This article considers what 'minimal' might mean in the context of using minimal computing tools in the humanities classroom. Specifically, it recounts experiences teaching students to make websites using Jekyll, a popular minimal website generation tool, using different understandings of 'minimal.' In one, students were encouraged to use a Web…

Digital play is a pedagogical construct used in early childhood to explain young children's engagement with technologies. Digital play draws upon theories of play to explain young children's learning with technologies. This paper proposes the further development of digital play by examining how the digital aspect of digital play may also be…

Apps are becoming increasingly important in education. However, critical educational research has hardly ever undertaken up-close analyses of educational apps. This article provides an extensive analysis of one 'learning to code' app called Grasshopper. Drawing from the field of Science and Technology Studies, the article adopts a theoretical…

This paper shares reflections and stories from a collaborative design process between the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab and a global network of community-based educators to develop a creative coding app called OctoStudio, which supports children and families to create and share interactive projects on mobile devices. The app…

Learning on and through social media is becoming a cornerstone of lifelong learning, creating places not only for accessing information, but also for finding other self-motivated learners. Such is the case for Reddit, the online news sharing site that is also a forum for asking and answering questions. We studied learning practices found in 'Ask'…

Social networking sites (SNSs) are popular technologies used frequently among youth for recreational purposes. Increasing attention has been paid to the use of SNSs in educational settings as a way to engage youth interest and encourage academically productive discussion. Potential affordances of using SNSs for education include knowledge…

Openness has a long genealogy in education. Whether through the use of post, radio, television and digital technologies, extending learning opportunities to more and a wider range of people has been a significant aspect of educational history. Transcending barriers to learning has been promoted as the means of opening educational opportunities in…

This paper provides a systematic review of students' multimedia projects and reveals how a complex web of institutional, local, global and gender issues influence the process of digital media creation by young adults. The significance of this research for this Special Issue lies in the study's longitudinal nature, which examined students'…

As teacher education students become professionals, they face a number of tensions related to identity, social participation, and work-life balance, which may be further complicated by social networking sites (SNS). This qualitative study sought to articulate tensions that arose between professionalization influences and teacher education student…

Within the academy, signals of a scholar's academic influence are made manifest in indices like the "h"-index, which rank output. In open scholarly networks, however, signals of influence are less codified, and the ways in which they are enacted and understood have yet to be articulated. Yet the influence scholars cultivate in open…

With the introduction of digital tools and online connectivity in primary schools, the shape of teaching and learning is shifting beyond the physical classroom. Drawing on the architecture of productive learning networks framework, we examine the affordances and limitations of an upper primary learning network and focus on how the digital and…

Much previous research into the effectiveness of CMC has suffered from a lack of clarity or of consistency in the adoption and explication of coding typologies or taxonomies. This has reduced the opportunities for comparison between studies and for the accumulation of evidences to guide pedagogy. In addition, most studies of CMC have used…