited volume contains 11 short papers selected from the 2017 Innovative Language Teaching and Learning at University conference (InnoConf), which took place on the 16th of June at The Open University. The theme of the conference was "Integrating Informal Learning into Formal Language Education." The aim of the conference was to engage in productive collaboration between language professionals to further equip students to succeed in the ever-growing landscape of formal and informal learning. The chapters in this book provide insights into many types of innovative approaches to teaching languages at university and beyond. The contributing authors have experimented with new strategies to enrich their students' learning experience or identified new ways of using existing resources in and outside the classroom. This is the third volume in a series of books compiling papers from the InnoConf conferences. Following "Integrating informal learning into formal language education: An introduction" (Fernando Rosell-Aguilar, Tita Beaven, and Mara Fuertes Gutiérrez), this volume is comprised of three sections. Section 1, Learning collaboratively online: Attitudes, motivation, and learning communities, contains the following papers: (1) Can you teach me to speak? Oral practice and anxiety in a language MOOC (Zsuzsanna Bárkányi); (2) Social media in L2 education: Exploring on-line collaborative writing in EFL settings (Robert Martínez-Carrasco); (3) Busuu: how do users rate this app for language learning? (Miguel Ángel Saona-Vallejos); and (4) 'It's a shame that we haven't met earlier!': Facilitating a tandem language exchange programme at Queen's University Belfast (Liang Wang). Section 2, Testing and evaluating language learning tools, contains the following papers: (5) ImparApp: Italian language learning with MIT's TaleBlazer mobile app (Tiziana Cervi-Wilson and Billy Brick); (6) LipDub: A technology-enhanced language learning project with music (Kirsten Mericka); (7) Video resources in a flipped language classroom: An experience of using videos to flip a Mandarin teaching module (Zhiqiong Chen); (8) The Better French Living Project: How to encourage linguistic, practical, and cultural year-abroad preparation outside the classroom (Sandra Salin); (9) Multimodal Corpus of Spanish Speech Acts: Main features and potential pedagogical uses (Marta Vacas Matos); and (10) Twitter as a formal and informal language learning tool: From potential to evidence (Fernando Rosell-Aguilar). Section 3, The polyglot community: An interview with Richard Simcott, contains the following paper: (11) The polyglot community: An interview with Richard Simcott, by Tita Beaven (Tita Beaven and Richard Simcott). An author index is included. (Individual papers contain references.) [Language Acts and Worldmaking contributed to the funding for this publication. For the second volume, "Innovative Language Teaching and Learning at University: Enhancing Employability," see ED574244.]

This second volume in this series of papers dedicated to innovative language teaching and learning at university focuses on enhancing employability. Throughout the book, which includes a selection of 14 peer-reviewed and edited short papers, authors share good practices drawing on research; reflect on their experience to promote student engagement, inclusivity, and collaboration; and foster a successful learning environment while developing employability skills. Whatever the language--or the subject taught--there are a number of skills, behaviours, attributes and attitudes which staff and students should be aware of in order to enhance teaching and learning so as to maximise student potential and their employability prospects. Following Notes on Contributor and a Foreword by Jocelyn Wyburd, this volume contains the following: (1) "Innovative language teaching and learning at university: enhancing employability"--an introduction (Carmen Álvarez-Mayo, Angela Gallagher-Brett, and Franck Michel). Section 1: Mapping the "Global Graduate" landscape: (2) Transnational graduates and employability: challenges for HE language departments (Jocelyn Wyburd); (3) The year abroad: understanding the employability skills of the Global Graduate (Cristina López-Moreno); (4) "I'm just a linguist--all I can do is teach or translate." Broadening language graduates' horizons through employer engagement (Dawn Leggott); and (5) "Languages in the workplace": embedding employability in the foreign language undergraduate curriculum (Alison Organ). Section 2: Developing students' intercultural competence: (6) Building global graduates and developing transnational professional skills through a telecollaboration project in foreign language education (Mª Victoria Guadamillas Gómez); (7) Content modules in UK and US universities--their unique contribution towards the development of intercultural competence and criticality (Elinor Parks); and (8) Developing intercultural communicative competence for the year abroad experience (Sandra López-Rocha and Fabienne Vailes). Section 3: Fostering employability in the classroom: (9) Rotating poster presentations (Manuel Lagares and Sandra Reisenleutner); (10) Enhancing students' potential: EBL projects in language teaching (Theresa Federici); (11) Using assessment to showcase employability in IWLP (Caroline Campbell); and (12) Enhancing employability skills by bringing literature back into the foreign language class: the Litinclass website (Ana Bela Almeida and Idoya Puig) Section 4: Enhancing employability through digital tools: (13) Teachers as awakeners: a collaborative approach in language learning and social media (Alessia Plutino); (14) Enhancing online language learning as a tool to boost employability (Sol Escobar and Susanne Krauß); and (15) Looking beyond language skills--integrating digital skills into language teaching (Amanda Deacon, Lucy Parkin, and Carolin Schneider). An author index is included. (Individual papers contain references.) [For the first volume, "Innovative Language Teaching and Learning at University: Enhancing Participation and Collaboration," see ED565011.]

The present volume investigates the relevance of language teaching and learning in the contemporary job market, highlighting how language graduates can provide a substantial contribution to the multilingual needs of the UK. It also explores how the sudden spread of COVID-19 impacted on the acceleration of the online pedagogical shift which had already been foreseen by Jisc and developed at a higher speed than predicted. Ultimately, by looking into the forced online pivot, this volume furthers a reflection on how the 'new normal' is contributing to drive pedagogical innovation. [This content is provided in the format of an e-book. Individual papers are indexed in ERIC.]

