Internet technologies may provide new spaces for churches that are facing challenges in geographic spaces. These online spaces can be understood as distinct online spaces or as extensions of geographic spaces. We consider the Beyond the Walls online ministry provided by the Toronto Congregation of Community of Christ, a denomination with a growing global footprint and a shrinking population in the Global North. Examining worship services between January 2020 and January 2022, we consider the locations and languages represented in Beyond the Walls services, the distribution and social network of contributing individuals, and how the services performed on Facebook and YouTube. We found that online ministry allowed Beyond the Walls to draw from a larger, more geographically and linguistically diverse population than in-person services could have, possibly responding to denominational concerns. We also illustrate the ways that this ministry corresponds with both distinct and extended understandings of space in the online church.

The affinity space framework has proven useful for explaining and understanding teacher activity on social media platforms. In this study, we explore the ‘dark side’ of teacher affinity spaces by documenting a partisan teachers’ group on an alternative social media platform. We used a mix of a priori and emergent coding to analyse screenshots of posts and comments from a public teachers’ group and group administrators’ activity on the broader platform. Findings indicate that although the group administrators began with a focus on teachers, most participants were non-teachers with political (rather than professional) concerns about US education. Furthermore, administrators both freely engaged with political talking points in their activity outside the teachers’ group and allowed the broader platform culture—including conspiratorial thinking, explicit racism and out-group villainization—to seep in. We conclude by describing how these findings correspond with the key characteristics of an affinity space, including an overlapping of affinities, a lack of concern for professional qualifications, and influence from the broader platform. These findings provide an illustrative example of how teacher affinity spaces can drift from their stated intention within the larger platform context.

Scholarship on the intersection of Mormonism and the internet has often focused on progressive online voices. However, in recent years, the DezNat movement has challenged the assumption that online Mormonism necessarily trends more liberal than the Latter-day Saint mainstream. In this study, we examine the influence of red pill communities—which include far-right and anti-feminist movements on the internet—on DezNat. We collected 1,378 screenshots of tweets containing the #DezNat hashtag (which often included additional data and context) and engaged in open coding of these tweets, guided by our understanding of red pill concepts and tropes. We found considerable evidence of far-right and anti-feminist influences on DezNat-tagged tweets, suggesting that it is disingenuous for DezNat defenders to describe the movement as merely about Latter-day Saint orthodoxy. However, interpreting our findings through an affinity space framework, we argue that it is impractical—and perhaps impossible—to definitively establish the motivations of all those who participate in the movement. Rather, we suggest that the clear red pill references by DezNat participants provide an opportunity to consider overlaps between Mormonism, the far right, and aggressive anti-feminism—as well as the tensions between intentional ambiguity and boundary maintenance in Latter-day Saint institutions.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine how higher education students think about educational technologies they have previously used – and the implications of this understanding for their awareness of datafication and privacy issues in a postsecondary context. Design/methodology/approach: The authors conducted two surveys about students’ experience with the ClassDojo platform during their secondary education. In both surveys, the authors included a question asking students to identify which ClassDojo-like platform they used in school. For this study, the authors examined responses to these screening questions, identifying the technologies that responses referred to and sorting technologies into categories. Findings: Students identified a wide range of technologies when prompted to identify a technology similar to ClassDojo. Many responses suggested students have a broad, monolithic understanding of educational technology. This suggests the prevalence of a utilitarian tool perspective (rather than a platform perspective) that may be entrenched by the time that students reach higher education, hampering efforts to inform and educate them in that context. Originality/value: To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there are few studies of students’ conflation of educational technologies in the extant literature. Furthermore, the platform perspective emphasized in this manuscript remains relatively rare in many fields associated with educational technology.

There is an abundance of scholarship documenting educators’ uses of for-profit social media platforms for professional learning, but little is known about how inauthentic accounts affect those experiences. We studied 83 state-sponsored accounts’ interactions with the teacher-focused #Edchat hashtag by analyzing their profiles, profiles of accounts they retweeted, and tweets they shared. We found no patterns of overt state interference in #Edchat; however, state-sponsored accounts amplified other inauthentic accounts, such as those focused on commercial, spam, and self-promoting #Edchat messages. Most state accounts used formulaic methods to create relatable account profiles that may go unnoticed by educators using the hashtag. These findings raise questions for educators and researchers about disinformation, anonymity, attention-seeking, and information glut in social media environments polluted by inauthentic amplification.

