In schools, students are expected to perform obedience through routines which many find arbitrary and oppressive. Some students have sought an escape from these demands via virtual and hybrid schools. Drawing on ethnographic research, this work contributes understanding of how design can minimize control of diverse embodied experiences through emphasis on standardized outputs. Such a strategy lessens demands for assimilation, increasing a sense of freedom experienced by those who fall outside normative social categories. Yet, it also fails to fundamentally challenge underlying oppressive dynamics. This article weighs the harms and benefits of this translational approach for those seeking to navigate hostile institutions, arguing for designs that preserve autonomy but also actively offer support.

Through design workshops and ethnographic fieldwork, this manuscript explores how students in hybrid alternative high-schools navigate their conflicting desires for nurturing educational environments and efficient certification. We highlight two competing visions in students’ designs of future educational technologies: one of affirmative and supportive spaces that address student mental health, sense of community, and identity needs; another that prioritizes expediency through self-paced, on-demand learning. We make three key contributions: 1) documenting how students struggle to navigate competing educational purposes; 2) analyzing how current hybrid school structures meet and conflict with student desires; 3) demonstrating how design ideas originating from students embody these tensions, sometimes offering paths forward for creative reconciliation. We argue that hybrid schools represent a critical site for understanding the future of educational technology, and advocate for designing digital tools and platforms that balance care and efficiency while supporting diverse student needs in increasingly digitized educational landscapes.

Peer Reviewed

Many digital platforms pit consumers or customers and service workers against one another or render human work invisible, concealing human labor for profit and the charismatic allure of automation. When schooling is digitized, what transformations occur to the relationships between teachers, parents, and students, and with what consequences? In pre-pandemic virtual and hybrid schooling, I find that teachers developed alternative strategies to practice caring responsiveness in online environments of low visibility through a process I call "distributed attunement.'' These strategies entailed building holistic relationships, collaborating with student families and fellow teachers, and interpreting student experiences using a combination of platform data and social information. Rather than giving in to digitization as a vehicle for removing or obscuring care work, this study illustrates that teachers centered relationships as core to the virtual schooling experience. The distributed attunement teachers in virtual schools created indicates the impossibility of separating technical and affective labor in a pedagogical context and provide promising sites to develop supports for high-quality online education. Further, teachers' navigation of limited visibility suggests tactics for CSCW researchers concerned with documenting invisible labor in the development of digital systems. Nevertheless, these strategies can be appropriated or undermined by employers in ways that threaten to diminish their efficacy, requiring ongoing advocacy to push for flourishing online schooling options.

For young lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people, and those belonging to other marginalized sexual and gender identities (LGBTQ+), accessing information to develop one's identity and community is essential. Yet information and resource access is a particularly complex process for LGBTQ+ youth living in rural areas and small towns without dense, visible LGBTQ+ networks. While efforts to remove LGBTQ+ resources and demonize LGBTQ+ people intensify, this study asks a group of young LGBTQ+ adults living in and around a college town in the rural Midwestern United States to document their experiences with navigating information landscapes in low-resource settings. Despite the remarkable everyday creativity required to craft their information practices, participants' current efforts produce several vulnerabilities that make local queer information networks precarious and often inaccessible. We lay out several patterns in this data, including experiences of both connectedness and disconnectedness, the role of organizations in information sharing, and the existence of both active and passive information search. Building on prior research that found increasing demand for multi-modal access to relevant information that is digitally enabled, but deeply embedded in localized social geography and LGBTQ+ community, we use this data and complementary interviews to identify problem areas and potential interventions to strengthen rural LGBTQ+ young people's information access. In response to the informational needs and desires of LGBTQ+ youth in this community, we propose a series of imaginative designs. These speculative artifacts are embedded in local communities to strengthen grassroots webs of knowledge. We focus on contributing solutions that fall under three problem areas in participants' information ecosystem: increasing information stumbling, building expert capacity and support, and bridging the disconnected to the connected. We propose speculative conceptual designs that address core challenges in LGBTQ+ information networks, working in the tradition of ''information activism'' to create and maintain access to otherwise precarious and ephemeral resources and spark social change.

Recent interest in ethical AI has brought a slew of values, including fairness, into conversations about technology design. Research in the area of algorithmic fairness tends to be rooted in questions of distribution that can be subject to precise formalism and technical implementation. We seek to expand this conversation to include the experiences of people subject to algorithmic classification and decision-making. By examining tweets about the "Twitter algorithm" we consider the wide range of concerns and desires Twitter users express. We find a concern with fairness (narrowly construed) is present, particularly in the ways users complain that the platform enacts a political bias against conservatives. However, we find another important category of concern, evident in attempts to exert control over the algorithm. Twitter users who seek control do so for a variety of reasons, many well justified. We argue for the need for better and clearer definitions of what constitutes legitimate and illegitimate control over algorithmic processes and to consider support for users who wish to enact their own collective choices.