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A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Sustainable Education and Approaches".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2022) | Viewed by 79808

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Prof. Dr. Alfonso Chaves-Montero

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Department of Sociology, Social Work and Public Health, Faculty of Social Work, COIDESO Research Centre, Contemporary Thought and Innovation for Social Development, University of Huelva, 21007 Huelva, Spain
Interests: teleworking; social services; COVID-19; quality of working life; job satisfaction; Twitter; citizen interactions; political discourse; network analysis
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Social networks are important in today's life and in times of pandemics such as the one we are living in. In social networks, online and streaming discourse occurs in different areas such as politics, social and sustainable education, ethics, and it is quite possible and normal to find many fake news on these networks. With the advent of new technologies, the concept of public sphere is redefined, including these new media. The new cyberspaces are a new conception of the public sphere, as a place of information, contestation, organisation, discussion and political, social, educational, ethical, sustainable, etc. struggle. This rise of social networks in the current context arises from a deterioration of the conventional public sphere (traditional media and political organisations), giving rise to this new public sphere in which citizens can find and exchange dissimilar points of view. What we must ask ourselves is to what extent the use of social networks contributes to the democratisation of public life and what effects the use of fake news has on educational models and on the social construction of reality.

This special issue is framed around social media and the sustainable approach to research. Researchers can make scientific contributions on topics such as social networks and politics, social networks and education, social networks and sustainability, fake news, public ethics and sustainable education models. This will contribute to a deeper understanding of the multiple dimensions of the above-mentioned problems and issues.

Prof. Dr. Alfonso Chaves-Montero
Guest Editor

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Keywords

social networks
sustainability
education
fake news
ethics
policy

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Published Papers (11 papers)

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Research

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10 pages, 2243 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Social Services and Twitter: Analysis of Socio-Political Discourse in Spain from 2015 to 2019

by Alfonso Chaves-Montero

Sustainability 2023, 15(4), 3177; https://doi.org/10.3390/su15043177 - 9 Feb 2023

Cited by 5 | Viewed by 2256

Abstract

The fundamental role of social networks in all areas of our lives and of social and political interactions is also very important in this new digital environment. The study focused on the analysis of tweets related to social-service issues published on Twitter during the different electoral campaigns in Spain from 2015 to 2019. The sample is 6728 tweets generated between 2015 and 2019 on the topic “social services” for quantitative analysis. In this analysis, we use the Gephi tool to observe how these messages flow on Twitter. The aim was to understand the socio-political discourse of different actors on social services in order to identify priority topics and networks for active Twitter profiles. The results show that users use Twitter for informal communication during the election period, focusing on messages, condemnation and positive evaluation to increase their visibility and influence. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Education and Social Networks)

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12 pages, 579 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Networked Learning Communities in Promoting Teachers’ Receptivity to Change: How Professional Learning Beliefs and Behaviors Mediate

by Hui-Ling Wendy Pan and Wen-Yan Chen

Sustainability 2023, 15(3), 2396; https://doi.org/10.3390/su15032396 - 29 Jan 2023

Cited by 11 | Viewed by 3629

Abstract

More research on networked learning communities (NLCs) and the causal mechanism among the effects of NLCs are needed. To better understand the impacts of NLCs and the influential factors, this study intended to discover how teachers’ participation in networked learning communities affects their beliefs and behaviors of professional learning and further influence their receptivity to change. Adopting a survey design, we collected 226 valid questionnaires from the pilot schools joining the program of Learning Community under Leadership for Learning supported by the Ministry of Education in Taiwan. First, the results indicated that the program’s intervention of NLCs had a significant positive effect on teachers’ receptivity to change. Second, teachers’ participation in NLCs also showed a significant impact on their beliefs and behaviors regarding professional learning. Third, teachers’ beliefs in professional collaborative learning could significantly enhance their behaviors of professional collaborative learning. Fourth, the program’s intervention, employing hands-on professional learning activities, had a significant impact on teachers’ inclination to realize the program, both through direct influence and the mediation of beliefs about professional learning. The results acquired from this study would be conducive to developing strategies to support implementing the NLCs program. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Education and Social Networks)

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24 pages, 3947 KiB

Open AccessArticle

EFND: A Semantic, Visual, and Socially Augmented Deep Framework for Extreme Fake News Detection

by Muhammad Imran Nadeem, Kanwal Ahmed, Dun Li, Zhiyun Zheng, Hend Khalid Alkahtani, Samih M. Mostafa, Orken Mamyrbayev and Hala Abdel Hameed

