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Through the lens of self-directed theory, the purpose of this paper is to investigate if social technologies such as YouTube will be viable to disseminate educational instructions and in the process empowering learners to take charge of their learning.

A total of 150 educational videos on YouTube were selected and 29,386 comments extracted using the authors’ customized extraction software application. Sentiment and qualitative content analyses were performed.

Results indicate that YouTube can play important roles in facilitating online self-directed learning (SDL) as the findings uncovered a variety of learning and social affordances of YouTube. However, caution should be exercised as high views and well-commented videos might not imply quality and credibility. This study concludes that YouTube generally provides a conducive a learning environment that affords learners the resources to meet their SDL objectives.

To the best of knowledge, this is the first study that investigates SDL in social media by combining both qualitative content and sentiment analyses. The study shows that such a hybrid approach of combining two diverse analytical techniques provides an innovative means to make sense of comments expressed in social media.

The results will help educational institutions and policy-makers to craft better programs for public education and create policies to help self-directed learners in evaluating online video resources.

Despite a wealth of literature on the use of technologies to support learning, the majority of work done to date has dealt in the classroom context. Studies on SDL using educational content on YouTube are limited. Hence, this research contributes by providing insights on how educational institutions can move toward the direction of building collaborative digital learning platforms with relevant educational instruction and resources to enable users to participate in lifelong self-learning and education.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate tertiary students’ acceptance of digital game-based learning (DGBL). Specifically, it investigated the influence of learning motivation, enjoyment, and perceived usefulness on students’ behavioral intention to play an information literacy (IL) game.

In total, 150 tertiary students were recruited to play an IL game, and fill in a survey questionnaire. Multiple linear regression was performed.

Results indicated that attention, satisfaction, affective enjoyment, and perceived usefulness were significant determinants for the behavioral intention to play IL games. However, relevance, confidence, cognitive enjoyment, and behavioral enjoyment were not found to predict their behavioral intention.

The authors did not consider other factors in the hypotheses, such as the mediating effects of enjoyment on behavioral intention, and the influence of students’ individual characters such as learning styles or personalities on their behavioral intention of using DGBL. Further, the IL game used in the study, Library Escape, may reduce generalizability of the results. The study used self-reported attitudinal data from survey questionnaires, while behavioral data were not considered.

The results showed that pedagogical features, enjoyment factors, and perceived usefulness remain critical in the uptake of IL games by students. Further, the study demonstrated that instead of behavioral or cognitive dimensions of enjoyment, players are more concerned with affective enjoyment. Hence, developing DGBL with affective features should be pursued.

By taking into consideration both pedagogical and gameplay characteristics of DGBL to explain students’ acceptance of IL games, this study integrates and extends previous studies in the context of IL games. Additionally, instead of using perceived enjoyment as a single dimensional construct, this study adopted a multifaceted, more nuanced perspective on the perceived enjoyment of DGBL.

Public service announcements (PSAs) have been shown to be effective instruments that raise awareness, educate society, and change behaviors and attitudes. Many governments and organizations have utilized PSAs on social media to promote online safety among children and youth. However, we have limited understanding of the range of topics that these PSAs address and how they present their content to audiences. This study provides an inventory of the types of online safety topics that current PSAs address and a catalogue of the types of persuasive features employed by PSAs.

A content analysis of 220 YouTube PSA videos on online safety was conducted. Various topics under the umbrella of online safety were identified. Guided by the prospect theory and exemplification theory, different persuasive features employed in the PSAs were sought.

The findings highlight that the primary focus of these PSAs is on online safety behaviors and general instructions on online hygiene. Interestingly, nearly half of the videos employ a neutral frame, while a significant portion provides no evidential support. Additionally, video length was associated with the number of views and likes it gathered but not with the number of comments.

The inventory of PSAs can help researchers, practitioners, and policymakers better understand the type of content being produced and disseminated online as well as identify topics that are either over or under-represented. Further, the catalogue of the types of persuasive features employed by PSAs would be helpful in guiding research, practice, and policymaking in the context of creating effective online safety videos.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how perceived usability and user characteristics influence the intention to use a crowdsourcing application for finding potentially trafficked children. As part of this effort, the authors also attempt to uncover the usability concerns surrounding the use of this application.

