Nowadays, Computational Thinking (CT) is is one of the major skills that learners must acquire and develop. It covers a set of cognitive abilities and skills that is challenging to learn and teach. Technology Enhance Learning (TEL) gives the opportunity to learners to enhance their CT skills and conceptual knowledge. The COPCOT project aims to (1) understand learners’ skills-building in CT through a TEL platform, and (2) facilitate skills-building in CT through content and feedback personalization. To reach our objectives, we will elaborate the competence and learner models that will allow personalization and feedback generation in relation with how learners build their comprehension of CT. To this end, we will use the Algorea platform developed by the France IOI association which aims to encourage French learners to progress in CT and which already has an important amount of data. We will integrate and test our models and personalization features in the platform. Our main target in experimentations will be university students, in Social Science and Science & Technology fields, who are novice in terms of CT skills. This multidisciplinary project will involve researchers in Educational Sciences (CIREL) and Computer Science (CRIStAL). As the CT is one of the 21st century skills and it has a key role to access to the labor market, the project will have an impact on society by: facilitating the CT learning at a large scale, increasing employability, and helping learners to understand social impacts of CT and having their own opinions on it as citizens.

This research project focuses on the analysis of cultural crowdsourcing and crowdfunding platforms in France, the United States, as well as in South America and Africa. These platforms allow the « crowd » of Internet users to take part in the production and financing of diverse projects in the fields of culture and media. Do they contribute to cultural democratization and diversification or, on the contrary, do they reinforce globalized industrial norms, under the cover of user and citizen empowerment? This research will investigate the rapid expansion of these intermediary players as the expression of social, economic and ideological trends. Our hypothesis is that these devices represent possible fields of socio-economical experimentation, both on a national and international level, and are of interest to industrial players as well as public institutions. The issue of how these new modes of production and funding are legitimized will indeed be investigated via the media representations they bring about, and their uptake by public institutions. This will also entail analyzing how the collective financing, exchange and implication phenomena lead these platforms to impact changes in the production chain, in labor organization, and a shift from the figure of the consumer towards an amateur-producer-consumer.

This project explores the new forms of consumption of information on the social networks sites (SNS) and the journalistic practices (including innovative formats) that are associated with it. The aim is to highlight the roads and the factors of appropriation and sharing of articles coming from news sites. We intend to tackle this problematic into two complementary approaches, both in their scientific and methodological dimension. 1) The first level concerns the collection and use of a public corpus of mass data extracted from SNS (mainly Twitter and Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Pinterest as exploratory and complementary) referring links to information produced by thirty news sites selected for the study. The exploitation of this corpus will lead to identifying the specificity of information circulated on SNS (thematic, format, temporality, etc.) and the social logics (eg influence) related. One of the challenges of this first axis is to create tools for dynamic and interactive visualization to uncover ways and logics of flow to the heart of social networks and to identify their possible regularities, in the form of model. Thanks to cooperation between researchers in information science and communication and information technology, we will proceed to the extraction of knowledge through processes of interactive visualization, adapted to data, in order to highlight aspects previously undetectable and enable an innovative use of manipulated data. This "design" of data will help to better prioritize, make visible, and access to relevant information at the heart of our multidimensional data. In this sense, the INFO-RSN project will be part of the epistemological and methodological debate is now open for the digital humanities. 2) In parallel, we will conduct an analysis of the uses and practices of production, consumption and sharing information on the SNS. This project is a continuation of the work done over the past two years in our Observatory of webjournalism, on the insertion of journalistic production on the SNS. This understanding of those “being done uses”, which opens up opportunities for further analysis to the study of "traces", is based on qualitative methods that we apply to two areas: * A panel of Internet users, which will be monitored throughout the duration of the project, and asked (in focus groups in particular) on their use and not – use – of SNS for information. The influence of the variable "community of interest" (existing before or made by the SNS) on circulated and sharing articles from news sites will be studied in detail. * Media newsrooms national general information. The practices of journalists and the media are upset by these new modes of consumption of their products. Thus, we will interrogate the writing formats (like live-blogging) and the ways of presence and action on the SNS, by querying the pressure to innovate that has this new context. INFO-RSN is, by its ambitions, a multidisciplinary project. It combines a science lab of information and communication (CREM), a computer lab (LCOMS), and a company specialized in modeling and optimization : and innovative start-up (Semiocast, an expert in the study of social conversations online and behavior of Internet users). Already three news sites (le Nouvel Observateur, FranceInfo, Metro) have expressed interest in being involved in the project to conduct timely and thorough studies through the sharing of confidential data from their platform.

