In this work, we explore agenda-setting effects in the Twitter debate about the Brazilian Presidential Elections 2018. Our results reveal a complex dynamic in the transmission of the media agenda to the public with the distribution of shared media outlets aligned according to a truncated power-law, reflecting a "preferential attachment" behavior. However, the traditional media did not dominate the debate, as alternative media played an important role in the campaign. Measuring the euclidean distance of the topics found in the debate, we noticed that the titles of the articles shared in the tweets are closer to the text of tweets than the text of the articles. Nonetheless, when comparing with the complete corpus of tweets (tweets with links and without links), the text of the shared articles is closer, in a relationship of inverse proportionality with the distance of tweets to titles.
Tiago Santos, Jorge Louçã, Helder Coelho
Conference on Complex Systems 2020
Op-ed article on hate speech monitoring on social networks where I argue that a healthy digital ecosystem requires not only the monitoring of hate speech, but also the regulation of the existing digital market and the creation of public and cooperative digital service alternatives (PT).
P3 (Público)
In this paper, we study the relationship between social media and traditional media and their impact on democratic systems. We revisit the concepts of the public sphere and agenda‐setting and translate them into the current media landscape. Using topic‐modelling techniques, we then explore the effects of first level agenda‐setting in the Twitter debate on the Brexit referendum. Our results reveal a complex dynamic in the transmission of the media agenda to the public agenda. The traditional media dominated the debate, but not entirely, as alternative media played an important role in the campaign. The “Leave” campaign had more success in the transmission of its interpretative agenda, while the user‐generated content polarized the media's message. We conclude a list of recommendations to address the societal challenges posed by the transformation of the media environments.
Tiago Santos, Jorge Louçã, Helder Coelho
Systems Research and Behavioral Science
This paper investigates first-level agenda-setting effects on Twitter during UK's EU referendum campaign. Using topic-modeling techniques, we investigate the dynamics of the interaction between users and the media content, and how the media outlets relate to each other. Results show that traditional media outlets dominated the debate, but alternative media played an important part. The media outlets that supported “Leave” stood closer to users' opinion who contributed to polarize the media's message, with pro-Leave side successfully framing some media's message in his own terms.
Tiago Santos, Jorge Louçã, Helder Coelho
4th World Conference on Complex Systems (WCCS), Ouarzazate, Morocco (2019)
In the last few years, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have dominated the discussion of the role of online learning in the future of higher education (HE). The MOOC movement is mostly based in the USA where the for-profit educational start-ups such as Coursera, Udacity, and the MIT and Harvard-founded non-profit platform edX take the lead. On the European level, many Member States have recognized the potential impact of technology on education and e-learning initiatives have been launched. Some universities have joined the USA initiatives and others were created, like the pan-European initiative OpenupEd, supported by the European Commission (EC), as well as FutureLearn, Iversity, France Université Numérique (FUN), UNEDcoma or Miríada X. Nonetheless, European initiatives have been isolated and fragmented and the EU risks in lagging behind the USA and some Asian countries that are investing in ICT-based strategies to reshape education and training. The EU recognizes that has a role to play in the promotion of best practices and support exchanges across Member States. The EU intervention concerning the deployment and availability of digital technology and content through financial support, public-private partnerships and recommendations, could generate economies of scale and interoperability benefits, thus avoiding fragmentation. One solution that fits this line of action would be the creation of a shared European MOOC platform, where HE institutions (HEI) could publish their courses. Such platform would enable the collaboration of (pan-)European HEI in the development of new educational solutions which could otherwise be out of reach if designed by each institution on its own, promoting their international reach, including recruitment and support.
Carlos J. Costa, Manuela Aparicio, Tiago Santos
HOME - Higher education Online: MOOCs the European way
Position papers for European cooperation on MOOCs
Globalization and economic interdependency of a post-modern society point toward an internationalization mission for the university. However, on a global scale, social, economic, and cultural circumstances have significant effects upon an individual’s ability to show the merit required in higher education. The growing open access movement reveals the early emergence of a meta-university that bring cost-efficiencies to institutions through the shared development of educational materials, which is particularly important to the developing world. But despite the huge success in the dissemination and democratization of knowledge provided by the open access movement, it has attached a severe financial downside, and configures a hamper in educational innovation due to its failure in harnessing Web 2.0 collaborative technologies. In order to find a model that better suits the needs of collaborative teaching and learning in a networked information economy, two approaches are followed in this dissertation. The first consists in the analysis and comparison of the open education ecosystem. On the other approach, based on the previous results, we propose a MOOC model, Metaversia, for a collaborative network that harness the capital exchange potential, and knowledge-building opportunities that rests on the connections between people, enabling citizen's full participation in the actual networked information economy.
Tiago Santos
Advisors: Carlos J. Costa and Manuela Aparicio
Master in Open Source Software
The growing open access movement reveals the early emergence of a meta-university. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC), the most recent branch in the Open Education Resources (OER) movement, take a step forward in courses dissemination, integrating reputation and network aspects. Although MOOC's enrollment success in delivering courses to thousands of students per course, universities face several barriers that must be overcome in order to turn MOOC's sustainable. In this paper a literature review is presented. We propose a conceptual model of a MOOC, named Metaversia with knowledge-building based framework. The conceptual model is validated by a prototype implemented on Drupal, an open source content management system.
Tiago Santos, Carlos J. Costa, Manuela Aparicio
Proceedings of the Workshop on Open Source and Design of Communication