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The book has generated a passionate dialogue-disagreement (mostly but not entirely) with the book. Dialogue-disagreement is based on challenges, disagreements and rebuttals between opponents, often belonging to different, even irreconcilable, paradigms. The goal of dialogue-disagreement is not so much to convince the opponent to change their mind but rather to critically examine and problematize the two involved paradigms: the authors’ and the reviewer’s. By taking the generated challenges and disagreements seriously, both irreconcilable paradigms can grow through their replies. Dialogue-disagreement gives the participants–opponents the gift of revealing their own paradigmatic blind spots, which are often invisible from within their paradigms. Dialogue-disagreement is exploratory and based on an agnostic relationship between frenemies, i.e. “friendly enemies.”

This is a critical book review essay of Self Managed Learning and the New Educational Paradigm (Cunningham, 2021).

The reviewer views Ian Cunningham’s Self Managed Learning educational paradigm as a hybrid of Progressive and Democratic Education, while the reviewer sees his/her Self-Education paradigm as entirely Democratic (and Dialogic). Elsewhere, the reviewer discussed and critically analyzed the Progressive Education paradigm, which generally involves channeling the student’s learning activism and subjectivity toward learning outcomes desired by an educator. It uses the educator’s manipulation of the student’s subjectivity to make them study what the educator wants them to study. In contrast, the paradigm of Democratic Education assumes that the educatee is the final authority of their own education. The educatee decides whether to study, when to study, what to study, how to study, with whom to study, where to study, for what purpose to study and so on. The educatee makes these decisions by themselves or with the help of other people at the educatee’s discretion and conditions. The reviewer charges that Ian’s Self Managed Learning paradigm is a hybrid of both paradigms, with the Progressive Education paradigm taking the lead and exploiting the Democratic Education paradigm.

The book presented a unique, innovative practice worth a critical analysis. The reviewer’s dialogue-disagreement with the book reveals a particular hybrid of Progressive and Democratic Education which is common to some innovative self-directed learning.

This paper aims to study the role of self-concept in consumer relationships with anthropomorphised conversational artificially intelligent (AI) agents. First, the authors investigate how the self-congruence between consumer self-concept and AI and the integration of the conversational AI agent into consumer self-concept might influence such relationships. Second, the authors examine whether these links with self-concept have implications for mental well-being.

This study conducted in-depth interviews with 20 consumers who regularly use popular conversational AI agents for functional or emotional tasks. Based on a thematic analysis and an ideal-type analysis, this study derived a taxonomy of consumer–AI relationships, with self-congruence and self–AI integration as the two axes.

The findings unveil four different relationships that consumers forge with their conversational AI agents, which differ in self-congruence and self–AI integration. Both dimensions are prominent in replacement and committed relationships, where consumers rely on conversational AI agents for companionship and emotional tasks such as personal growth or as a means for overcoming past traumas. These two relationships carry well-being risks in terms of changing expectations that consumers seek to fulfil in human-to-human relationships. Conversely, in the functional relationship, the conversational AI agents are viewed as an important part of one’s professional performance; however, consumers maintain a low sense of self-congruence and distinguish themselves from the agent, also because of the fear of losing their sense of uniqueness and autonomy. Consumers in aspiring relationships rely on their agents for companionship to remedy social exclusion and loneliness, but feel this is prevented because of the agents’ technical limitations.

Although this study provides insights into the dynamics of consumer relationships with conversational AI agents, it comes with limitations. The sample of this study included users of conversational AI agents such as Siri, Google Assistant and Replika. However, future studies should also investigate other agents, such as ChatGPT. Moreover, the self-related processes studied here could be compared across public and private contexts. There is also a need to examine such complex relationships with longitudinal studies. Moreover, future research should explore how consumers’ self-concept could be negatively affected if the support provided by AI is withdrawn. Finally, this study reveals that in some cases, consumers are changing their expectations related to human-to-human relationships based on their interactions with conversational AI agents.

This study enables practitioners to identify specific anthropomorphic cues that can support the development of different types of consumer–AI relationships and to consider their consequences across a range of well-being aspects.

This research equips marketing scholars with a novel understanding of the role of self-concept in the relationships that consumers forge with popular conversational AI agents and the associated well-being implications.

Social media platforms are a pervasive technology that continues to define the modern world. While social media has brought many benefits to society in terms of connection and content sharing, numerous concerns remain for the governance of social media platforms going forward, including (but not limited to) the spread of misinformation, hate speech and online surveillance. However, the voice of citizens and other non-experts is often missing from such conversations in information systems literature, which has led to an alleged gap between research and the everyday life of citizens.