ClassDojo is a classroom communication and behavior management app intended to “bring every family into [the] classroom” (www.classdojo.com). The features of the platform include a points system to facilitate classroom management, instant teacher-parent communication (on the individual or class level), and student portfolios (among others). While ClassDojo claims to be used in over 95% of schools in the United States, there is little known about how students or principals interact with and understand the platform’s features and data. Drawing upon a mixed-methods study in a small state in the Southeastern United States, this article offers empirically driven insight into how students and principals perceive new digital education apps like ClassDojo. In particular, this analysis speaks to stakeholder attitudes toward the use of the app with regard to if and how it is mediating student-teacher and student-parent relationships. In so doing, this article offers early insights from a state-specific case into how the use of and experience of ClassDojo is situated within the broader educational experiences of students.

A general suspicion of Mormonism in American politics and media dates back to the 19th century and continues today. Weber (2019) has described Mormonism as a ‘meme’ that is malleable enough to symbolize different things for different audiences in different contexts. In this study, I examine the presence of ‘Mormonism as meme’ in 511 posts composed by government-sponsored Twitter accounts as part of information operations before, during, and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. I retrieved these posts from a dataset of government-sponsored tweets made available by Twitter and used a mix of computational and human methods to determine: 1) which countries used Mormonism as meme, 2) whether government-sponsored accounts originated or amplified these messages, 3) what identities government-sponsored accounts adopted, and 4) how government-sponsored accounts used Mormonism as a meme. This study’s results indicate that six governments invoked Mormonism as part of their information operations during this time frame. Venezuela pursued a strategy that depended on using pro-Trump accounts to repeatedly share messages describing Mormons as communitarian and insular. Other countries (including Russia and Iran) pursued more subtle strategies, more often retweeting others’ posts than writing their own. However, they still invoked aspects of Mormonism that called into question its compatibility with liberal, conservative, or broadly American values. As a whole, these posts correspond with both Weber’s (2019) description of Mormonism as malleable meme and information operations’ twin purposes of influencing the 2016 election and dividing Americans.

Despite the continued use of social media in educational contexts, there remains skepticism about whether platforms like Twitter can actually contribute to learning. In this paper, we argue that such skepticism is based on an overly narrow conception of learning that focuses on academic performance and disregards other manifestations. To advance this argument, we document use of the #bac2018 Twitter hashtag in the month leading up to the 2018 baccalauréat exams (the “bac”), which are significant not only for their role in the French educational system but also for their connections with broader French society and culture. We found that participants engaged in sharing notes; slacking, doubting, and fearing; requesting retweets; preferring topics; complaining; connecting with bac heritage and experience; joking; and showing awareness of time. In keeping with the significance of the bac, we found that these practices within the #bac2018 hashtag were associated with not only academic learning but also social and cultural practices that are significant despite their absence from any formal curriculum. These findings underline the complexity and richness that characterizes learning—especially in digital contexts.

Games can invite players to try on moral identities, but players ultimately choose how to respond to this invitation. In this study, I explore how the design of a game and the context it is played in affect whether players tried on a moral identity when completing in-game actions. I interviewed seven students who had played an ethics game and asked what influenced their perception of the game’s ethical significance. After coding interview transcripts using an established framework of design and contextual features related to serious games, I found that environmental constraints, formal constraints, goals, and the game context all influenced whether students tried on moral identities during the game, suggesting a complicated relationship between player identity, game design, and game context.

In this paper, we document different expressions of Mormon identity and different approaches to Mormon practice within the #ldsconf Twitter hashtag. In particular, we examine #ldsconf during two important events in the recent history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: the presidential transition from Thomas Monson to Russell Nelson in January 2018, and the Church’s formal acceptance of Nelson as Church president in April 2018. Our findings suggest that the #ldsconf hashtag allows for more expression of identity than formal Latter-day Saint contexts and that Twitter hashtags afford a ready audience for religious discussion in which no bounds are set on appropriate identity or practice.