Collaborative Agency in Youth Online Creative Production in Scratch

Much attention has focused on the successes of creative collaboration in online communities yet little is known about how members organize participation and collaboration at such sites. In this paper, we analyze different dimensions of collaborative agency by youth who locally self-organized in groups and participated in a collaborative design challenge in the Scratch online programming community. We report on youths’ fluid roles in groups, their contributions in terms of feedback, and their awareness of participation in relation to the online community. In the discussion we address what we learned about new forms of collaboration, equity issues, and implications for the design of tasks which better support collective learning.