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Martin Hilbert

Embark on a transformative journey through the digital landscape with our comprehensive course on Digital Transformation and Persuasive Technologies. Explore the intricate dynamics of social media business models and the profound impacts of artificial intelligence on user behavior. Learn to balance risks and benefits while analyzing the attention economy and algorithmic persuasion prevalent in today's digital world. Delve into the future digital age, uncovering the potential of AI, the Metaverse, and Blockchain technology. Discover the transformative power of blockchain in revolutionizing information storage and property rights systems, alongside practical applications like cryptocurrency and smart contracts. Gain insights into the evolution of the web and its implications for digital interactions. Join us in mastering the essentials of digital transformation and prepare to thrive in the evolving digital landscape!

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What's inside

Syllabus

Getting Started & The Social Media Business Model
After this module, you will be able to discuss the business model of social media and its potential impacts on user well-being and societal dynamics. You will explore the increasing role of artificial intelligence and persuasive technologies in shaping user behavior on social media platforms and examine strategies to balance risks and benefits associated with these technologies. You'll be able to explore how the attention economy has evolved beyond attention, focusing on the users’ persuasion of preset goals and be able to explore the operational structure of persuasive technologies, focusing on the dynamic of persuasion prevalent in social media, to understand how algorithms utilize user data for targeted behavioral changes and personalized advertising.
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Traffic lights

Read about what's good
what should give you pause
and possible dealbreakers
Uncovers the influence of artificial intelligence on human behavior
Develops an understanding of the power dynamics within the attention economy
Emphasizes ethical considerations in the design of persuasive technologies
Explores innovative technologies such as the Metaverse and Blockchain, empowering learners with knowledge of emergent trends
Provides a multi-modal learning experience with a combination of readings, discussions, and hands-on labs
Requires no prerequisites, making it accessible to a wide range of learners

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Reviews summary

Essential digital trends for professionals

According to students, this course offers a largely positive and comprehensive overview of cutting-edge digital trends. Learners particularly appreciate its ability to demystify complex concepts like AI, the Metaverse, persuasive technologies, and Blockchain, making them accessible. The course provides valuable insights into social media business models and the practical implications of these technologies for various industries. While some note its breadth over depth, many find it an excellent starting point for understanding the evolving digital landscape and its impact on user behavior and future innovations.
Content reflects the latest developments in digital technologies.
"The content felt remarkably current, which is crucial for a course on digital trends."
"I was impressed by how up-to-date the content was, especially regarding recent advancements in LLMs and Web3."
"This course provides insights into truly cutting-edge trends."
Instructor effectively explains complex topics with clarity.
"The instructor's explanations were always clear and concise, making potentially dry topics engaging."
"The course is well-structured and easy to follow."
"The instructors broke down complex concepts into digestible chunks."
Offers valuable insights applicable to real-world scenarios.
"I appreciated the modules on persuasive technologies and social media business models, as they offered actionable insights for my marketing role."
"The practical applications discussed, like NFTs and smart contracts, were well-explained and relevant."
"I learned so much about the attention economy and algorithmic persuasion, concepts I can immediately apply."
Covers key emerging technologies in an accessible way.
"This course provided me with an excellent overview of the most critical digital trends shaping our future, from AI to blockchain."
"It's truly a solid foundation for a broad understanding of these complex subjects."
"I gained a solid foundation from completing this course and feel more prepared for the digital future."
Provides broad understanding, less for deep dives.
"While it covered many topics, I sometimes wished for more in-depth exploration of specific AI or blockchain concepts."
"It felt more like a summary than an in-depth learning experience. Good for absolute beginners though."
"If you want to dive deep into, say, specific AI models, you'll need other resources."

