Publications

The potentials of social media for youth voice are clear. Young people’s experiences using these media for civic dialogue are less well understood. In this paper, we draw on qualitative interviews with fifteen civic dialoguers to explore how they navigate online political conversations. Our findings suggest that youth use various strategies for online engagement; however, they struggle, especially when engaging with disagreements. Our findings suggest a need for supports for engaging with diverse perspectives online.

Building upon a process- and context-oriented information quality framework, this paper seeks to map and explore what we know about the ways in which young users of age 18 and under search for information online, how they evaluate information, and how their related practices of content creation, levels of new literacies, general digital media usage, and social patterns affect these activities. A review of selected literature at the intersection of digital media, youth, and information quality — primarily works from library and information science, sociology, education, and selected ethnographic studies — reveals patterns in youth’s information-seeking behavior, but also highlights the importance of contextual and demographic factors both for search and evaluation. Looking at the phenomenon from an information-learning and educational perspective, the literature shows that youth develop competencies for personal goals that sometimes do not transfer to school, and are sometimes not appropriate for school. Thus far, educational initiatives to educate youth about search, evaluation, or creation have depended greatly on the local circumstances for their success or failure.

In this article, the authors describe an open-source, open-data digital infrastructure for sharing information about open educational resources (OERs) across disparate systems and platforms. The Learning Registry, which began as a project funded by the U.S. Departments of Education and Defense, currently has an active international community working on use cases, pilot implementations, and specifications. This article discusses key benefits to using the Learning Registry, and introduces pioneering uses of the resource distribution network by some of the early adopters.