Sustainability 2023, 15(1), 133; https://doi.org/10.3390/su15010133 - 22 Dec 2022

Cited by 24 | Viewed by 5711

Abstract

Due to the exponential increase in internet and social media users, fake news travels rapidly, and no one is immune to its adverse effects. Various machine learning approaches have evaluated text and images to categorize false news over time, but they lack a comprehensive representation of relevant features. This paper presents an automated method for detecting fake news to counteract the spread of disinformation. The proposed multimodal EFND integrates contextual, social context, and visual data from news articles and social media to build a multimodal feature vector with a high level of information density. Using a multimodal factorized bilinear pooling, the gathered features are fused to improve their correlation and offer a more accurate shared representation. Finally, a Multilayer Perceptron is implemented over the shared representation for the classification of fake news. EFND is evaluated using a group of standard fake news datasets known as “FakeNewsNet”. EFND has outperformed the baseline and state-of-the-art machine learning and deep learning models. Furthermore, the results of ablation studies have demonstrated the efficacy of the proposed framework. For the PolitiFact and GossipCop datasets, the EFND has achieved an accuracy of 0.988% and 0.990%, respectively. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Education and Social Networks)

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17 pages, 6092 KiB

Open AccessArticle

WhatsApp as a University Tutoring Resource

by Indira Gómez-Arteta, Cesar Gonzalo Vera-Vasquez, Jorge Mamani-Calcina, Héctor Cardona-Reyes and Klinge Orlando Villalba-Condori

Sustainability 2022, 14(19), 12304; https://doi.org/10.3390/su141912304 - 27 Sep 2022

Viewed by 2951

Abstract

Tutoring, as a process of accompaniment of university students, has among its purposes identification of and reflection on the various difficulties that can interfere in the development of student competencies. To the same end, the present research explores the possibility of using WhatsApp as a tutoring resource in universities, with an emphasis on identifying and reflecting on the academic, personal, and family problems of students. This case study uses a quasi-experimental approach with a treatment group and a control group intentionally selected at the Escuela Profesional de Educación Secundaria de la Universidad Nacional del Altiplano de Puno, Peru, during the first semester of the 2020 academic year. Data were collected using semi-structured interview guides and individual tutoring cards. The results show that this technological resource improved the university tutoring service among the students in the experimental group. It proved more flexible and attractive to students, who were motivated to externalize and reflect on their personal, family, and academic difficulties and showed increased openness to receiving help in problem solving them. On the other hand, student participation was less active in the control group. These findings affirm that WhatsApp is a resource that can allow more spontaneous and friendly communication between tutors and students, creating a context conducive to achieving the objectives of university tutoring. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Education and Social Networks)

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14 pages, 1035 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Counteracting French Fake News on Climate Change Using Language Models

by Paul Meddeb, Stefan Ruseti, Mihai Dascalu, Simina-Maria Terian and Sebastien Travadel

Sustainability 2022, 14(18), 11724; https://doi.org/10.3390/su141811724 - 19 Sep 2022

Cited by 8 | Viewed by 4702

Abstract

The unprecedented scale of disinformation on the Internet for more than a decade represents a serious challenge for democratic societies. When this process is focused on a well-established subject such as climate change, it can subvert measures and policies that various governmental bodies have taken to mitigate the phenomenon. It is therefore essential to effectively identify and counteract fake news on climate change. To do this, our main contribution represents a novel dataset with more than 2300 articles written in French, gathered using web scraping from all types of media dealing with climate change. Manual labeling was performed by two annotators with three classes: “fake”, “biased”, and “true”. Machine Learning models ranging from bag-of-words representations used by an SVM to Transformer-based architectures built on top of CamemBERT were built to automatically classify the articles. Our results, with an F1-score of 84.75% using the BERT-based model at the article level coupled with hand-crafted features specifically tailored for this task, represent a strong baseline. At the same time, we highlight perceptual properties as text sequences (i.e., fake, biased, and irrelevant text fragments) at the sentence level, with a macro F1 of 45.01% and a micro F1 of 78.11%. Based on these results, our proposed method facilitates the identification of fake news, and thus contributes to better education of the public. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Education and Social Networks)

