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Why would individuals who are capable of learning opt not to? Learning is important for stability and success. It would seem rational that students in groups that are frequently underrepresented or marginalized would be motivated to learn. However, negotiation of multiple identities and self-beliefs can impact motivations to learn. For example, young African American males frequently adopt a “cool pose” in their approach to education. They maintain that they do not care and will not try to be a part of the existing educational system. To better understand these issues, we studied African American males in the Glitch Game Testers program. High school students in the Glitch program worked as paid game testers and took workshops in computer science. More than 65% of the participants went on to study computing after high school. We found that these students persisted with education and computing because they navigated around motivations to not learn by creating many different faces for their involvement with Glitch. In this article, we explore the use and design implications of face-saving tactics these young men used to “geek out” on computer programming, choose computer science for their career, and maintain their current identities with friends and families. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The potential learning benefits of the Web are diminished due to the complexity of creating interactive, collaborative Web-based applications. The CoWeb is a collaborative Web site that allows users to create collaborative applications with great flexibility. The CoWeb facilitates open authoring where any user can edit any existing page or creating new pages. Using the CoWeb, both teachers and students have invented a wide variety of educational applications. Thus, the CoWeb serves as an example of an educational technology that has led to teacher inventiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computer-mediated discussion forums (such as newsgroups or those in instructional management software environments) are becoming common in higher education. Such forums are interesting because they are not only one of the easiest technologies to add to a class but may also provide an important learning opportunity for students. However, simply making a discussion forum available does not mean that it will be used effectively to enable learning. In this paper, we explore the idea that specific features of a discussion forum may increase the likelihood of effective discussions taking place within the forum. We define effective discussions as those that are sustained and are focused on topics related to class learning goals. We then describe the specifications for an electronic discussion forum-a computer-mediated anchored discussion forum-that we propose makes sustained on-topic discussion more likely. We report on the results of two studies that support this proposal. We end by exploring implications for research into computer-supported discussion tools for learning and their design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]