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To present YouFlow Microblog and how its functionalities for discourse structuring and message classification allows improving learning. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors developed a survey on microblogs and its functionalities for supporting education, and then the authors developed a new microblog called YouFlow Microblog, which was used in a case study to illustrate its applicability.

The results were: the categorization of messages according to the lesson plan allowed deeper discussions; the amount of messages and preference of the students for the categorization approach are directly related; the filtering of messages (categorization on the reading time) was used as a facilitator of the discussion understanding; the students prefer the search results organized by the categories and related messages; and the students were able to follow the discussions supported by the tree structure of discourse, categorization of messages according to the lesson plan and searches or filtering of messages.

Other case studies involving more students and from different knowledge areas could be performed. Other approaches for messages' visualization for reducing the amount of information could be explored, such as recommendation of messages in microblogs; and groupings of messages according to date, priority and subject.

The developed microblog is useful and proved to be interesting for applying in the educational context.

No other microblog allows different structuring of messages and the their classification according to the lesson plan, in addition to filtering and query functionalities.

Social networking tools, like Twitter, are beginning to demonstrate their potential as powerful communication and collaboration tools in social, political, and educational arenas. As smart phones and mobile computing devices become less expensive and more powerful, they will also become more pervasive. As a matter of economics, institutions will need to adapt to learning experiences that can occur in a wide range of contexts and over multiple channels. Having more technologically adept learners will also compel educators to develop innovative ways to promote students’ active learning and equitable participation in class discussions. Given the increased popularity and exponential growth of Twitter, educators have begun to experiment with it to determine its potential for communication and collaboration, both in and out of the classroom. Through a brief description and history of microblogging and the emergence of Twitter, examples of how instructors are integrating microblogs into their courses, and an overview of a social networking cooperative project case study, this chapter tells the story of how the authors’ use of microblogs evolved from purely recreational to authentic instructional uses for their online classes.

Public reviews on educational robots are of great importance for the design, development and management of the most advanced robots with an educational purpose. This study explores the public attitudes and emotions toward educational robots through online reviews on Weibo and Twitter by using text mining methods.

Our study applied topic modeling to reveal latent topics about educational robots through online reviews on Weibo and Twitter. The similarities and differences in preferences for educational robots among public on different platforms were analyzed. An enhanced sentiment classification model based on three-way decision was designed to evaluate the public emotions about educational robots.

For Weibo users, positive topics tend to the characteristics, functions and globalization of educational robots. In contrast, negative topics are professional quality, social crisis and emotion experience. For Twitter users, positive topics are education curricula, social interaction and education supporting. The negative topics are teaching ability, humanistic care and emotion experience. The proposed sentiment classification model combines the advantages of deep learning and traditional machine learning, which improves the classification performance with the help of the three-way decision. The experiments show that the performance of the proposed sentiment classification model is better than other six well-known models.

Different from previous studies about attitudes analysis of educational robots, our study enriched this research field in the perspective of data-driven. Our findings also provide reliable insights and tools for the design, development and management of educational robots, which is of great significance for facilitating artificial intelligence in education.

This chapter stems from the need to focus on the inherent interplay of faculty and student engagement while studying the impact of social media in higher education teaching and learning. The discussion is specifically concerned with the role and affordances of microblogging in the rethinking of the teacher/student relationship and in blurring the boundaries of academic contexts. The chapter examines an early experimentation of Twitter use to foster and monitor participation by the master students enrolled in a Human Resources Management class in an Italian university. The pilot is discussed referring to lessons learned from a range of accounted empirical cases and relevant studies on microblogging for teaching and learning in academia. A special focus addresses both a revised notion of academic scholarship and engagement, prompted by emergent profiles of networked faculty, and debates about the multiple ways of conceptualizing student engagement in the current academic cultures and contexts, being challenged by an increasingly complex digital landscape and by a varied typology of learners coming to university. As conclusion, issues related to the range of alignments to be taken into account when adopting social networking services in a higher education context are suggested as cues for an ongoing discussion.

This chapter provides a comprehensive review of research and developments relating to the use of Web 2.0 technologies in education. As opposed to early educational uses of the Internet involving publication of static information on web pages, Web 2.0 tools offer a host of opportunities for educators to provide more interactive, collaborative, and creative online learning experiences for students. The chapter starts by defining Web 2.0 tools in terms of their ability to facilitate online creation, editing, and sharing of web content. A typology of Web 2.0 technologies is presented to illustrate the wide variety of tools at teachers’ disposal. Educational uses of Web 2.0 technologies such as wikis, blogs, and microblogging are explored, in order to showcase the variety of designs that can be utilized. Based on a review of the research literature the educational benefits of using Web 2.0 technologies are outlined, including their ability to facilitate communication, collaborative knowledge building, student-centered activity, and vicarious learning. Similarly, issues surrounding the use of Web 2.0 tools are distilled from the literature and discussed, such as the possibility of technical problems, collaboration difficulties, and plagiarism. Two case studies involving the use Web 2.0 tools to support personalized learning and small group collaboration are detailed to exemplify design possibilities in greater detail. Finally, design recommendations for learning and teaching using Web 2.0 are presented, again based on findings from the research literature.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the Chinese microblog users’ psychological motivations and the association between users’ motivations and their offline civic and political engagement. Specifically, this study examines what the psychological impetuses of Weibo use are and how they promote the young citizens’ civic and political involvement.

