Exploring Students’ Perceptions on Acquisition of Transversal Skills During an Online Social Simulation

Due to the demands of the current job market, universities need to adapt their teaching approaches to provide students with opportunities to advance their transversal skills in order to succeed with their careers. Social simulations have been considered previously as a fruitful study method that helps to advance transversal skills; however, the research in this field is scarce. This study aims to explore the perceived affordances and limitations of social simulation as an online learning method for acquisition of transversal skills of graduate and undergraduate students from communication and media study programs. The empirical part draws on a set of qualitative data. All together 32 students in two universities participated in the testing of an original simulation scenario that was created in an Erasmus+ Strategic partnership project. The results indicate that students in both simulation exercises mostly applied their negotiation, strategic thinking and planning skills. During the second simulation, self-evaluation forms filled before and after the event helped the students to realize which transversal skills they need and want to develop further. Our results demonstrate that students felt pressured to intensively collaborate and coordinate with their group members, other groups and the teachers as during both testing sessions technical disruptions were experienced. We conclude that an online social simulation is a productive interactive learning and teaching method that helps to sensitize students towards their transversal skills and stimulate self-reflection. We also argue that in exercising a social simulation online there is an additional layer of pedagogical implications: the choice of the digital platform and the potential technical disruptions such as the loss of Internet connection or sudden malfunction of some of the platform’s features may divert the flow of the simulation.

Action network: a probabilistic graphical model for social simulation

Agent-based social simulations are typically described in imperative form. While this facilitates implementation as computer programs, it makes implicit the different assumptions made, both about the functional form and the causal ordering involved. As a solution to the problem, a probabilistic graphical model, Action Network (AN), is proposed in this paper for social simulation. Simulation variables are represented by nodes, and causal links by edges. An Action Table is associated with each node, describing incremental probabilistic actions to be performed in response to fuzzy parental states. AN offers a graphical causal model that captures the dynamics of a social process. Details of the formalism are presented along with illustrative examples. Software that implements the formalism is available at http://actionnetwork.epizy.com .

Social Simulation of Intergroup Conflicts Using a New Model of Opinion Dynamics

The social identity theory proposed by Tajfel et al. provides insight into how group membership and self-categorization cause intergroup prejudice and discrimination, finally leading to social conflicts. However, unanswered questions remain: under what conditions can an “in-group” and an “out-group” transform conflictual intergroup behavior into a more harmonious relationship and avoid social conflict? Opinion dynamics theory and social simulation are appropriate methods to answer this question. In this study, a new model of opinion dynamics proposed by Ishii is adopted, and we conduct simulations of intergroup conflicts. The new model, along with social simulations, presents how an in-group and an out-group can develop social harmony and avoid social conflict. According to our simulations, when the two groups trust their members 100%, the opinion inside an in-group converges. However, intragroup opinion diverges as trust within the group gets lower. On the other hand, intergroup opinion converges when the intergroup trust is higher than 50%. If intergroup trust is higher than 80%, then the intergroup opinions of the two perfectly overlap. Furthermore, if intragroup trust is 70% and intergroup trust is as low as 50%, the two groups' opinions completely polarize. We also calculated additional cases where intragroup trust was fixed at 70%, but for one-third of an in-group member trust an out-group with various values. Finally, a method to avoid further social crises can be obtained by examining real-world cases of partisan conflicts in recent America.