To identify factors that can contribute toward supporting educator adoption of digital technologies beyond the emergency remote teaching response to COVID‐19, we investigated how teachers’ motivation and abilities related to the use of digital technologies for teaching changed since the onset of the pandemic. Two surveys and interviews were conducted with school teachers in Spain. The first survey was completed at the onset of the COVID‐19 lockdown, the second survey and interviews in the weeks leading up to the school year that followed. Survey questions were from SELFIE and the Work Tasks Motivation Scale for Teachers. Moreover we analysed the type of advice teachers sought on Twitter during the lockdown and post‐lockdown periods. Results indicate that teachers believe their proficiency in using digital technologies for teaching has improved. Teacher confidence in using technology for preparing lessons, class teaching, assessing and providing feedback, and for communicating with students and families has increased along with teacher motivation to improve their digital skills and use digital technologies for teaching. Teacher advice seeking on Twitter seemed to shift from serving immediate instructional needs to focussing on professional development and the creation of their own digital content. Practitioner notes: What is already known about this topic There is a need to enhance educator digital skills and competences for a digital transformation of education. The emergency remote teaching response to COVID‐19 made educators increase their usage of technology. What this paper adds Teachers’ motivation and abilities related to the use of digital technologies for teaching have changed since the onset of the pandemic. Teachers believe their proficiency in using digital technologies for teaching has improved. Teacher confidence in using technology for preparing lessons, class teaching, assessing and providing feedback, and communication has increased. Teacher motivation to use digital technologies in their teaching practice increased during the pandemic. Teacher advice seeking on Twitter shifted from serving immediate instructional needs to focusing on professional development and the creation of their own digital content. Implications for practice and/or policy COVID‐19 has rapidly advanced teacher digital skills and has altered their relationships with digital technologies for teaching and learning. Teachers have acquired a range of new experiences related to using digital technologies for teaching from which future initiatives can build upon.

Wikipedia is a huge global repository of human knowledge that can be leveraged to investigate interwinements between cultures. With this aim, we apply methods of Markov chains and Google matrix for the analysis of the hyperlink networks of 24 Wikipedia language editions, and rank all their articles by PageRank, 2DRank and CheiRank algorithms. Using automatic extraction of people names, we obtain the top 100 historical figures, for each edition and for each algorithm. We investigate their spatial, temporal, and gender distributions in dependence of their cultural origins. Our study demonstrates not only the existence of skewness with local figures, mainly recognized only in their own cultures, but also the existence of global historical figures appearing in a large number of editions. By determining the birth time and place of these persons, we perform an analysis of the evolution of such figures through 35 centuries of human history for each language, thus recovering interactions and entanglement of cultures over time. We also obtain the distributions of historical figures over world countries, highlighting geographical aspects of cross-cultural links. Considering historical figures who appear in multiple editions as interactions between cultures, we construct a network of cultures and identify the most influential cultures according to this network.

With the irruption of ICTs and the crisis of political representation, many online platforms have been developed with the aim of improving participatory democratic processes. However, regarding platforms for online petitioning, previous research has not found examples of how to effectively introduce discussions, a crucial feature to promote deliberation. In this study we focus on the case of Decidim Barcelona, the online participatory-democracy platform launched by the City Council of Barcelona in which proposals can be discussed with an interface that combines threaded discussions and comment alignment with the proposal. This innovative approach allows to examine whether neutral, positive or negative comments are more likely to generate discussion cascades. The results reveal that, with this interface, comments marked as negatively aligned with the proposal were more likely to engage users in online discussions and, therefore, helped to promote deliberative decision making.

The Arab Spring, the Spanish Indignados, the Occupy Wall Street movement, the #YoSoy132 movement, the protests in Istanbul's Taksim Gezi Park, the Brazilian Spring (#jan25, #arabspring, #15M, #ows, #YoSoy132, #occupyGezi, #vemprarua): in the last three years the world has witnessed the emergence of networked citizen politics. These movements are not institutions, but oftentimes mimic their nature. At the same time, they are unlike traditional citizens’ movements, but very much alike in their decentralized structure. Networked citizen politics, characterized by decentralization, swarm-like action and an intensive use of information and communication technologies have been playing an increasing role in worldwide protests and movements, often overtaking and circumventing the actions of governments, parliaments, political parties, labour unions, non-governmental organizations, mass media and all kinds of formal democratic institutions. Taking the case of Spanish Indignados, we analyse the nature of networked citizen politics as an extra-representational kind of political participation – for instance, the pervasiveness of Twitter's use in the 15M movement. We begin by characterizing users, including a description of how movements propagate from one to another. Next we explore the bonds between networked citizen movements and formal democratic institutions and how they relate to each other, especially the movements with political parties and mass media. We also examine how networked citizen politics may use tools similar to those of the so-called Politics 2.0 but with very different purposes and, accordingly, the result is of the two conflicting approaches. Our analysis shows that different movements – that is, 15M and 25S – act as a continuum for networked citizen politics that use the Internet as the support for new institutionalisms, and despite the lack of traditional organizations, people, practices and ideas are shared and used as foundations for further action. Nevertheless, there is almost no inter-institutional dialogue, with exceptions being individuals belonging to minor and left-wing parties.

Online discussion in form of written comments is a core component of many social media platforms. It has attracted increasing attention from academia, mainly because theories from social sciences can be explored at an unprecedented scale. This interest has led to the development of statistical models which are able to characterize the dynamics of threaded online conversations.