Activities

Be better prepared before your course. Deepen your understanding during and after it. Supplement your coursework and achieve mastery of the topics covered in Digital Trends: AI, Metaverse, Persuasive Tech & Blockchain with these activities:
Organize and Review Course Materials
Prepare for and reinforce learning by organizing and reviewing the materials from the course.
Show steps
  • Gather and organize course notes, assignments, and materials
  • Review and summarize key concepts and theories
  • Create a personal knowledge base or study guide for future reference
Read 'Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do'
Gain insights into the psychological principles and design patterns underlying persuasive technologies.
Show steps
  • Read the book and highlight key concepts
  • Summarize and present the main ideas of the book to the class
Attend an Industry Conference on Web Technologies
Stay updated with the latest innovations and connect with professionals in the field of web technologies.
Browse courses on Web Technologies
Show steps
  • Research and identify relevant industry conferences
  • Attend sessions, workshops, and keynote speeches
  • Network with attendees and exchange knowledge
Five other activities
Expand to see all activities and additional details
Show all eight activities
Concept Drills
Reinforce understanding of social media platform models and their impact on societal dynamics.
Browse courses on Social Media
Show steps
  • Solve ten practice problems on the dynamics of social media business models
  • Discuss and compare your findings with peers in a study group
Design a Social Media Campaign
Apply algorithmic principles and persuasive technologies to create a persuasive social media campaign.
Browse courses on Social Media Marketing
Show steps
  • Choose a specific target audience and define campaign objectives
  • Research and analyze successful social media campaigns
  • Develop a content strategy that leverages persuasive techniques
  • Create and execute your social media campaign
  • Monitor and evaluate campaign performance, optimizing it based on insights
Explore AI Neural Network Architectures
Build a deeper understanding of how different AI architectures function and their applications.
Browse courses on Artificial Intelligence
Show steps
  • Identify and describe the different types of neural networks
  • Follow tutorials to implement and train different neural network architectures
  • Experiment with different parameters and compare the performance of various architectures
Participate in a Blockchain Hackathon
Develop practical skills in implementing blockchain solutions and contribute to real-world projects.
Browse courses on Blockchain
Show steps
  • Join a hackathon team or form your own
  • Ideate and develop a blockchain-based solution to a specific problem
  • Build a prototype and present your solution to a panel of judges
Develop a Digital Twin Prototype
Enhance understanding of digital twins by building a functional prototype.
Browse courses on Digital Twins
Show steps
  • Identify a suitable use case and define the scope of the prototype
  • Gather real-world data and design a system architecture
  • Build and connect the digital twin components
  • Validate and refine the prototype through testing and feedback

Career center

Learners who complete Digital Trends: AI, Metaverse, Persuasive Tech & Blockchain will develop knowledge and skills that may be useful to these careers:

