ABSTRACT
The COVID 19 pandemic had an unusual multidimensional impact on humanity as a whole, creating or recreating new or renewed forms of relationship between people, communities and the state, as an articulating entity of social relations and spaces of human development. In this context, the general use of ICTs in teaching-learning processes at all levels of the educational system is common, to the detriment of the person-to-person encounter affected by social distancing. The objective of the article is to describe a useful conceptual framework to redefine educational policies in accordance with the new realities that characterize post-pandemic scenarios in Ecuador. Methodologically it is a documentary, analytical and prospective research. The authors conclude that investment in education is considered urgent since its material and symbolic spaces mean for the majority of young people the most legitimate opportunity to train, achieve better opportunities and ascend socially, a situation that reduces the dynamics of social conflict.
ABSTRACT
The lockdown as a countermeasure at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic gained diverse responses globally. Many turned to Social Media platforms such as Twitter to express their sentiments on health crisis-related concerns. This study magnified the collective support-related Twitter content posted by users within the Philippines at the beginning of the pandemic. Collective Support expressions were collected using the Twitter Python Library and examined using content analysis. The primary goal is to elicit insights to understand the Filipinos' social/collective behaviors and how they were manifested at the onset of the COVID-19 lockdown. Hofstede's and Triandis' Theory of Collectivism primarily guided the direction of the study towards the affirmation of the Philippines as a collectivistic nation as demonstrated in the Collective Support Tweets classified under the following identified themes: (1) Language of Appreciation, Tribute, Support, covering the most significant percentage with 38.96% of the collective support tweets;(2) Friendly Reminders with 28.91%;(3) Acts of Community Service comprising 20.31%;and (4) Encouraging Words forming 11.82%. Given the Filipino's traditional familial and community-oriented culture, their collectivistic behavior shall naturally be conveyed irrespective of location, technology, and other relevant settings. However, considering the Twitter dataset under study, the technology shaped cultural implications based on the shared Twitter content in the Philippines. Further, it has affirmed the Philippines' collectivistic culture in accordance with the indicators under Hofstede's and Triandis' Theory of Collectivism.
ABSTRACT
As the global pandemic continuously affect millions to date, an abundant number of internet users turn to seek and share health information in mainstream social networking sites such as Twitter. This study is a theoretically based qualitative analysis on the utilization of health information during the first COVID-19 Philippine lockdown. With Uses and Gratifications Theory as its theoretical lens, results suggest that health information on tips and pointers on COVID-19 prevention are commonly sought and shared, along with the latest information on COVID-19 health statistics, and the economic impact of pandemic on business ventures and on personal lives. But more importantly, this paper argues that more than utilizing health information to meet user cognitive needs (information seeking and sharing), social and integrative needs were also met and vital through the themes surrounding community engagement and social interactions. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
Twitter is considered one of the most popular social networking platforms. More than microblogging, it has evolved to be an integral source of information from daily news, current events, and other trending topics on social media. Since the emergence of COVID-19 in Asia in 2019, Twitter has become one of the platforms primarily utilized for information seeking and sharing by Internet users to keep updated with and disseminate relevant information about the virus and its spread. However, the health crisis was no exception in attracting the attention of spammers in exploiting the platform with scams and other malicious content. In this study, tweets containing trending hashtags related to COVID-19 were culled from Twitter to investigate the presence of spam tweets and to assess its possible impact on the information credibility of the platform. Though results suggest that the volume of unrelated Twitter expressions was minimal, this research argues that irrelevant tweets were substantial enough to pose implications detrimental to hashtag use and knowledge discovery. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.