Audience in the service of learning: how kids negotiate attention in an online community of interactive media designers

Audience can serve as powerful motivation in learning - and network technologies have the potential to greatly broaden audience for the processes and products of learning. But these new opportunities for audience are accompanied by new challenges. In this paper, we examine and problematize the notion and role of audience in learning by presenting a case study of a large online community of young interactive-media designers. We focus on two key questions: (1) How do young people develop a sense of audience in the online community? (2) How does this sense of audience shape kids' participation as interactive-media designers? Drawing on five years of observation data and interviews with 30 young designers, we share a portrait of how these kids engaged with others as audience, drawing out several major themes: kids' desires for attention in a populous, digitally mediated space, the challenges of getting attention or not getting attention, and how attention-seeking behaviour can be aligned and misaligned with kids' initial intentions as creators, community members, and learners.