The authors address this gap by presenting findings from 16 h of online dialog with 25 citizens on social media platform governance. The online dialog was undertaken as part of a worldwide consultation project called “We, the internet”, which sought to provide citizens with a voice on a range of topics such as “Digitalization and Me,” “My Data, Your Data, Our Data” and “A Strong Digital Public Sphere.” Five phases of thematic analysis were undertaken by the authors to code the corpus of qualitative data.

Drawing on the Theory of Communicative Action, the authors discuss three dialogical processes critical to citizen discourse: lifeworld reasoning, rationalization and moral action. The findings point toward citizens’ perspectives of current and future issues associated with social media platform governance, including concerns around the multiplicity of digital identities, consent for vulnerable groups and transparency in content moderation. The findings also reveal citizens’ rationalization of the dilemmas faced in addressing these issues going forward, including tensions such as digital accountability vs data privacy, protection vs inclusion and algorithmic censorship vs free speech.

Based on outcomes from this dialogical process, moral actions in the form of policy recommendations are proposed by citizens and for citizens. The authors find that tackling these dark sides of digitalization is something too important to be left to “Big Tech” and equally requires an understanding of citizens’ perspectives to ensure an informed and positive imprint for change.

This paper aims to explore and review the potential of robotic rehabilitation as a treatment approach for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and its impact on the health and quality of life of AD patients.

The present discourse endeavors to provide a comprehensive overview of extant scholarly inquiries that have examined the salience of inhibitory mechanisms vis-à-vis robotic interventions and their impact on patients with AD. Specifically, this review aims to explicate the contemporary state of affairs in this realm by furnishing a detailed explication of ongoing research endeavors. With the objective of elucidating the significance of inhibitory processes in robotic therapies for individuals with AD, this analysis offers a critical appraisal of extant literature that probes the intersection of cognitive mechanisms and assistive technologies. Through a meticulous analysis of diverse scholarly contributions, this review advances a nuanced understanding of the intricate interplay between inhibitory processes and robotic interventions in the context of AD.

According to the review papers, it appears that implementing robot-assisted rehabilitation can serve as a pragmatic and effective solution for enhancing the well-being and overall quality of life of patients and families engaged with AD. Besides, this new feature in the robotic area is anticipated to have a critical role in the success of this innovative approach.

Due to the nascent nature of this cutting-edge technology and the constrained configuration of the mechanized entity in question, further protracted analysis is imperative to ascertain the advantages and drawbacks of robotic rehabilitation vis-à-vis individuals afflicted with Alzheimer’s ailment.

The potential for robots to serve as indispensable assets in the provision of care for individuals afflicted with AD is significant; however, their efficacy and appropriateness for utilization by caregivers of AD patients must be subjected to further rigorous scrutiny.

This paper reviews the current robotic method and compares the current state of the art for the AD patient.

This paper aims to help higher education institutions (HEIs) develop a better understanding of student support and services needs, thereby enabling them to allocate limited resources for initiatives that effectively improve student experience.

An assessment framework following the Kano analysis is developed to categorize student service features based on customer satisfaction and need fulfillment. The framework is used at a local university, using 23 service features listed as minimum requirements by the national regulatory body for education. Analysis of the satisfaction survey results and prioritization are based on quality indices derived from a factor of importance and the satisfaction gap. A survey was conducted for two academic years to generate a comparison of results.

Of the list mandated as minimum requirements for HEIs, the study revealed that no features were regarded as “must-be,” eight as performing, 14 as attractive and one as indifferent by the students. As these results were disaggregated per year level, the natural decay of delight as in the Kano theory was exhibited as there were less attractive features for students who have been in the university longest. After a full-year academic cycle, results compared to the baseline figures seemed to reveal of impact of the achievement of performance targets by the units rendering specific activities on client satisfaction.

Further rounds of the study are needed to build up more data sets on the relationship between objective performance and satisfaction level for performing features, mindful that this categorization is also bound to change along the way.

As HEIs in the Philippines journey towards the establishment of their own respective internal quality assurance systems, this study provides a practical approach for institutions to transform a mere list of student services for compliance into a strategic tool to enhance the student experience.

In the context of continuous quality improvement, the study presents how the qualitative Kano model, along with simple quantitative tools in the methodology, can be utilized not only in the planning stage of service design but also in closing the planning, doing, checking and acting (PDCA) cycle and opening the quality improvement spiral.