Th metaverse presents a new opportunity to construct personalized learning paths and to promote practices that scale the development of future skills and collective intelligence. The attitudes, knowledge and skills that are necessary to face the challenges of the 21st century should be developed through iterative cycles of continuous learning, where learners are enabled to experience, reflect, and produce new ideas while participating in a collective creativity process. In this paper, we propose an architecture to develop a metaverse-intensive learning experience (MiLEx) platform with an illustrative scenario that reinforces the development of 21st century career practices and collective intelligence. The learning ecosystem of MiLEx integrates four key elements: (1) key players that define the main actors and their roles in the learning process; (2) a learning context that defines the learning space and the networks of expected interactions among human and non-human objects; (3) experiential learning instances that deliver education via a real-life–virtual merge; and (4) technology support for building practice communities online, developing experiential cycles and transforming knowledge between human and non-human objects within the community. The proposed MiLEx architecture incorporates sets of technological and data components to (1) discover/profile learners and design learner-centric, theoretically grounded and immersive learning experiences; (2) create elements and experiential learning scenarios; (3) analyze learner’s interactive and behavioral patterns; (4) support the emergence of collective intelligence; (5) assess learning outcomes and monitor the learner’s maturity process; and (6) evaluate experienced learning and recommend future experiences. We also present the MiLEx continuum as a cyclic flow of information to promote immersive learning. Finally, we discuss some open issues to increase the learning value and propose some future work suggestions to further shape the transformative potential of metaverse-based learning environments.

Social network analysis techniques have shown a potential for influencing graduates to meet industry needs. In this paper, we propose a social-web driven solutions to bridge formal education and industry needs. The proposed career development framework utilizes social network analytics, influence diffusion algorithms and persuasive technology models along three phases: (1) career readiness to measure and visualize the general cognitive dispositions required for a successful career in the 21st Century, (2) career prediction to persuade future graduates into a desired career path by clustering learners whose career prospects are deemed similar, into a community of practice; and (3) career development to drive growth within a social network structure where social network analytics and persuasive techniques are applied to incite the adoption of desired career behaviors. The process starts by discovering behavioral features to create a cognitive profile and diagnose individual deficiencies. Then, we develop a fuzzy clustering algorithm that predicts similar patterns with controlled constraint-violations to construct a social structure for collaborative cognitive attainment. This social framework facilitates the deployment of novel influence diffusion approaches, whereby we propose a reciprocal-weighted similarity function and a triadic closure approach. In doing so, we investigate contemporary social network analytics to maximize influence diffusion across a synthesized social network. The outcome of this social computing approach leads to a persuasive model that supports behavioral changes and developments. The performance results obtained from both analytical and experimental evaluations validate our data-driven strategy for persuasive behavioral change.

Cloud service providers typically compose their services from a number of elementary services, which are developed in-house or built by third-party providers. Personalization of composite services in mobile environments is an interesting and challenging issue to address, given the opportunity to factor-in diverse user preferences and the plethora of mobile devices at use in multiple contexts. This work proposes a framework to address personalization in mobile cloud-service provisioning. Service personalization and adaptation may be considered at different levels, including the user profile, the mobile device in use, the context of the user and the composition specification. The user’s mobile device and external services are typical sources of context information, used in our proposed algorithm to elicit context-aware services. The selection process is guided by quality-of-context criteria that combine cloud-service provider requirements and user preferences. Hence, the paper proposes an integrated framework for enhancing personalized mobile cloud-services, based on a composition approach that adapts context information using a common model of service metadata specification.

Within a community, social relationships are paramount to profile individuals’ conduct. For instance, an individual within a social network might be compelled to embrace a behaviour that his/her companion has recently adopted. Such social attitude is labelled social influence, which assesses the extent by which an individual’s social neighbourhood adopt that individual’s behaviour. We suggest an original approach to influence maximization using a fuzzy-logic based model, which combines influence-weights associated with historical logs of the social network users, and their favourable location in the network. Our approach uses a two-phases process to maximise influence diffusion. First, we harness the complexity of the problem by partitioning the network into significantly-enriched community-structures, which we then use as modules to locate the most influential nodes across the entire network. These key users are determined relatively to a fuzzy-logic based technique that identifies the most influential users, out of which the seed-set candidates to diffuse a behaviour or an innovation are extracted following the allocated budget for the influence campaign. This way to deal with influence propagation in social networks, is different from previous models, which do not compare structural and behavioural attributes among members of the network. The performance results show the validity of the proposed partitioning-approach of a social network into communities, and its contribution to “activate” a higher number of nodes overall. Our experimental study involves both empirical and real contemporary social-networks, whereby a smaller seed set of key users, is shown to scale influence to the high-end compared to some renowned techniques, which employ a larger seed set of key users and yet they influence less nodes in the social network.