The authors first describe Zhongxun, which is the application used in the present paper. Next, they conducted a survey eliciting usability perceptions of Zhongxun. A total of 287 participants were recruited for the survey which used constructs adapted from the Computer System Usability Questionnaire as well as various demographic variables. Hierarchical regression analysis was used to ascertain factors influencing intention to use Zhongxun. Participants' qualitative feedback was also analyzed to derive themes pertaining to areas of improvement.

The results showed that system usefulness was the factor that most positively influenced intention to use Zhongxun, followed by information quality and interface quality. Interestingly, a higher level of education was negatively associated with intention to use the application. Qualitative feedback suggested various ways of improving Zhongxun's functionality. Participants recommended the incorporation of gamification mechanisms as a new feature of the application. Cultivating awareness of Zhongxun was also suggested as a means to attract new users.

The work can help inform the design of crowdsourcing applications for finding missing and potentially trafficked children, as well as similar systems. Implications include the need for simplicity of design, communication strategies to attract new and retain existing users, and instilling confidence in the quality of crowdsourced contributions.

Prior research in evaluating the usability of crowdsourcing applications has been performed but not in the context of finding missing and potentially trafficked children. The task of finding such children is markedly different from previous usage contexts and could impact perceptions of usability and usefulness. Hence, the present study attempts to plug this research gap.

This paper aims to confront the rising threat of deepfake videos, focusing on the limited research on deepfake detection strategies among seniors. The study thus investigates seniors’ video credibility conceptualizations and identifies their deepfake detection strategies.

This study employed semi-structured interviews with 20 seniors aged 55 to 70. Areas covered include their perceptions of video information credibility and identification strategies undertaken. Qualitative content analysis was conducted to interpret interview responses.

Seniors emphasized the importance of objectivity, trustworthiness, believability, reliability and truthfulness in terms of video credibility. Regarding strategies for assessing video credibility, seniors employed five categories: character appearance, non-human visuals, audio, personal knowledge and external sources.

This study contributes to the literature on human-oriented deepfake detection strategies by uncovering diverse methods employed by seniors. It enhances the understanding of how individuals assess video credibility in the context of deepfakes. Furthermore, this study offers practical and applicable strategies for real-world deepfake detection.

In the wake of a rumor outbreak, individuals exchange three types of messages: rumor messages, counter-rumor messages, and uncertainty-expressing messages. However, the properties of the three types of messages are relatively unknown particularly in the social media context. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to examine these three types of messages posted on social media in the wake of a rumor outbreak.

Data included tweets posted after the outbreak of a rumor that wrongly accused the fast food chain Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) for selling rats instead of chicken. Using a deductive approach, codes were derived via content analysis on the tweets. Volume and exposure of tweets were also examined.

Counter-rumor tweets (52 percent) outnumbered rumors tweets (32 percent) and uncertainty-expressing tweets (16 percent). Emotions and personal involvement were abundant in rumor tweets. Expressions of credence and references to URLs were high in counter-rumor tweets. Social ties were found widely in uncertainty-expressing tweets. The high volume and exposure of counter-rumor tweets compared with those of either rumor tweets or uncertainty-expressing tweets highlight the potential of counter-rumors to mitigate rumors.

This research ventures into a relatively unexplored territory by concurrently examining rumor messages, counter-rumor messages and uncertainty-expressing messages in the wake of a rumor outbreak. It reveals that counter-rumor messages have the potential to mitigate rumors on social media.

The purpose of this study is to identify organizational cultural factors and overarching themes on emergency management evident across the Facebook page of an emergency management organization. This study also aims to understand the dimensions of social capital that influence the reputation of emergency management organization using the lens of organizational culture.

The organizational cultural factors defined in the literature were used to classify content posted by the organization during a six-month period. The posts were read and analyzed thematically to determine the overarching themes evident across the collected posts. The dimensions of social capital defined in the literature were used to determine its influence on the reputation of an emergency management organization.

