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The purpose of this paper is to examine how higher education students think about educational technologies they have previously used – and the implications of this understanding for their awareness of datafication and privacy issues in a postsecondary context.

The authors conducted two surveys about students’ experience with the ClassDojo platform during their secondary education. In both surveys, the authors included a question asking students to identify which ClassDojo-like platform they used in school. For this study, the authors examined responses to these screening questions, identifying the technologies that responses referred to and sorting technologies into categories.

Students identified a wide range of technologies when prompted to identify a technology similar to ClassDojo. Many responses suggested students have a broad, monolithic understanding of educational technology. This suggests the prevalence of a utilitarian tool perspective (rather than a platform perspective) that may be entrenched by the time that students reach higher education, hampering efforts to inform and educate them in that context.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there are few studies of students’ conflation of educational technologies in the extant literature. Furthermore, the platform perspective emphasized in this manuscript remains relatively rare in many fields associated with educational technology.

Empirical investigation into the e-learning innovation, FUSE Studios, is both timely and relevant because FUSE is rapidly expanding domestically and abroad and there is continued interest in the interdisciplinary fields of information and learning sciences in the constructs of choice and interest as they relate to the provision and design of learning experiences. In particular, this paper aims to contribute to scholarly and design-based conversations on how e-learning innovations – especially those situated within the digital youth and constructionism strands of research – can be designed in ways that support robust opportunities for learning for young people (Reynolds et al., 2019).

Drawing upon a large corpus of mixed-methods data including computer-generated activity log data, youth survey data and studio facilitator interview data, this paper examines patterns of use and interest-related experience among young people in a range of FUSE Studios settings across the USA.

The results suggest that student choice within FUSE’s curricular and Studio model tends to support a broad exploration of interests across a wide range of youth, rather than a deep dive into particular Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM) content areas.

Alongside the broad exploration that was found to characterize the patterns of student choice in FUSE Studios, a striking number of students from those surveyed reported that FUSE supported their interest development: they liked the FUSE challenges, were always able to find something of interest to do in the FUSE Studios and saw the FUSE challenges are supportive of their current and future interests. (See similar findings in Stevens et al., 2016). We understand these student self-reported experiences as evidence that the FUSE Studios model did well to encourage meaningful, interest-driven learning experiences for youth.

Committed to making research usable for practice, this paper offers implications for future e-learning designs that seek to make choice and interest central to the organization of activity and environment.

While living in the information age is not new, the continued spread of dis/mis/information in tandem with rising partisanship has made clear the educational need for robust and critical information and media literacy education (Bulger and Davison, 2018; Garcia et al., 2021; Reich, 2018; Wineburg and McGrew, 2016). Given that most young people (and adults) today get their information and news about the world through online sources, including social media (Pew Research Center, 2018; Garcia et al., 2021), it is imperative for the health of the American democracy that students’ school-based civic learning opportunities include digital civic learning, too. This paper aims to offer a study into one such schooling landscape in a large and diverse public school district in the USA.

A mixed-method approach – including an online survey and face-to-face group interviews – was used to understand the opportunity landscape more broadly and glean insight into the texture and nuance of youth perspectives and experiences on digital civic learning.

Analysis of data reveals a dearth of consistent and routine opportunities for digital civic learning within the Rio Public School District context.

Empirical research that examines and makes visible students’ lived experiences and perspectives with digital civic information is essential if as educators and researchers, the authors are to successfully design for more and better of these experiences.

This chapter discusses the unique role that public libraries can play to (re)build our Republic by centering the lived experiences and voices of marginalized communities. As robust sites for out-of-school time learning and community-based information spaces, public libraries have long played a key role in promoting the health and well-being of our nation’s democracy. Public libraries’ inclusivity efforts, though, have not always been evenly balanced, and these efforts have often been underdeveloped, poorly articulated, and undervalued by other key civic actors. Bringing together a Learning Sciences scholar of youth development and civic engagement, Library and Information Sciences scholar on free speech, and an Assistant Director of a public library in the Southeast, this chapter will offer interdisciplinary research-practice insights into both the challenges and opportunities that exist for public libraries as they grapple with the serious question of how to serve the public in the complex reality that is this third decade of the twenty-first century. In particular, this chapter explores questions like: how can public libraries balance the constraints of the status quo to hear, share, and amplify the voices of marginalized communities? And in what ways can library staff encourage opportunities that bridge librarians’ expertise and libraries’ resources with the lived realities and needs of marginalized communities? In this chapter, the authors expand upon these questions and collectively dream about the ways in which public libraries might be reimagined to more authentically and equitably serve the many faces of the contemporary American public.