This volume offers a comprehensive, up-to-date, empirical and methodological view over the new scenarios and environments for language teaching and learning recently emerged (e.g. blended learning, e-learning, ubiquitous learning, social learning, autonomous learning or lifelong learning), and also over some of the new approaches to language teaching and/or research that can support them (usually by applying ICT), such as Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL), Mobile-Assisted Language Learning (MALL), Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), or Language Massive Open Online Courses (LMOOCs). This book is geared to those undertaking language teaching for the first time or willing to try new perspectives and methods in their courses. The following sections and papers are included: (1) Applying information and communication technologies to language teaching and research: an overview (Antonio Pareja-Lora, Pilar Rodríguez-Arancón, and Cristina Calle-Martínez). Section 1. General applications of ICTs to language teaching and learning. Section 1.1. E-learning and languages in primary/secondary/tertiary education; (2) 27 Technology use in nursery and primary education in two different settings (Mª Camino Bueno Alastuey and Jesús García Laborda); (3) How working collaboratively with technology can foster a creative learning environment (Susana Gómez); (4) The e-generation: the use of technology for foreign language learning (Pilar Gonzalez-Vera); (5) Evaluation of reading achievement of the program school 2.0 in Spain using PISA 2012 (Cristina Vilaplana Prieto); (6) Language learning actions in two 1x1 secondary schools in Catalonia: the case of online language resources (Boris Vázquez Calvo and Daniel Cassany); (7) Innovative resources based on ICTs and authentic materials to improve EFL students' communicative needs (Rebeca González Otero); (8) Teaching the use of WebQuests to master students in Pablo de Olavide University (Regina Gutiérrez Pérez); and (9) ICTs, ESPs and ZPD through microlessons in teacher education (Soraya García Esteban, Jesús García Laborda, and Manuel Rábano Llamas). Section 1.2. Language distance, lifelong teaching and learning, and massive open online courses: (10) Learning specialised vocabulary through Facebook in a massive open online course (Patricia Ventura and Elena Martín-Monje); (11) Identifying collaborative behaviours online: training teachers in wikis (Margarita Vinagre Laranjeira); (12) The community as a source of pragmatic input for learners of Italian: the multimedia repository LIRA (Greta Zanoni); and (13) Grammar processing through English L2 e-books: distance vs. face-to-face learning (Mª Ángeles Escobar-Álvarez). Section 1.3. Interaction design, usability and accessibility: (14) A study of multimodal discourse in the design of interactive digital material for language learning (Silvia Burset, Emma Bosch, and Joan-Tomàs Pujolà); and (15) Audiovisual translation and assistive technology: towards a universal design approach for online education (Emmanouela Patiniotaki). Section 2. New trends in the application of ICTs to language learning. Section 2.1. Mobile-assisted language learning: (16) Mobile learning: a powerful tool for ubiquitous language learning (Nelson Gomes, Sérgio Lopes, and Sílvia Araújo); (17) Critical visual literacy: the new phase of applied linguistics in the era of mobile technology (Giselda Dos Santos Costa and Antonio Carlos Xavier); (18) Virtual learning environments on the go: CALL meets MALL (Jorge Arús Hita); (19) Exploring the application of a conceptual framework in a social MALL app (Timothy Read, Elena Bárcena, and Agnes Kukulska-Hulme); (20) Design and implementation of BusinessApp, a MALL application to make successful business presentations (Cristina Calle-Martínez, Lourdes Pomposo Yanes, and Antonio Pareja-Lora); and (21) Using audio description to improve FLL students' oral competence in MALL: methodological preliminaries (Ana Ibáñez Moreno, Anna Vermeulen, and Maria Jordano). Section 2.2. ICTs for content and language integrated learning: (22) 259 ICT in EMI programmes at tertiary level in Spain: a holistic model (Nuria Hernandez-Nanclares and Antonio Jimenez-Munoz); and (23) Vocabulary Notebook: a digital solution to general and specific vocabulary learning problems in a CLIL context (Plácido Bazo, Romén Rodríguez, and Dácil Fumero). Section 2.3. Computerised language testing and assessment: (24) Using tablet PC's for the final test of Baccalaureate (Jesús García Laborda and Teresa Magal Royo); (25) The implications of business English mock exams on language progress at higher education (Rocío González Romero); and (26) Assessing pragmatics: DCTs and retrospective verbal reports (Vicente Beltrán-Palanques). Section 3. Applying computational linguistics and language resources to language teaching and learning: (27) An updated account of the WISELAV project: a visual construction of the English verb system (Andrés Palacios Pablos); (28) Generating a Spanish affective dictionary with supervised learning techniques (Daniel Bermudez-Gonzalez, Sabino Miranda-Jiménez, Raúl-Ulises García-Moreno, and Dora Calderón-Nepamuceno); (29) Transcription and annotation of a Japanese accented spoken corpus of L2 Spanish for the development of CAPT applications (Mario Carranza); (30) Using ontologies to interlink linguistic annotations and improve their accuracy (Antonio Pareja-Lora); (31) The importance of corpora in translation studies: a practical case (Montserrat Bermúdez Bausela); (32) Using corpus management tools in public service translator training: an example of its application in the translation of judgments (María Del Mar Sánchez Ramos and Francisco J. Vigier Moreno); and (33) Integrating computer-assisted translation tools into language learning (María Fernández-Parra). An author index is included. (Individual papers contain references.) [The publication of this volume has been partly funded by the following grants and/or projects: Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (grant ref. FFI2011-29829), eLITE-CM project (grant ref. H2015/HUM-3426, and the European Commission.]

