This chapter answers the question: what is an internet platform, anyway? Why is it special? The definition focuses on the network characteristics of internet services that leverage positive network externalities to grow to an immense scale, permit a high degree of behavioral novelty and diversity, and operate under an economic model that profits primarily by taxing the activity thus promoted (including by taxing user attention). This is analogized to the basic operating model of political states.

The introduction chapter outlines the need for qualitative research in the age of digitalization. The chapter outlines the opportunities and challenges which digital technologies and digitalization provide and enable. The chapter explicates the need to understand the different aspects of digitalization, the opportunities, issues, challenges and implications at different levels (individual, work, organizational, societal) and outlines the need of qualitative research to understand these phenomena. The chapter discusses the methodological opportunities and challenges for digital qualitative research enabled through digitalization.

I always had a complicated relationship with technology. I would like it, then realize I like it too much, and then try to disentangle from it. I went through several cycles of this. As a young girl in the 1970s, I spent far too much time playing video games. Then in the 1990s, I spent every spare minute during one college semester playing a dungeon treasure hunt computer game. I stopped only after I convinced a friend to place a password on the game to prevent my access. Then came email. I simply could not stop checking it. In my first apartment in New York City as a graduate student, I endlessly connected and disconnected my modem to check my emails. But for me and for many others, 2009 was the year when things started changing. This was the year that smartphones and Facebook became popular.1 Suddenly, we could text, email, access the Internet, and engage in social interactions practically anywhere and anytime.

This chapter aims at clarifying basic concepts related to multimedia: communication, comprehension, and learning. Multimedia communication is considered as the intentional creation, display, and reception of multiple kinds of signs in order to convey messages about some content. It entails two subprocesses: meaning and comprehension. Multimedia meaning is a process in which the producer of a message creates multiple external signs based on his or her prior knowledge in order to direct the recipient’s mind so that the recipient understands what the producer means. Multimedia comprehension is the complementary process of reconstructing the previously externalized knowledge in the mind of the recipient. It can be seen as the bottleneck of multimedia communication. Multimedia comprehension and multimedia learning are related but are nevertheless different: While multimedia comprehension results in transient changes in working memory, multimedia learning results in permanent changes in long-term memory. Multimedia learning is a byproduct of multimedia comprehension. Further, an overview of the book is presented.

This chapter first defines data science, its primary objectives, and several related terms. It continues by describing the evolution of data science from the fields of statistics, operations research, and computing. The chapter concludes with historical notes on the emergence of data science and related topics.

Straddling the line between knowledge and business, public and private, or between its local ties to the state and its reach toward the global economy of higher education, the modern university seems to have found in brands a tool to construct a coherent and attractive image, if perhaps only skin deep, of itself, its role, and its “excellence.” This chapter looks at the specificity of academic brands compared to their corporate counterparts, focusing in particular on the distinct notion of “origin” that they signify (and how that frames the ways in which such brands may be tarnished), the relationship between academic brands and academic rankings, and the fundamental role of students in the establishment of such brands. One of the suggestions put forward here is that, rather than an adoption of a corporate trend, academic brands may have in some way predated that trend.

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a change in mind-sets in many university leadership teams and faculty members worldwide, previously somewhat vulnerable to the sector's digitalization. Academia proved capable of flexibility, going beyond their reputation of being change-averse, moving entire curricula online within days. Yet, to benefit from higher education's digitalization, propelled by the pandemic, future pedagogical innovation is vital so as not to make other sectors' errors of merely transferring the offline into the online world. Moreover, higher education will need to find responses to several (further) academic, budgetary, legal, and operational issues induced by the sector's digital transformation, potentially leading to its disruption. However, higher education also must evade false ideas such as believing that physical buildings will become redundant due to academia's digitalization: On the contrary, facilities will be more critical than ever.

Opening with a disturbing example of how outmoded university structures can jeopardize a vulnerable student’s future, Chapter 1 introduces the structural lag between an increasingly diverse student generation that grew up with the smartphone and its easy access to information and the fragmented practices of the university. This gap is deepened by societal crucibles in contemporary American life, including the pandemic, economic change, extremism, climate change, and structural racism. By forcing universities online, the pandemic highlighted how important campus life is to students, the learning process, and how much of the university experience takes place outside the classroom. As universities prepare for post-pandemic education, they must take long-discussed and long-delayed steps to critically examine their history, address the bifurcation between faculty and service staff, reform their semi-independent institutional structures, and coordinate the array of student services toward the goal of a student-centered and holistic university experience.