As higher education emerges from two years of distance learning management in a pandemic context, the question of hybridisation of training systems and practices is still being raised at several levels. In 2012, thanks to the European project "Hy-Sup", a typology of hybrid training environments and a self-positioning tool for teachers were created. Today, considering the changes of the last few years, it is necessary to resume this work and to design a common descriptor framework updated according to recent institutional contexts, which allows both to describe and categorise these environments, and to better understand the practices and the related training contexts among teachers and students. The objectives of the HyPES project are thus to: (1) to update and enrich the tool and the typology of hybrid training environments created in 2012 by integrating the points of view of both teachers and students, the dimension of learning assessment and the consideration of the institutional context; (2) to study the divergences and convergences in the conception and/or perception of these environments by teachers and students, as well as the evolution of their blended learning practices over the 3 years of the project; (3) to understand the collective conditions under which university actors appropriate these instruments for analysing their practices, which are the result of collective research. In order to achieve these objectives, the project will be based on quantitative (150 teachers and 3000 students), qualitative and longitudinal (45 teachers and students) research on the hybrid training practices of teachers and students in these environments. It will take into account the institutional contexts and the support policies carried out for these actors by the 4 university partners of the project. The deliverables will include an update of the typology of hybrid environments of the European "Hy-Sup" project and the resulting self-positioning tool, portraits (persona) of the actors surveyed, the formalisation of a tool-based methodology for the longitudinal monitoring of hybrid teaching-learning practices, a modelling (cartography) of the components of the institutional context on hybridisation of higher education training, and standard support scenarios for the actors (teachers and students). This project, coordinated by French and Luxembourg university partners, will also involve Swiss and Quebec researchers, in order to strengthen its international scope and to diversify the potential investigation contexts in which these devices and practices are embedded.

Within Western societies, the issue of migration is often accompanied by high levels of public anxiety and translates to a significant increase of the use of hate speech towards immigrants and minorities. Social media seem to be a fertile ground for hate speech. Focusing on the social dimension of hate speech, the project M-PHASIS seeks to study the patterns of hate speech related to migrants in user-generated content. The project will address the following aspects to provide a better understanding of the prevalence and emergence of hate speech in user-generated content in France and Germany: 1. Advance the understanding and assessment of hate speech by considering multiple features of the phenomenon (lexical, syntactical and contextual facets of hate speech) and taking into account explicit and implicit forms. 2. Develop a research protocol to detect hate speech in text and classify it in terms of its referents (i.e., themes associated with hate speech) and the representations conveyed, as well its circulatory characteristics. 3. Improve the methods to detect hate speech in terms of validity, reliability, and the equivalence across cultures. 4. Conduct a cross-cultural comparison of the prevalence of hate speech in France and Germany and the factors that give rise to hate speech in both countries (e.g., platforms on which comments appear, homogeneity of surrounding user-generated context, journalistic intervention). 5. Proceed to the archiving and annotation of real-life examples of hate speech from social media sources, to be released to the research community for secondary analyses at the end of the project. Our research hypotheses are that hate speech against migrants in social media: ? Is context-dependent: it must be apprehended and analyzed in relation to its surrounding topical contents, its supporting media outlets as well as the sociocultural conditions of its appearance. ? Materializes in different ways that can be systematized: hate speech can be understood through its linguistic features but can also be implicit, conveyed in more subtle manners. In this project, we therefore want to examine what types of contexts relate to which types of hate speech. The project embraces an interdisciplinary approach to its object and seeks to benefit from the inputs provided by computerized processing of hate speech in social media. The insights gained will allow to produce a software app detecting and/or blocking hateful comments automatically. Resources developed during this project will be made accessible in Open Access Platforms to the scientific community. A web demonstrator will be implemented to validate the scientific developments achieved in the project.