Learners are increasingly accessing free online and open resources, tools, and spaces where they can develop their language skills beyond the classroom, alone, or in collaboration with others, and often whilst engaging in purposeful and enjoyable activities. Teachers need to find ways to explore and connect these activities productively with the formal learning that they design for their students, as shown in many of the contributions in this volume. This collection is addressed primarily to foreign and second language teachers in secondary and tertiary education. Authors were asked to provide sufficient context and detail about their projects to enable other practitioners to replicate or build upon the activities described in each case study. Whilst these are not research papers, the projects here included are often the result of pedagogical research, engagement with open education, and extensive experience of language learning and teaching. This volume includes: (1) Introduction to New Case Studies of Openness in and Beyond the Language Classroom (Anna Comas-Quinn, Ana Beaven, and Barbara Sawhill); (2) An Inclusionary Open Access Textbook for Portuguese (Carlos Pio and Eduardo Viana da Silva); (3) Creating and Implementing Open Educational Resources for the Spanish as a Heritage Language Classroom (Evelyn Durán Urrea and Jocelly G. Meiners); (4) Italian Open Education: Virtual Reality Immersions for the Language Classroom (Margherita Berti); (5) Embedding OERs for the Development of Information Literacy in the Foreign Language Classroom (Odette Gabaudan and Susanna Nocchi); (6) Learning in the Open: Integrating Language and Culture Through Student Curation, Virtual Exchange, and OER (Lionel Mathieu, Kathryn Murphy-Judy, Robert Godwin-Jones, Laura Middlebrooks, and Natalia Boykova); (7) Building Bridges Not Walls -- Wikipedia in Translation Studies (Ewan McAndrew and Lorna Campbell); (8) Working with Online Communities: Translating TED Talks (Anna Comas-Quinn and Mara Fuertes Gutiérrez); (9) Repurposing MOOCs for Self-Regulated Language Learning in an English for Academic Purposes Course (Barbara Conde Gafaro); (10) Assessing Language Student Interaction and Engagement via Twitter (Olivia Kelly); (11) 'Your Language Development': Harnessing Openness to Integrate Independent Language Learning into the Curriculum (Tita Beaven); (12) Open Practices as a Catalyst for Language Teachers' Professional Development (Patricia Daniels); (13) Empowering Teachers and Learners in and Beyond Classrooms: Focus on OEPs in Reading Activities (Fanny Meunier, Alice Meurice, and Julie Van De Vyver); and (14) Exploratory Practice: A Way of Opening up Access to Research by Classroom Teachers and Learners (Assia Slimani-Rolls).

From 2000 to 2012 the number of Internet users rose from less than 0.4 billion to 2.4 billion. Scholarly, evidence-based Internet research is of critical importance. The field of Internet research explores the Internet as a social, political and educational phenomenon, providing theoretical and practical contributions to understanding, and informing practice, policy and further research. This new collection is a unique and welcome work. The editors have compiled a diverse range of new scholarly, peer-reviewed research, spanning the fields of education, arts, the social sciences and technology. The authors provide academic perspectives, both theoretical and practical, on the Internet and citizenship, education, employment, gender, identity, friendship, language, poetry, literature and more. The collection comprises a rich resource for researchers and practitioners alike. Following Notes on Contributors, Acknowledgements, a Foreword, and "Introduction on Internet Research, Theory, and Practice: Perspectives from Ireland" (Cathy Fowley, Claire English, and Sylvie Thouësny), the following sections and papers are included: Section 1: Research and Reflections on Ethics and Digital Culture: (1) "Ethical Issues in Internet Research: International Good Practice and Irish Research Ethics Documents" (Heike Felzmann); (2) "Studying Young "People's Blogs: Ethical Implications" (Cathy Fowley); (3) "Poetic Machines: From Paper to Pixel" (Jeneen Naji); (4) "A Second Level Pictorial Turn? The Emergence of Digital Ekphrasis from the Visuality of New Media" (Nina Shiel); and (5) "Digital Reading: A Question of Prelectio?" (Noel Fitzpatrick). Section 2: Research and Reflections on Societal Practices; (6) "Constructions of Violence and Masculinity in the Digital Age" (Jennifer Patterson); (7) "The Public Sphere and Online Social Media: Exploring the Use of Online Social Media as Discursive Spaces in an Irish Context" (Claire English); (8) "Not Quite Kicking Off Everywhere: Feminist Notes on Digital Liberation" (Angela Nagle); (9) "We are All Friends Nowadays: But What is the Outcome of Online Friendship for Young People in Terms of Individual Social Capital?" (Anne Rice); (10) "Romanian Diaspora in the Making? An Online Ethnography of Romaniancommunity.net" (Gloria Macri); (11) "What's 'Smart' About Working from Home: Telework and the Sustainable Consumption of Distance in Ireland?" (Michael Hynes); and (12) "Surveillance Privacy and Technology: Contemporary Irish Perspectives" (Kenny Doyle). Section 3: Research and Reflections on Educational Practices: (13) Digital Divide in Post-Primary Schools (Ann Marcus-Quinn and Oliver McGarr); (14) "The Use of a Task-Based Online Forum in Language Teaching: Learning Practices and Outcomes (Marie-Thérèse Batardière); (15) "Using Facebook in an Irish Third-Level Education Context: A Case-Study" (Catherine Jeanneau); (16) "Internet-Based Textual Interventions and Interactions: How Language Learners Engage Online in a Written Task" (Sylvie Thouësny); and (17) "Information and Communication Technology in Foreign Language Teaching: Leveraging the Internet to Make Language Learning Real" (Etáin Watson). Section 4: Research and Reflections on Irish Resources: (18) "The Born Digital Graduate: Multiple Representations of and Within Digital Humanities PhD Theses" (Sharon Webb, Aja Teehan, and John Keating); (19) DHO: Discovery--Stargazing from the Ground Up" (Niall O'Leary); (20) "Database in Theory and Practice: The Bibliography of Irish Literary Criticism" (Sonia Howell); (21) "Digital Humanities and Political Innovation: The SOWIT Model" (Vanessa Liston, Clodagh Harris, Mark O'Toole, and Margaret Liston). A Name Index is included.

