This study contributes new insights into digital multimodal composing (DMC) using a multimodal analysis of two COVID-19-related videos embedded in a virtual ethnography of social media platforms in China. The analysis examined how video-makers drew on meaning-making resources and multimodal techniques in DMC to enact practices of civic…

Educators must consider how today's technology-mediated environments expand our conceptualization of learning contexts and the continuities and tensions between learning and participation in various settings. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted educational systems worldwide, necessitating emergency remote teaching and coinciding with increased social…

Social media platforms like "Twitter" are venues for 24/7 political discussion -- including deliberation, everyday banter, and bickering. For youth, these platforms offer new opportunities and risks for participation, and suggest corresponding implications for civic education. This qualitative, exploratory study examines how 15 civic…

The paper investigates YouTube teachers' identity construction within dominant language ideologies. Drawing on the constructs of language teacher professional identity, social media micro-celebrity persona, linguistic entrepreneurship, and raciolinguistic ideologies and online persona, the study analyses banner images, biographies, and…

As new media spaces expand opportunities for engagement with geographically distant people and places, this article examines how communication practices within such spaces may construct cultural differences. The study's data source was a website on which people posted, watched, and discussed Asian dramas. Qualitative data included writing, visual…

Much of the research on how social media is embedded into the educational practices of higher education students has a Western orientation. In concentrating on a case study of the varied ways in which African International Distance Education (IDE) students actively use social media to shape their learning experiences, we discuss an…

This study examines the role of social networking sites on the learning processes, teaching practices and professional development of secondary school teachers. By conducting observations and in-depth interviews with active participants, we present an ethnographic study of the "Facebook" group "Teaching ideas secondary…

Online platforms enable free-form, spontaneous, unbridled political expression, blurring the public and private, the written and spoken, and the norms of formal and casual speech. Consequently, they pose new opportunities and challenges to civic interactions, necessitating a reconfiguration of the norms informing civic exchanges. In this paper, we…

Open education aspires to democratize education, promote inclusion and effect change through social justice. These aspirations are difficult to realize in open, online environments, which enable multiple, and often conflicting, perspectives. This paper proposes a counter-narrative that surfaces certain operational norms of the internet and…

This study utilizes public data mining to explore participation divides of all available K-12 institutional Twitter accounts in the U.S. (n = 8275 accounts, n = 9,216,853 tweets). Results indicated that U.S. schools used Twitter to broadcast information on a variety of topics in a unidirectional manner and that hashtags included a variety of…

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'…

This paper aims to discuss changing perspectives observed and collected from 10 focus groups conducted with teenagers in Hong Kong between 2012 and 2017. It has identified a growing sense of distrust and fear about online participation. It found that young people were increasingly aware of the public nature of social media and exercised great…

The intersections between learning, technology, and media are often the scene of tumult and change. The forces of learning, technology, and politics are pervasive in the lives of young people. These contexts of learning are fueled by the current political moment, but also informed by historical contexts that impact our youth, regardless of…

This paper considers the social value of anonymity in online university student communities, through the presentation of research which tracked the final year of life of the social media application Yik Yak. Yik Yak was an anonymous, geosocial mobile application launched in 2013 which, at its peak in 2014, was used by around two million students…

This study investigates the audiences that scholars imagine encountering online and the ways in which these audiences impact scholars' online participation and presentation of self. Prior research suggests that imagined audiences affect what users share and how they present themselves on social media, but little research has examined this topic in…