Abstract
While massive online communities have drawn the attention of researchers and educators on their potential to support active collaborative work, knowledge sharing, and user-generated content, few studies examine participation in these communities at scale. The little research that does exist attends almost solely to adults rather than communities to support youths’ learning and identity development. In this chapter, we tackle two challenges related to understanding social practices that support learning in massive social networking forums where users engage in design. We examined a youth programmer community, called Scratch.mit.edu, that garners the voluntary participation of millions of young people worldwide. We report on site-wide distributions and patterns of participation that illuminate the relevance of different online social practices to ongoing involvement in the online community. Drawing on a random sample of more than 5000 active users of Scratch.mit.edu over a 3-month time period in early 2012, we examine log files that captured the frequency of three types of social practices that contribute to enduring participation: DIY participatory activities, socially supportive actions, and socially engaging interactions. Using latent transition analysis, we found (1) distinct patterns of participation (classes) across three time points (e.g., high networkers who are generally active, commenters who focus mainly on social participation, downloaders engaging in DIY participatory activities), (2) unique migration changes in class membership across time, (3) relatively equal gender representation across these classes, and (4) importance of membership length (or age) in terms of class memberships. In the discussion, we review our approach to analysis and outline implications for the design and study of online communities and tools for youth.
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Notes
- 1.
Just because a user only uses loops and does not use seemingly more complex commands does not necessarily mean that their programs are less sophisticated. However, our analysis, detailed in Fields, Giang and Kafai (2014), supports a view of increasing eliteness in programming based on the latent classes of programmers we identified. See Fields, Giang and Kafai (2014) for a fuller discussion of this topic.
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Acknowledgments
This material is based upon work supported by a collaborative grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF#1027736) to Yasmin Kafai with Mitchel Resnick and Yochai Benkler. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the National Science Foundation, Utah State University, St. Mary’s College, or the University of Pennsylvania. Particular thanks to Anant Seethalakshmi for help with gathering data and to the Scratch Team for providing repeated feedback on analysis. An earlier version of the latent class analysis appeared in the proceedings of the Annual Conference of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (Fields et al., 2013).
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Fields, D.A., Kafai, Y.B., Giang, M.T. (2016). Coding by Choice: A Transitional Analysis of Social Participation Patterns and Programming Contributions in the Online Scratch Community. In: Cress, U., Moskaliuk, J., Jeong, H. (eds) Mass Collaboration and Education. Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning Series, vol 16. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13536-6_11
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