This report brings together research publicly released by the National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER) over the year. The 2017 compilation reflects an extensive collection of NCVER research activities undertaken during 2017, comprising reports, summaries, infographics, occasional papers, presentations and webinars. NCVER has organized their research program into three priority areas: (1) Structures and systems for skilling and learning; (2) The impact of vocational education and training; and (3) Teaching and learning. Summaries of projects that were published under each of these priorities are presented in this report. [For the previous year, "Research Messages 2016," see ED573529.]

This white paper reports on findings from the fourth survey of social media in advancement, conducted in January and February, 2013 by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE), Huron Education, and mStoner. The survey was taken by more than 1,000 CASE members. Featured are six case studies on the effective use of social media in fundraising: (1) Columbia University: A Day to Raise Millions (Gareth Henderson); (2) Phillips Exeter Academy: Engaging Young Alumni of an Independent School (Gareth Henderson); (3) Indiana University: Turning Alumni Passion into Engagement (Gareth Henderson); (4) UMass Amherst: Developing a Campus Culture of Philanthropy (Justin Ware); (5) Skidmore College: A 24-Hour Challenge for Alumni Giving (Gareth Henderson); and (6) Georgetown University: Making Giving a Game (Justin Ware). In this fourth annual exploration of the use of social media in institutional advancement in education some things have remained stable over those four years, there have been changes, too. One of the most important is that looking at the data in total, there are encouraging signs of sophistication in the way that many institutions are approaching social media--for example, a higher percentage of respondents who said they are "very successful" or "a model" for use of social media (28 percent, compared to 21 percent in 2012). Also important is the growing use of social media in campaigns of all kinds, including those focused on raising money. The big news this year is that 59 percent of the 382 respondents who said they use social media in campaigns reported that their fundraising and development campaigns involved social media. An appendix, "#Demographics," is included.

This book gives an overview of the state-of-the-art in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL). It is organized as a collection of 14 research themes, each introduced by leading experts and including references to the most relevant literature on the theme of each cluster. Additionally, each chapter discusses four seminal papers on the theme with expert commentaries and updates. This volume is of high value to people entering the field of learning with technology, to doctoral students and researchers exploring the breadth of TEL, and to experienced researchers wanting to keep up with latest developments. This book contains the following chapters: (1) Research Themes in Technology Enhanced Learning (Erik Duval, Mike Sharples, and Rosamund Sutherland); (2) Technology and Theories of Learning (Charles Crook and Rosamund Sutherland); (3) Constructionism and Microworlds (Richard Noss and Celia Hoyles); (4) Design Methods for TEL (Susan McKenney and Yael Kali); (5) Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (Sten Ludvigsen and Hans Christian Arnseth); (6) Mass Collaboration with Social Software in TEL (Ulrike Cress and Gerhard Fischer); (7) Learning Spaces (Brett Bligh and Charles Crook); (8) Mobile Learning (Mike Sharples and Daniel Spikol); (9) Virtual Worlds for Learning (Maggi Savin-Baden, Liz Falconer, Katherine Wimpenny, and Michael Callaghan); (10) Adaptive Intelligent Learning Environments (Eelco Herder, Sergey Sosnovsky, and Vania Dimitrova); (11) Self-Regulated Learning in Technology Enhanced Learning Environments (Donatella Persico and Karl Steffens); (12) Assessment for Learning (Carlo Perrotta and Denise Whitelock); (13) Learning Objects (Tom Boyle and Erik Duval); (14) Technical Learning Infrastructure, Interoperability and Standards (Xavier Ochoa and Stefaan Ternier); and (15) Digital Divides and Social Justice in Technology-Enhanced Learning (Lyndsay Grant and Rebecca Eynon).