The organizational cultural factors that emerged from the analysis are openness and future orientation without any evidence on risk-taking and flexibility. An analysis of cultural factors indicates that organizational culture facilitates knowledge exchange and knowledge combination. The key themes embedded in the organization's posts are emergency preparedness, communication devices for emergency management, coordination and admiration. The dimensions of social capital that influenced the reputation of emergency management organization were group characteristics, volunteerism, generalized norms and togetherness. Though previous studies have found the influence of culture on social capital, this study extends those findings by identifying the dimensions of culture (i.e. openness and future orientation) that reflects the social capital dimensions (i.e. generalized norms and group characteristics) in an organizational setting.

This study contributes to theory on the identification of cultural factors from content posted by emergency management organizations on a public social networking site (SNS). The organization benefited in terms of its reputation through the dimensions of social capital which are group characteristics, volunteerism, generalized norms and togetherness. One of the organizational reputation dimensions that was evident in this study was moral reputation which is a contribution of this study.

Among the guiding principles of Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, three guiding principles were evident in the posts of the emergency management organization. These principles which represent the practical implications of this study are disaster risk reduction through cooperation, inclusiveness of minority community members and implementing cost-effective and sustainable development policies for future through investment.

Previous studies have examined organizational culture in general, but to date there has been very little research into determining cultural factors that facilitate knowledge exchange and knowledge combination. This is also a unique study which identified the dimensions of social capital and organizational reputation in emergency management.

A web site usually contains a large number of concept entities, each consisting of one or more web pages connected by hyperlinks. In order to discover these concept entities for more expressive web site queries and other applications, the web unit mining problem has been proposed. Web unit mining aims to determine web pages that constitute a concept entity and classify concept entities into categories. Nevertheless, the performance of an existing web unit mining algorithm, iWUM, suffers as it may create more than one web unit (incomplete web units) from a single concept entity. This paper presents two methods to solve this problem. The first method introduces a more effective web fragment construction method so as reduce later classification errors. The second method incorporates site‐specific knowledge to discover and handle incomplete web units. Experiments show that incomplete web units can be removed and overall accuracy has been significantly improved, especially on the precision and F1 measures.

Human computation games (HCGs) that blend gaming with utilitarian purposes are a potentially effective channel for content creation. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the driving factors behind players’ adoption of HCGs through a music video tagging game. The effects of perceived aesthetic experience (PAE) and perceived output quality (POQ) on HCG acceptance are empirically examined.

An integrative structural model is developed to explain how hedonic and utilitarian factors, including PAE and POQ, working with another salient factor – perceived usefulness (PU) – affect the acceptance of HCGs. The structural equation modeling method is used to verify the proposed model with data from 124 participants.

Results show that PAE is the strongest predictor of HCGs adoption. PU has a significant impact on individuals’ attitude toward HCGs. POQ is a salient predictor of PU and PAE, and its indirect effect on attitude is significance.

From an academic point of view, this study provides a good understanding of the driving factors behind player acceptance of HCGs and adds new knowledge to games with utilitarian purposes. It is also one of the first to describe the components of game enjoyment with a taxonomy of aesthetic experiences. From the practical perspective, the investigation of the specific factors behind adoption of HCGs provides specific guidelines for their design and evaluation.

Applications blending games with mobile content sharing have garnered much interest recently. In this paper, the authors aim to examine users' motivations for seeking and creating content in the context of Indagator, a mobile content sharing game. The authors also seek to investigate the impact of games on these motivations.

The authors conducted a user study where 28 participants used Indagator for a week to create and share content (annotations). Participants were interviewed. All interview responses, and annotations sought (5,799) and generated (599) were manually examined and coded to ascertain motivations.

Motivations for seeking content include awareness, task performance, exploratory play, killing time, and socialising. Those for creating include altruism, task performance, competitive play, killing time, reminder of experiences, self‐presentation, and socialising. Additionally, games served as a motivator for mobile content sharing systems, forming a mutually beneficial ecology with content sharing.

Prior work has not examined motivations for using mobile content sharing games, and has typically employed surveys rather than actual use of such applications. Understanding motivations has implications for developers. The benefits of incorporating games include increasing awareness for the application and addressing the “cold‐start” problem inherent in many newly introduced applications.