Samantha Shorey

FROM HANGING OUT TO FIGURING IT OUT

Learning to program means learning to overcome failure — bugs and glitches are just part of the creative process. In online learning environments, users leverage social tools (like comments spaces) to collectively troubleshoot these technical issues. My co-authors and I call this collaborative problem solving practice “participatory debugging.” As a research assistant at the University of Washington’s Community Data Science Collective, I lead a project investigating participatory debugging through a qualitative, big-data analysis of the youth coding platform Scratch.

Our article “From Hanging Out to Figuring Out: Socializing Online as a Pathway to Computational Thinking” was published in the journal New Media and Society.

Recommendations for Design

We’ve also created a 1-sheet (PDF) of our findings from the New Media and Society article. Written with platform designers in mind, it provides an accessible summary and actionable recommendations for facilitating the participatory debugging in online learning environments.

In our reading of over 14,000 user comments, we found that participatory debugging wasn’t all that common. Some users would build vibrant and dynamic learning communities, while others would struggle to solve their problems solo. Yet, comments space where participatory debugging did occur revealed an important pathway in the Connected Learning model that bridges the personal interests of users (like fandom) to the learning of higher-order skills (like programming).

A Note: Challenging the Narrative of the “Self-Taught” Coder

As a researcher, I’m interested in the way narratives about technology support or constrain participation in technological communities. The concept of “participatory debugging” provides evidence for the idea that learning online happens through both the creative activities of individuals and their interaction with other creators, users and community members. Yet, the most prevalent personal narratives of young media creators tend to emphasize the value of “self taught” trajectories (Lange, 2014). These narratives serve to distance creators from formal learning environments, but they also emphasize a vision of skill building in which one learns through trials and failures, alone (p. 224). Tinkering as a method of learning is strongly tied to technical identities – such as the “computer geek” or “hacker” – that are defined through mastery and control (Ito, 2009). Hacker cultures are defined by an imperative to openly share information, but also discipline members to RTFM or “Read the F-cking Manual” before asking rudimentary questions (Coleman, 2013). Maxims like RTFM contribute to norms of participation that define basic competency as an outcome of individual tinkering rather than as an iterative, socially imbedded processes. By studying the social process through which users problem solve, we hope to better understand the collective practices that enable young people to overcome technical challenges in the pursuit of learning.