Fresh from a party, a teen posts a photo on Facebook of a friend drinking a beer. A college student repurposes an article from Wikipedia for a paper. A group of players in a multiplayer online game routinely cheat new players by selling them worthless virtual accessories for high prices. In "Disconnected", Carrie James examines how young people and the adults in their lives think about these sorts of online dilemmas, describing ethical blind spots and disconnects. Drawing on extensive interviews with young people between the ages of 10 and 25, James describes the nature of their thinking about privacy, property, and participation online. She identifies three ways that young people approach online activities. A teen might practice "self-focused thinking," concerned mostly about consequences for herself; "moral thinking," concerned about the consequences for people he knows; or "ethical thinking," concerned about unknown individuals and larger communities. James finds, among other things, that youth are often blind to moral or ethical concerns about privacy; that attitudes toward property range from "what's theirs is theirs" to "free for all"; that hostile speech can be met with a belief that online content is "just a joke"; and that adults who are consulted about such dilemmas often emphasize personal safety issues over online ethics and citizenship. Considering ways to address the digital ethics gap, James offers a vision of "conscientious connectivity", which involves ethical thinking skills but, perhaps more important, is marked by sensitivity to the dilemmas posed by online life, a motivation to wrestle with them, and a sense of moral agency that supports socially positive online actions. [Foreword by Henry Jenkins.]

This paper presents initial research results of an intervention into higher educational teaching and studying practices from facilitators` point of view. The intervention was implemented into an international Master΄s level online course mediated by landscapes of social media tools and services. In this course more emphasis was put on a shift of control from a facilitator to a student or a group of students in the following aspects: setting up one΄s study goals, choosing activities, selecting appropriate resources, including technology and defining one΄s evaluation criteria. The initial analysis showed that the facilitators gained a lot in terms of understanding the benefits of exploiting social media tools and services for their teaching practices, perceiving a need of having a different role as well as the shortages and problems while being a facilitator in such a course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interactive storytelling is an interesting cross-disciplinary area that has importance in research as well as entertainment. In this paper we explore a new area of interactive storytelling that blurs the line between traditional interactive fiction and collaborative writing. We present a system where the user and computer take turns in writing sentences of a fictional narrative. Sentences contributed by the computer are selected from a collection of millions of stories extracted from Internet weblogs. By leveraging the large amounts of personal narrative content available on the web, we show that even with a simple approach our system can produce compelling stories with our users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online book search services allow users to tag and review books but do not include such data in the search index, which only contains titles, author names and professional subject descriptors. Such professional metadata is a limited description of the book, whereas tags and reviews can describe the content in more detail and cover many other aspects such as quality, writing style and engagement. In this paper we investigate the impact of including such user-generated content in the search index of a large collection of book records from Amazon and LibraryThing. We find that professional metadata is often too limited to provide good recall and precision and that both user reviews and tags can substantially improve performance. We perform a detailed analysis of different types of metadata and their impact on a number of topic categories and find that user-generated content is effective for a range of information needs. These findings are of direct relevance to large online book sellers and social cataloguing sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social Media and user-generated content can be used as a `call for action' to let users contribute content to other users' multimedia experience. If combined with Serious Games and used for knowledge exchange among peers, Social Media content can be used to influence and enrich one's gameplay experience as well as raise attention of connected persons in an Online Social Network (OSN) environment. In this paper we will describe the technical setup of a serious game connected to an OSN (here: facebook) via a social communication middleware. Befriended persons that are currently online can contribute content to specific calls from the game via a dynamically generated web interface that is linked to published notifications in the OSN. Results of a first study show that both, game player and connected people of the OSN, appreciate the personalization and participation via user-generated content that is integrated into the game play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are over 300 known school shooting cases in the world and over ten known cases where the perpetrator(s) have been prohibited to perform the attack at the last moment or earlier. Interesting from our point of view is that in many cases the perpetrators have expressed their views in social media or on their web page well in advance, and often also left suicide messages in blogs and other forums before their attack, along the planned date and place. This has become more common towards the end of this decennium. In some cases this has made it possible to prevent the attack. In this paper we will look at the possibilities to find commonalities of the perpetrators, beyond the fact that they are all males from eleven to roughly 25 years old, and possibilities to follow their traces in the digital sphere in order to cut the dangerous development towards an attack. Should this not be possible, then an attack should be averted before it happens. We are especially interested in the multimedia data mining methods and social network mining and analysis that can be used to detect the possible perpetrators in time. We also present in this paper a probabilistic model that can be used to evaluate the success/failure rate of the detection of the possible perpetrators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an ongoing multi-disciplinary research-and development project in which we are exploring emerging methods and practices for participatory design of tools and content of accessibility information in India and Sweden, based on user created content. The initial development of the AUGMENT-Project also includes the production of a prototype for sharing information. The joint set up and unfolding of public digital spaces and cooperative creation of processes and infrastructure for user-driven accessibility information is making use of existing handheld mobile phones which offer the possibility to upload pictures and comments via an application with a map-based interface. The research initiative is exploring and comparing cross-cultural participatory methods for cultivation of shared transformational spaces. The paper discusses both the notion of user-driven content and co-creation of tools and methods, drawing upon the tradition of Scandinavian Systems Design, explicitly arguing for direct user-representation in systems development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter describes a need for Smart Media to enhance the vision of the Smart Internet. Smart Media is introduced as a mechanism to bridge Smart Services and Smart Interactions. Smart Media extends the existing notions of Media in HCI such as Hypermedia, New Media, Adaptive Hypermedia, and Social Media. There are three main contributions from this paper: (1) A historical perspective of media in HCI and how media could benefit from smartness; (2) through some