The data were collected through the web-based survey with a total sample of 426 people. Principal components factor analysis, correlation analysis, and hierarchical multiple regressions were sequentially carried out to address the research questions.

The findings reveal that there are four major motives for using Weibo: information, socializing, recognition seeking and entertainment. Interestingly, seeking social needs is positively and significantly related to increasing young people’s civic participation, but not political participation.

Theoretically, the research demonstrates that the uses and gratifications is a suitable approach for analysis of psychological antecedents of Weibo use and subsequent outcomes. Practically, it will help understand the dynamics of how the new media technology may engender democratic development and change.

Although the growing significance of social media has drawn considerable attention, little research has been conducted to assess the political consequences of Weibo. The current study fills the void by investigating whether Weibo functions as an effective tool to facilitate democratic engagement in contemporary China. The obtained results may provide insight into the relationship between the gratification structures and engagement in other social settings.

Although microblogs have become an important information source, the credibility of their postings is still a critical concern due to the open and unregulated nature. To understand the antecedents of microblog information credibility, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the dual-role of cognitive heuristics (i.e. the additivity and bias roles) and the effect of gender differences.

This study collected data via an online field survey of active microblog users, and a total of 204 valid responses was received.

This study demonstrates the dual-role of source credibility and vividness, the additivity role of microblog platform credibility, and the bias role of social endorsement. Furthermore, this study also found out gender difference that the additivity role of cognitive heuristics was stronger for men while bias role was stronger for women.

This research enriches the microblog literature by examining the cognitive heuristic determinants as key predictors of microblog information credibility, and contributes to the information credibility literature by identifying and analyzing the dual-role effect of cognitive heuristics and corresponding gender differences.

This study can help organizations better manage their reputation, especially during the reputation crises, and also serves as a reminder to microblog platform operators of the importance of their microblog platform credibility.

This study can help organizations better manage their reputation, especially during the reputation crises, and serves as a reminder to the microblog platform operators of the importance of their microblog platform credibility.

This study investigates the dual-role effect of cognitive heuristics (i.e. the additivity role and bias role) and corresponding gender differences that are less touched on before, and thus provides a more nuanced understanding of the more complex effects of cognitive heuristics.

Considering the popularity and addictive attributes of microblogging, the purpose of this paper is to explore the key drivers of the microblogging addiction tendency, and to investigate the causal relationship between microblogging usage and addiction tendency through the lens of the uses and gratifications (U&G) theory.

By extending the U&G theory to accommodate the negative consequences of gratification, a research model that explains the relationships among microblogging use, gratification and addiction tendency was developed and empirically examined based on the data collected from 520 microblogging users in China.

The results showed that different types of microblogging use lead to different categories of gratification to different extents, while different categories of gratification play different roles in determining the level of addiction tendency. Specifically, the effect of content gratification on addiction is marginal, while social gratification has significant effects on all dimensions of addiction tendency.

The present study has both theoretical and practical implications. From a theoretical perspective, unlike many previous studies applied the U&G theory to explore the positive outcomes of media uses, this paper extends the U&G by including addiction tendency as a negative psychological outcome of U&G., resulting a research framework (use-gratification-addiction framework). Meanwhile, this paper contributes to the extending literature by examining the constructs of U&G at a granular level and investigated the causal relationship between “uses” and “gratifications.”

Customers have high expectations that company representatives contacted online will go out of their way to be helpful. One type of social media that may be particularly useful as a customer relationship management (CRM) tool is microblogging platforms such as Twitter. The purpose of this paper is to look at the impact of perceived helpfulness of customer representative microblog responses on people's perceptions of brand trust, brand benevolence, brand attitudes and intentions to try or purchase a brand.

A field experiment was conducted to manipulate three variables: type of helpfulness response (empathetic or problem‐solving), amount of helpfulness (less or more helpful), and interface in which responses were viewed (branded, Google, or Twitter).

The interaction between type of helpfulness and amount of helpfulness led to greater perceptions of company trustworthiness and benevolence when there were many problem‐solving responses than when there were few, but the number of empathetic postings did not reveal this same pattern. Furthermore, attitudes towards the brand were greater when there were many problem‐solving postings than when there were few problem‐solving postings, and lower when there were many empathetic postings than when there were few empathetic postings.

Marketers must think carefully about whether they have the necessary resources to successfully engage consumers on microblogs. This paper found that simply acknowledging that a problem exists is not the level of engagement that consumers expect. Thus, companies that cannot afford to monitor microblogs for signs of consumer distress and then respond to consumers' problems are advised to not publicly respond in purely empathetic ways.

Expressional anomie (e.g. obscene words) can hinder communications and even obstruct improvements of national literacy. Meanwhile, the borderless and rapid transmission of the internet has exacerbated the influences. Hence, the purpose of this paper is detecting online anomic expression automatically and analyzing dynamic evolution processes of expressional anomie, so as to reveal multidimensional status of expressional anomie.

This paper conducted expressional anomie analysis via fine-grained microblog mining. Specifically, anomic microblogs and their anomic types were identified via a supervised classification method. Then, the evolutions of expressional anomie were analyzed, and impacts of users’ characteristics on the evolution process were mined. Finally, expressional anomie characteristics and evolution trends were obtained.

Empirical results on microblogs indicate that more effective and diversified measures need to be used to address the current large-scale anomie in expression. Moreover, measures should be tailored to individuals and local conditions.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is the first research to mine evolutions of expressional anomie automatically in social media. It may discover more continuous and universal rules of expressional anomie, so as to optimize the online expression environment.