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15 pages, 2323 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Online Learning, Mobile Learning, and Social Media Technologies: An Empirical Study on Constructivism Theory during the COVID-19 Pandemic

by Omar A. Alismaiel, Javier Cifuentes-Faura and Waleed Mugahed Al-Rahmi

Sustainability 2022, 14(18), 11134; https://doi.org/10.3390/su141811134 - 6 Sep 2022

Cited by 82 | Viewed by 16369

Abstract

The study’s main purpose was to discover the important factors that impact university students’ online learning and academic performance during the COVID-19 epidemic, as well as their usage of social media throughout the pandemic. Constructivism theory was used and developed with constructs mostly linked to leveraging social media for collaborative learning and student interaction during the COVID-19 pandemic, given the context-dependent nature of online learning during the epidemic. During the COVID-19 epidemic, additional components such as collaborative learning, student participation, and online learning were implemented. The enlarged model, which assesses students’ happiness and academic performance during the COVID-19 epidemic in connection to social media use, was validated using empirical data collected via an online survey questionnaire from 480 Saudi Arabian higher education students. AMOS-SEM was used to analyze the model’s various assumptions (Analysis of Moment Structures-Structural Equation Modeling). The findings revealed that (1) using social media for collaborative learning and students’ engagement has a direct positive impact on students’ interactivity with peers and teachers; (2) students’ interactivity with peers and teachers has a direct positive impact on online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic; (3) online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic mediates the relationship between students’ interactivity and satisfaction; (4) online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic mediates the relationship between students’ interactivity and satisfaction. Students, higher education institutions, and educational technology application suppliers would benefit greatly from the conclusions of this study, both theoretically and practically. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Education and Social Networks)

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14 pages, 290 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Relationship between Cyberbullying and Mental Health among University Students

by Sayed Ibrahim Ali and Nurjahan Begum Shahbuddin

Sustainability 2022, 14(11), 6881; https://doi.org/10.3390/su14116881 - 5 Jun 2022

Cited by 18 | Viewed by 24087

Abstract

Background: The term ‘cyberbullying’ is linked to traditional bullying, and both refer to oppression. This study aimed to determine the overall effects of cyberbullying on mental health among university students of various ages, and to investigate the extent to which victims (students) directed less attention and focus towards their academic achievement. Methods: The participants in this study were 326 male and female students from King Faisal University in the Al-Ahsa Governorate. The researchers in this study employed the descriptive correlative approach. Results: The study’s findings revealed that there were substantial variations in the categories of sex, academic specialty (medical and non-medical students), and family economic status, in relation to cyberbullying surveys. In addition, there was a significant negative relationship between cyberbullying and mental health. Conclusions: It is highly recommended that, in order to prevent cyberbullying, people of all generations need to be made aware of it via specific programs in different public areas, for example, in schools, colleges, and malls, and on social media. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Education and Social Networks)

12 pages, 1233 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Developing Resilience to Disinformation: A Game-Based Method for Future Communicators

by Mariana Cernicova-Buca and Daniel Ciurel

Sustainability 2022, 14(9), 5438; https://doi.org/10.3390/su14095438 - 30 Apr 2022

Cited by 6 | Viewed by 3642

Abstract

This paper analyzes the outcomes of a game-based educational process aiming to strengthen resilience to fake news. An innovative approach that considers linguistic choices as bases for manipulating information is used in an online classroom environment, students in communication being invited to understand, explain and reflect upon framing and information credibility, using as a topic of inquiry the refugee crisis of 2021 in Romania. Cognitive learning outcomes as well as learning dynamics were assessed using pre- and end-of game surveys. The results of the game are discussed in relation with the instructional goal to facilitate the understanding of communicative social actions, learning about disinformation that is deliberately misleading, as well as finding ways to break the disinformation code. The debriefing discussions after each stage of the game encouraged students to reflect upon their newly gained insights and increase their critical thinking capacity, in the effort to ensure a sustainable education in communication studies. The paper has the potential to enrich the educational strategies with innovative methods helping future professionals navigate the complex world of media messages. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Education and Social Networks)

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18 pages, 2049 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Interaction of Civil Engineering Students in Group Work through the Social Network Analysis

by Tito Castillo, Rodrigo F. Herrera, Tania Guffante, Ángel Paredes and Oscar Paredes

Sustainability 2021, 13(17), 9847; https://doi.org/10.3390/su13179847 - 2 Sep 2021