high level sample scenarios, a proposal for Smart Media to meet the vision of the Smart Internet; and (3) a detailed example of how Smart Media could play a role in software development. The paper concludes by outlining some of the key challenges that need to be faced in realizing and applying Smart Media objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an approach for collaborative project management. The focus is on the support of collaboration, communication and trust. Several project management tools exist for monitoring and control the performance of project tasks. However, support of important intangible assets is more difficult to find. In the paper a leadership approach is identified as a management means and the use of new IT technology, especially social media for support of leadership in project management is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most visible trends on the Web is the emergence of ˵Social Web″ sites which facilitate the creation and gathering of knowledge through the simplification of user contributions via blogs, tagging and folksonomies, wikis, podcasts, and the deployment of online social networks. The Social Web has enabled community-based knowledge acquisition with efforts like the Wikipedia demonstrating the ˵wisdom of the crowds″ in creating the world΄s largest online encyclopaedia. Although it is difficult to define the exact boundaries of what structures or abstractions belong to the Social Web, a common property of such sites is that they facilitate collaboration and sharing between users with low technical barriers, although usually on single sites. As more social websites form around the connections between people and their objects of interest, and as these ˵object-centred networks″ grow bigger and more diverse, more intuitive methods are needed for representing and navigating the content items in these sites: both within and across social websites. Also, to better enable user access to multiple sites, interoperability among social websites is required in terms of both the content objects and the person-to-person networks expressed on each site. This requires representation mechanisms to interconnect people and objects on the Social Web in an interoperable and extensible way. The Semantic Web provides such representation mechanisms: it can be used to link people and objects by representing the heterogeneous ties that bind us all to each other (either directly or indirectly). In this paper, we will describe methods that build on agreed-upon Semantic Web formats to describe people, content objects, and the connections that bind them together explicitly or implicitly, enabling social websites to interoperate by appealing to some common semantics. We will also focus on how developers can use the Semantic Web to augment the ways in which they create,reuse, and link content on social networking sites and social websites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a semi-automatic tool that assists experts in their daily work of monitoring the reputation of entities–companies, organizations or public figures–in Twitter. The tool automatically annotates tweets for relevance (Is the tweet about the entity?), reputational polarity (Does the tweet convey positive or negative implications for the reputation of the entity?), groups tweets in topics and display topics in decreasing order of relevance from a reputational perspective. The interface helps the user to understand the content being analyzed and also to produce a manually annotated version of the data starting from the output of the automatic annotation processes. A demo is available at: http://nlp.uned.es/orma/ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the advance of Internet and Web 2.0 technologies, it is easy to extract thousands of threads about a topic of interest from an online forum but it is nontrivial to capture the blueprint of different aspects (i.e., subtopic, or facet) associated with the topic. To better understand and analyze a forum discussion given topic, it is important to uncover the evolution relationships (temporal dependencies) between different topic aspects (i.e. how the discussion topic is evolving). Traditional Topic Detection and Tracking (TDT) techniques usually organize topics as a flat structure but it does not present the evolution relationships between topic aspects. In addition, the properties of short and sparse messages make the content-based TDT techniques difficult to perform well in identifying evolution relationships. The contributions in this paper are two-folded. We formally define a topic aspect evolution graph modeling framework and propose to utilize social network information, content similarity and temporal proximity to model evolution relationships between topic aspects. The experimental results showed that, by incorporating social network information, our technique significantly outperformed content-based technique in the task of extracting evolution relationships between topic aspects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information appearing in social media provides a challenge for determining the provenance of the information. However, the same characteristics that make the social media environment challenging provide unique and untapped opportunities for solving the information provenance problem for social media. Current approaches for tracking provenance information do not scale for social media and consequently there is a gap in provenance methodologies and technologies providing exciting research opportunities for computer scientists and sociologists. This paper introduces a theoretical approach aimed guiding future efforts to realize a provenance capability for social media that is not available today. The guiding vision is the use of social media information itself to realize a useful amount provenance data for information in social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public health-related topics are difficult to identify in large conversational datasets like Twitter. This study examines how to model and discover public health topics and themes in tweets. Tobacco use is chosen as a test case to demonstrate the effectiveness of topic modeling via LDA across a large, representational dataset from the United States, as well as across a smaller subset that was seeded by tobacco-related queries. Topic modeling across the large dataset uncovers several public health-related topics, although tobacco is not detected by this method. However, topic modeling across the tobacco subset provides valuable insight about tobacco use in the United States. The methods used in this paper provide a possible toolset for public health researchers and practitioners to better understand public health problems through large datasets of conversational data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As news media have been expected to provide valuable news contents to readers, credibility of each medium depends on what news contents it has created and delivered. In traditional news media, staff editors look into news articles and arrange news contents to enhance their media credibility. By contrast, in social news services, general users play an important role in selecting news contents through voting behavior as it is practically impossible for staff editors to go through thousands of articles sent to the services. However, although social news services have strived to develop news ranking systems that select valuable news contents utilizing users΄ participation, they still represent popularity rather than credibility, or give users too much burden. In this paper, we examined whether there is a group of elite users who votes for articles whose journalistic values are higher than others. To do this, we firstly assessed journalistic values of 100 social news contents with a survey. Then, we extracted a group of elite users based on what articles they had voted for. To prove that the elite group shows a tendency to vote for journalistically valuable news contents, we analyzed their voting behavior in another news pool. Finally, we concluded with a promising result that news contents voted by the elite users show significantly higher credibility scores than other news stories do while the number of votes from general users is not significantly correlated with the scores. