Lessons learned on student engagement from the nature of pervasive socio‐digital interests and related network participation of adolescents.

The rise of modern socio‐digital technologies has fundamentally changed the everyday environments in which young people communicate with each other and cultivate interests. To gain a more sophisticated understanding of this phenomenon, this study provides in‐depth, qualitative insights into adolescents' experiences of their socio‐digital developmental ecologies. The 15 interview participants were recruited based on a previously conducted questionnaire. The semi‐structured theme interview addressed the socio‐digital aspects of the participants' interest‐driven behaviours and related networks with the aid of participant‐generated egocentric maps. The data not only qualitatively enrich the picture on adolescents' friendship‐ and interest‐driven socio‐digital participation but also provide new perspectives on the phenomena through the added network‐layer of analysis. The youth seem to vary in their motivational profiles related to their participation and the potential relevant psychological background factors for this variation are considered. Educational implications of these results are discussed when it comes to effective student engagement and connected learning. Lay Description: What is already known about this topic: The developmental ecologies of our youth are being transformed through the socio‐digital revolution.Adolescents participate in their digital media ecologies inFriendship‐ (hanging out with friends) andInterest‐driven ways (messing around and geeking out related to interests). What this paper adds: We describe the fine‐grained variance in the genres of socio‐digital participation (SDP) with the added layer of self‐perceived egocentric networks.Within each of these genres, there is variation of socially connected socio‐digital participation and the socioemotional depth of different size networks also varies.The youth also seem to vary in their motivational profiles related to their participation.The potential relevant psychological background factors behind different genres of participation are discussed. Implications for practice and/or policy: Instructors can compete for the limited attention span of students' with the ubiquitous personal interests byIncluding central motivational elements of youth socio‐digital participation in learning.Utilizing school subjects as conceptual tools to solve students‐relevant problems in a connected manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]