In recent years, online education's reach and scale have increased through new platforms for large and small online courses. However, these platforms often rely on impoverished modalities, which provide limited support for participation in social learning experiences. We present Collaborative Live Media Curation (CLMC), a new medium for sharing context and participation in online learning. CLMC involves collaborative, synchronous collection, creation, and assemblage of web media, including images, text, video, and sketch. CLMC integrates live media including streaming video, screenshares, audio, and text chat. We deploy and study LiveMâché, a CLMC technology probe, in four situated online learning contexts. We discovered student and instructor strategies for sharing context and participating including creating curations in advance, sketching to illustrate and gesture, real-time transformations, sharing perspective, and assembling live streams. We develop implications through live experience patterns, which describe how spatial and computing structures support social activities.

On Reddit, users from tens of thousands of communities create and promote internet content, including pictures, videos, news, memes, and creative writing. However, like most social media feeds, subscribing to a very small subset of available content creates filter bubbles. These bubbles, while created unintentionally, skew perceptions of reality. This phenomena provides an impetus for researchers to design techniques breaking out of filter bubbles. Virtual reality provides opportunities for new environments that contextualize social media among multiple perspectives. We present one solution to the filter bubble problem: Blue Link City, which enables contextualized exploration of Reddit.