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social networks and social media channels have experienced phenomenal growth and influence over the last few years and provide a platform where consumers share video clips, pictures and texts to express their opinions and experiences of products and services. This raises major issues for hotels and travel firms, when consumers resort to instantly available, online and unmanaged information to choose destinations, accommodation and travel suppliers. This paper examines the phenomenon of shared ˵content″ online and particularly investigates, why, when, where and what type of content (young) travel consumers share online in the context of a recent ˵trip″. The method used is an online survey with mostly quantitative data gathered from nearly 450 respondents. The preliminary results reveal that most respondents post content within a week of completing a trip, that they mostly post text and photos and that they are more likely to post content on their ˵own″ social media website (e.g. Facebook, MySpace) than on a commercial supplier/intermediary website. Recommendations are made for marketers in the context of promoting post-purchase behaviour, e.g. in terms of the timing and content, and offers conclusions that support further examination of this phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online communities, social networks and social media in general have been recognised as important information resource for consumers and are more and more influencing the travel planning of consumers nowadays (Gretzel & Yoo, 2008; Arsal et al, 2008). Consumers cannot only receive content from the Internet, but also generate their own content in form of travelogues, photos, videos, reviews or even tweets and status updates on social networks like Facebook or Twitter. This so called User Generated Content (UCG) often is perceived more reliable than information provided by the destination or tourism service provider and subsequently considered as substitute for word of mouth (Niininen et al, 2006). While particular attention was given to studying the online travel planning and booking behaviour of the overall population, less attention was paid to this behaviour when it comes to disabled travellers. The survey results presented in this paper therefore provide interesting insights regarding this issue as well as the general trip planning behaviour of people with impairments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to describe and explain the role of Communities of Practice (CoPs) as an informal communication mechanism in initiating, improving, and fostering collaboration in the digital age. CoPs play a critical role in the management of shared knowledge and create value for both their members and organizations. The advent of the Internet and specifically the World Wide Web (WWW) has forever changed the means of accessing and sharing data and information. With the inception of Web 2.0 technologies and social-networking sites in recent years, connections and relationships are now not only nurtured and sustained in an online environment, but also established through creating virtual communities. The authors also assert that the inception of Web 2.0 technologies and social-networking sites is a great advancement in providing a rich learning, communication, and collaborative environment, especially through the transfer of tacit knowledge that we take for granted in our face-to-face interactions. These reflections are based on personal communications with members of virtual CoPs and literature on the impact of CoPs on decision-making and knowledge management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Service development in companies can have a new form when using social media as a communication interface. This communication can occur between company and its customers, but also the company΄s internal communication using social media services can prove beneficial. In this paper, we review and analyze the use of social media as a means for company communication in general and specifically in the case of customer involvement in service development. As a result, we present guidelines for of using social media tools in companies for improving the customer centric service development process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media have become important tools for social networking. However, most services are too complicated for people with learning disabilities or cognitive impairments. The problems are mostly related to understanding the different concepts of the environment and related special terminology, but accessibility and usability problems common to all internet services also apply. To tackle these problems, a project was started, aiming to create an easy-to-use social network service for the above mentioned target group by applying user-centered design methods. This paper explains the rationale for starting the project and also describes the some of the implementation methods used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a first outline of a typology of distributed knowledge co-creation in virtual communities based on Porter`s typology of virtual communities. The typology is based on empirical results from the analyses of social media, and a discussion of case study results from India proves the adaptability as well as usefulness of the typology. At the same time, the case study serves as an example to depict a socio-economic perspective on social media and knowledge management in Digital Ecosystems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tagging systems enable users to annotate resources with freely chosen keywords. The evolving bunch of tag assignments is called folksonomy and there exist already some approaches that exploit folksonomies to improve resource retrieval. In this paper, we analyze and compare graph-based ranking algorithms: FolkRank and SocialPageRank. We enhance these algorithms by exploiting the context of tags, and evaluate the results on the GroupMe! dataset. In GroupMe!, users can organize and maintain arbitrary Web resources in self-defined groups. When users annotate resources in GroupMe!, this can be interpreted in context of a certain group. The grouping activity itself is easy for users to perform. However, it delivers valuable semantic information about resources and their context. We present GRank that uses the context information to improve and optimize the detection of relevant search results, and compare different strategies for ranking result lists in folksonomy systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 concepts offer a whole new set of collaborative tools that allow new approaches to market research, in order to explore continuously and ever fast-growing social and media environments. Simultaneously, the exponential growth of online social networks, along with a combination of computer-based tools, is contributing to the construction of new kinds of research communities, in which respondents interact with researchers as well as with each other. Furthermore, by studying the networks, researchers are able to manage multiple data sources - user-generated contents. The main purpose of this paper is to propose a new concept of Distributed Informal Information Systems for Innovation that arises from the interaction of the accumulated stock of knowledge emerging at the individual (micro) level. A descriptive study is to unveil and report when and how market research professionals use social networks for their work, creating, therefore, distributed information systems for innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a methodology for the systematic exploitation of the emerging web 2.0 social media by government organizations in the processes of public policies formulation, aiming to enhance e-participation, in combination with established simulation modeling techniques and tools. It is based on the concept of `Policy Gadget΄ (Padget), which is a micro web application combining a policy message with underlying group knowledge in social media (in the form of content and user activities) and interacting with citizens in popular web 2.0 locations in order to get and convey their input to policy makers. Such `Padgets΄ are created by