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 3772

Abstract

A sustainable approach in the construction industry requires civil engineering professionals with technical and soft skills. Those skills complement each other and facilitate the professional to work effectively in multidisciplinary groups during the development of construction projects. Universities apply collaborative learning methods such as group work (GW) in the classroom to achieve these skills. There is disagreement on the best way to select the members of the GW to achieve their best performance, but it is clear that it should favor the interaction of diverse actors to promote the development of soft skills. A random or criteria-based selection could bring groups of people very close together, leading to the academic homogeneity of GW members and impairing performance and learning. Even the most alert instructors lack information about the closeness of their students, so they rely on their intuition without having tools that allow them to confirm their assumptions or relate them to GW performance. The objective of this paper was to discover the social structures within the classrooms and to identify the groups of people close by trust, knowledge, and informal conversation to relate them to their GW performance. For this purpose, a social network analysis (SNA) was applied to Civil Engineering degree students. In addition, a correlation analysis between SNA metrics and GW grades was performed. The results show that beyond the way in which members are selected, there is a social structure that affects such selection and GW performance. This study presents information that can be used for instructors for a better GW selection that propitiates the development of soft skills in Civil Engineering students. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Education and Social Networks)

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Review

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39 pages, 8738 KiB

Open AccessReview

Learning from Each Other—A Bibliometric Review of Research on Information Disorders

by Ramona Bran, Laurentiu Tiru, Gabriela Grosseck, Carmen Holotescu and Laura Malita

Sustainability 2021, 13(18), 10094; https://doi.org/10.3390/su131810094 - 9 Sep 2021

Cited by 19 | Viewed by 5400

Abstract

Interest in research connected to information disorders has grown considerably in recent years. The phrase “information disorders” refers to three different notions: dis-, mis-, and malinformation. It is difficult to pin down this new and dynamic phenomenon of informational disruption and to assess its impact on society. Therefore, we conducted a bibliometric analysis on the complexity of information disorders using the Web of Science Core Collection database from 1975 to June 2021. We analyzed 8964 papers with the goal to have an overall picture of the topic, clarify the knowledge framework of research in this field, examine the development dynamics, identify future research directions and increase the understanding of the research on information disorders. The following are our main findings: the number of publications, authors, and journals has increased; research on information disorders has earned considerable attention in multiple academic fields; there are more and more works written in collaboration by scholars from different parts and cultures of the world. This paper makes important contributions to the literature, not only by providing researchers and practitioners with a coherent and perceptible intellectual basis to find answers, but also by bringing valuable insights for further investigation and future research directions. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Education and Social Networks)

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Other

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25 pages, 3850 KiB

Open AccessSystematic Review

Developing a Framework for Fake News Diffusion Control (FNDC) on Digital Media (DM): A Systematic Review 2010–2022

by Shakeel Ahmad Khan, Khurram Shahzad, Omer Shabbir and Abid Iqbal

Sustainability 2022, 14(22), 15287; https://doi.org/10.3390/su142215287 - 17 Nov 2022

Cited by 18 | Viewed by 5365

Abstract

This study sought to investigate factors causing the spread of fake news on digital media (DM) and to explore the sometimes disastrous consequences of fake news on social media. The study also aimed to construct a framework for fake news disaster management to control the dangers of false news on DM. The study applied PRISMA guidelines and techniques for exploring, devising, and inclusion and exclusion criteria. The search was carried out through 15 of the world’s leading digital databases. As a result, 31 peer-reviewed studies published in impact-factor journals of leading databases were included. Findings showed that several factors influenced the sharing of fake news on digital media (DM) platforms. Six major trending factors were the rise of technologies, social connections, political reasons, the absence of a controlling center, online business and marketing, and quick dissemination of information. The study identified the disadvantages of fake news (FN) on digital media (DM). A framework was constructed for managing fake news disasters to control the spread of fake news on digital media. This paper offers important theoretical contributions through the development of a framework for controlling fake news spread on digital media and by providing a valuable addition to the existing body of knowledge. The study offers practical assistance to top management, decision makers, and policymakers to devise policies to effectively manage problems caused by fake news dissemination. It provides practical strategies to address fake news disasters on digital media for redefining social values. This research also assists digital media managers in utilizing the proposed framework and controlling the harmful impact of fake news on social media. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Education and Social Networks)

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