Reading list

We've selected 50 books that we think will supplement your learning. Use these to develop background knowledge, enrich your coursework, and gain a deeper understanding of the topics covered in Digital Trends: AI, Metaverse, Persuasive Tech & Blockchain.
The definitive benchmark textbook of modern artificial intelligence, rigorously unifying search algorithms, probabilistic reasoning, knowledge representation, and machine learning into an elegant, coherent agent-based framework.
A monumental foundational text establishing the mathematical, algorithmic, and statistical principles of modern deep neural networks, from linear algebra and optimization to convolutional and sequence modeling architectures.
Provides an exceptionally practical, code-first curriculum that guides engineers from end-to-end data preprocessing and traditional regression pipelines to production deep learning models and generative neural networks.
Delivers an authoritative mathematical foundation in Bayesian inference, graphical models, and statistical learning algorithms, bridging foundational probability theory with rigorous predictive computational modeling.
Guides engineers step-by-step through implementing, training, and fine-tuning complete generative transformer architectures in pure PyTorch, providing crystal-clear low-level insight into modern foundation models.
Presents the foundational treatise on Markov decision processes, temporal-difference learning, and policy gradient methods that underpin autonomous decision-making and modern post-training alignment workflows.
Considered by many as a comprehensive guide, this book delves into the technical aspects of blockchain, including cryptography, consensus algorithms, and smart contracts. It is suitable for undergraduate students with a technical background, graduate students, and working professionals seeking a deeper understanding of how blockchain works under the hood. The latest edition includes contemporary topics like DeFi, NFTs, and Web3.
Examines holistic architectural patterns for designing resilient machine learning infrastructure, addressing data pipelines, real-time feature stores, continual learning loops, and production deployment reliability.
Demystifies practical transformer model implementation through the Hugging Face ecosystem, demonstrating how to fine-tune, optimize, and deploy attention architectures across diverse natural language processing and understanding tasks.
Provides a comprehensive overview of digital transformation, covering key concepts, strategies, and case studies. It is suitable for both beginners and experienced professionals.
Provides an overview of the attention economy and how it is changing the way businesses operate. It discusses the importance of attention in the digital age and how businesses can use it to their advantage.
A highly technical book that provides an in-depth analysis of the Bitcoin protocol and blockchain. It's a foundational text for developers and those seeking a deep technical understanding of how blockchain works. While focused on Bitcoin, the principles are applicable to other blockchain technologies. Suitable for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and developers.
Delivers battle-tested operational patterns for serving foundation models, addressing GPU cluster throughput, semantic caching, automated evaluation benchmarks, and continuous latency minimization.
Offers a clear and concise breakdown of the technical aspects of blockchain technology, making it digestible for those with or without a technical background. It's an excellent introduction to both cryptocurrencies and the underlying blockchain technology, suitable for beginners and those looking to solidify their foundational knowledge.
Details an applied architectural methodology for running high-performance open-weights models on local workstations, tackling quantization fidelity, memory bandwidth limits, and prompt assembly trade-offs.
Offers a rigorous theoretical foundation for reasoning under uncertainty, combining graph theory and probability distributions to model complex high-dimensional dependencies across autonomous intelligent systems.
Offers a practical guide to digital transformation, with a focus on developing a successful strategy. It draws on the author's experience as a founder of Siebel Systems.
Introduces core computational linguistics concepts and practical tokenization, tagging, and syntactic parsing workflows through clear Python examples, establishing strong fundamentals for language analysis.
Explores the potential of the metaverse to transform various aspects of our lives, including work, entertainment, and social interactions. It provides a thought-provoking perspective on the future of the internet and the impact of the metaverse on society.
This science fiction novel offers a captivating glimpse into a dystopian future where people escape into a virtual reality called the OASIS, highlighting the potential and perils of the metaverse.
Explores the potential of blockchain technology to create a system of trust without intermediaries and its impact across various industries. It's a valuable read for undergraduates and professionals interested in the broader societal and economic implications of blockchain.
Synthesizes the five foundational tribes of machine learning into a unified conceptual framework, illuminating how symbolists, connectionists, evolutionaries, Bayesians, and analogizers approach intelligence.
Based on a popular online course, this book provides a technical introduction to Bitcoin and blockchain. It covers the fundamental concepts and underlying technology in a clear and structured manner, suitable for undergraduate students and those with a basic programming background.
Offers a comprehensive introduction to Bitcoin, blockchain, and cryptoassets from the perspective of monetary economics. It covers both the technical aspects and the economic implications. Suitable for students and professionals interested in the financial and economic aspects of blockchain.
Presents a step-by-step guide to digital transformation, covering everything from developing a vision to implementing new technologies. It valuable resource for businesses of all sizes.
Provides a practical guide to understanding the metaverse, its components, and how businesses can leverage it for growth and innovation.
Provides a strategic perspective on the metaverse, helping businesses understand its potential for digital transformation and offering guidance on how to prepare for and implement metaverse initiatives.
Save
Delves into the legal and regulatory challenges and implications of blockchain technology. It is particularly relevant for graduate students and professionals in law, business, and public policy, providing a crucial perspective on the intersection of blockchain and legal frameworks.
Provides a practical guide to developing blockchain applications. It covers various blockchain platforms and provides hands-on examples. Suitable for undergraduate students and developers looking to get started with building on blockchain.
Analyzes the geopolitical, macroeconomic, and industrial waves of artificial intelligence commercialization, assessing how data abundance and algorithmic disruption redefine global economic competition.
Provides an economic perspective on Bitcoin and, by extension, blockchain technology. It examines Bitcoin's role as a potential alternative to central banking. It's a valuable read for students and professionals interested in the economic and monetary aspects of decentralized technologies.
Focuses on the practical aspects of digital transformation, providing guidance on how to use Agile, DevOps, and Lean methodologies to achieve business results.
Tells the story of Bitcoin through the eyes of the people involved in its early days. While not solely focused on the technology, it provides valuable context on the development and early challenges of blockchain. It's a good read for anyone interested in the history and human stories behind blockchain.
A collection of the original writings of Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin. offers a historical and foundational perspective on the origins of blockchain technology. It's a classic for anyone interested in the history and foundational ideas behind Bitcoin and blockchain.
Discusses the neuroscience of attention and how it is being affected by the digital age. It provides practical advice on how to protect your attention and improve your focus.
Provides a Nobel-winning perspective on the science of attention. It discusses how attention works and how we can use it to improve our lives.

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