a central platform-toolset and then deployed in many different Web 2.0 media. Citizens input from them will be used in various simulation modeling techniques and tools (such as the `Systems Dynamics΄), which are going to simulate different policy options and estimate their outcomes and effectiveness. A use case scenario of the proposed methodology is presented, which outlines how it can be used in `real life΄ public policy design problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the popularity of social image-sharing websites, the amount of images uploaded and shared among the users has increased explosively. To allow keyword search, the system constructs an index from image tags assigned by the users. The tag-based image retrieval approach, although very scalable, has some serious drawbacks due to the problems of tag spamming and subjectivity in tagging. In this paper, we propose an approach for improving the tag-based image retrieval by exploiting some techniques in content-based image retrieval (CBIR). Given an image collection, we construct an index based on 130-scale Munsell-based colors. Users are allowed to perform query by keywords with color and/or tone selection. The color index is also used for improving ranking of search results via the user relevance feedback. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online knowledge sharing sites have recently exploded in popularity, and have began to play an important role in online information seeking. Unfortunately, many factors that influence the effectiveness of the information exchange in these communities are not well understood. This paper is an attempt to fill this gap by exploring the dynamics of information sharing in such sites - that is, identifying the factors that can explain how people respond to information requests. As a case study, we use Yahoo! Answers, one of the leading knowledge sharing portals on the web with millions of active participants. We follow the progress of thousands of questions, from posting until resolution. We examine contextual factors such as the topical area of the questions, as well as intrinsic factors of question wording, subjectivity, sentiment, and other characteristics that could influence how a community responds to an information request. Our findings could be useful for improving existing collaborative question answering systems, and for designing the next generation of knowledge sharing communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collaborative tagging allows users to tag online resources. We refer to the large database of tags and their relationships as a tag space. In a tag space, the popularity and correlation amongst tags capture the current social interests, and taxonomy is a useful way to organize these tags. As tags change over time, it is imperative to incorporate the temporal tag evolution into the taxonomies. In this paper, we formalize the problem of evolutionary taxonomy generation over a large database of tags. The proposed evolutionary taxonomy framework consists of two key features. Firstly, we develop a novel context-aware edge selection algorithm for taxonomy extraction. Secondly, we propose several algorithms for evolutionary taxonomy fusion. We conduct an extensive performance study using a very large real-life dataset (i.e., Del.ici.ous). The empirical results clearly show that our approach is effective and efficient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tagging has been widely used and studied in various domains. Recently, people-tagging has emerged as a means to categorize contacts, and is also used in some social access control mechanisms. In this paper, we investigate whether there are differences between people-tagging and bookmark-tagging. We show that the way we tag documents about people, who we do not know personally, is similar to the way we tag online documents (i.e., bookmarks) about other categories (i.e., city, country, event). However, we show that the tags assigned to a document related to a friend, differ from the tags assigned to someone we do not know personally. We also analyze whether the age and gender of a taggee - a person, who is tagged by others - have influences on social people-tags (i.e., people-tags assigned in social Web 2.0 platforms). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What makes a song to a chart hit? Many people are trying to find the answer to this question. Previous attempts to identify hit songs have mostly focused on the intrinsic characteristics of the songs, such as lyrics and audio features. As social networks become more and more popular and some specialize on certain topics, information about users΄ music tastes becomes available and easy to exploit. In the present paper we introduce a new method for predicting the potential of music tracks for becoming hits, which instead of relying on intrinsic characteristics of the tracks directly uses data mined from a music social network and the relationships between tracks, artists and albums. We evaluate the performance of our algorithms through a set of experiments and the results indicate good accuracy in correctly identifying music hits, as well as significant improvement over existing approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Web 2.0 applications such as delicious, flickr or lastfm have recently become extremely popular and as a result, a large amount of semantically rich metadata produced by users becomes available and exploitable. Tag information can be used for many purposes (e.g. user profiling, recommendations, clustering etc), though the benefit of tags for search is by far the most discussed usage. Tag types differ largely across systems and previous studies showed that, while some tag type categories might be useful for some particular users when searching, they may not bring any benefit to others. The present paper proposes an approach which utilizes rule-based as well as model-based methods, in order to automatically identify exactly these different types of tags. We compare the automatic tag classification produced by our algorithms against a ground truth data set, consisting of manual tag type assignments produced by human raters. Experimental results show that our methods can identify tag types with high accuracy, thus enabling further improvement of systems making use of social tags. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advances in location-sensing technology, coupled with an increasingly pervasive wireless Internet, have made it possible (and increasingly easy) to access and share information with context of one΄s geospatial location. We conducted a four-phase study, with 27 students, to explore the practices surrounding the creation, interpretation and sharing of map annotations in specific social contexts. We found that annotation authors consider multiple factors when deciding how to annotate maps, including the perceived utility to the audience and how their contributions will reflect on the image they project to others. Consumers of annotations value the novelty of information, but must be convinced of the author΄s credibility. In this paper we describe our study, present the results, and discuss implications for the design of software for sharing map annotations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Work in paper and chemical factories include controlling several processes and cooperating with several workers. This needs lots of awareness and information sharing. Breakdowns in information sharing can lead to low quality production and unsafe work situations. During last couple of years different social media and web 2.0 applications and services have become popular ways of sharing information in leisure environment. We created a prototype from social media perspective to respond the needs in information sharing in factories. Our electronic notice board prototype (El Nobo) uses a metaphor from process operators΄ current work environment and is designed to face the specific needs that occur in the chemical factory process operators΄ work. The prototype aims to introduce social media type of working practices to process control work and to test the possibilities of informal cross-organizational information sharing in industrial settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]