Information-seeking research emerges from separate traditions focusing on one-time information-seeking behavior (research on curiosity), and long-term task engagement (research on interest). However, these lines of research have been developed independently, and there has been little discussion as to how they can be understood in an integrative manner. Here we present a general framework (the reward-learning framework of knowledge acquisition) that provides a more comprehensive understanding of information-seeking behavior, effectively linking these two research traditions. This framework is based on existing reward-learning models that account for one-time information-seeking behavior, but extends them to explain its long-term development by incorporating the key role of knowledge accumulation.

In this chapter we discuss the psychological function of “the drive for sense-making,” or our innate desire to make sense of the world. We start by discussing why sense-making generates a drive, similar to those associated with the primary reinforcers of food, water, sleep, sex, shelter, and air. In our account, the drive for sense-making fills a critical gap in purely goal-oriented cognition by motivating us to continue investing in knowledge even when we cannot foresee exactly how it will benefit us. We then examine three different factors that shape the particular form sense-making takes: (1) the practical utility of holding accurate beliefs for attaining concrete goals, (2) the motivational significance of some beliefs, which generates a desire to make sense of the world in a way that feels good, and (3) the impact of computational limitations on the sense-making process, especially our limited ability to explicitly predict what information will turn out to be useful. Finally, we turn our attention to how these factors help to explain aberrant sense-making phenomena such as conspiracy theories, science denial, and political polarization.

A 2019 survey conducted by Pew Research Center revealed that 85% of Black adults sometimes feel the need to code-switch. This chapter explores code-switching by Black faculty at predominantly White institutions (PWIs), the implications of being “culturally compatible” with their White counterparts, and the inherent bias that creates negative stereotypes in colleges and universities. For African-American professors, there is constant self-consciousness in presenting themselves. Adopting code-switching can ease narratives and improve their prospects of success. The idea of “Whiteness” can be characterized as being “normal” and, as such, deemed the social norm. Through “talking White” they assimilate to increase their chances of being legitimized. Code-switching, however, comes at a cost. Projecting an identity deemed “appropriate” in exchange for the acceptance of others is mentally taxing and minimizes cultural expression and individuality. Is the sacrifice worth the reward?

The learning sciences (LS) is an interdisciplinary field that studies teaching and learning. This chapter explains how the thirty-three chapters are organized. The chapter is grouped into four key themes: (1) a shift from thinking of knowledge as facts and procedures to a conception of knowledge as situated in visible practice; (2) an expansion of a view of learning from purely cognitive to a sociocultural view that also incorporates collaboration and conversation; (3) the role of technology in learning; (4) research methodologies used in LS. The chapter closes with a short history of the field of LS from the 1980s through the present.

Blockchain has been the subject of much hype, but does it really offer a potential solution to issues like disinformation and “disorders” of trust? This chapter examines the genesis and development of blockchain, addressing some of the common misperceptions and confusion about what blockchain is (and is not). Next, some of the touted properties of blockchain are considered – tamper-evidentiality, decentralization, transparency, and pseudonymity – with a focus on whether these produce the immutability needed to establish trust in the blockchain ledger. Given the conditionality of blockchain immutability, the chapter ultimately concludes it is inadvisable to view it in essentialist terms as a fixed and stable blockchain property. Rather, blockchain immutability is best viewed as a sustained commitment that a group of individuals holds onto because they believe that the attribute is desirable, even necessary.

Law is a fiction.1 Copyright law is an excellent example of legal fictions. All its norms, definitions, doctrines – e.g., creativity, originality, personality, economic and moral rights, limitations, and exceptions, to name a few – are created and regularly re-created by human minds to serve metaphorical purposes.2 At the same time, copyright law is not a limitless fiction. It has its historical roots, development, subjects, objects, purposes, and limits. The ultimate question of copyright law, then, is nothing else than why, to whom, and to what extent do laws assign copyright protection?3

Communication includes a wide and distinctive range of activities that link originators to recipients. Like other complex activities, it must meet both technical standards and ethical and epistemic norms. Unsurprisingly discussion of many of the norms and standards that bear on communication is an age-old theme. And unsurprisingly these norms and standards may need review and reconsideration if we are to reach a convincing view of the ethics of communication that uses new technologies.

Uses ideas from the prototype theory of categories to define what a “community” is. Eleanor Rosch showed that categories in the mind are based on “prototypes” or “best examples”—a robin is a better example of a bird than an emu or a penguin. Similarly, we understand the idea of “community” in relation to prototypical communities in our minds like small towns or church groups. Ray Oldenburg’s work on “third places” shows us why we need places that are neither work nor home, and how these supportive communities are designed. The chapter shows how the detailed design features of online spaces can help them serve as third places. Finally, sociological research sheds light on how online communication has reshaped the kinds of community and strong and weak ties we all rely on in our lives.

Introduces Law and Policy for the Quantum Age, with a discussion of the key phenomena needed to understand quantum mechanics: the uncertainty principle, entanglement, and superposition.