For decades, the conversation around youth and technology has been dominated by powerful voices—media, researchers, and word-of-mouth warnings—painting a picture of digital tools as the looming threat to young people’s well-being. But what if that narrative isn’t the whole story? What if, instead, we favored the spectrum of possibilities in the digital present and future, instead of a good or evil binary. It would take a a vibrant counter-movement, led by passionate advocates and young people themselves, determined to reclaim the digital world for good. And good news, there is one.

This episode was recorded live at Sesame Workshop, bringing together a true who's who of leaders and do-ers in the world of “Digital Wellness for Young People.” At the heart of our conversation is Young Futures—a startup initiative funding projects through the crucial lens of digital wellness. Young Futures is empowering the next generation to create, innovate, and advocate for a healthier digital landscape, supporting ideas that prioritize well-being over profit.

Joining us are visionaries from the Scratch Foundation, the organization behind the world’s largest free creative coding platform for kids, empowering millions to express themselves and solve problems through technology. We’re also honored to welcome leaders from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, a research and innovation lab that advances learning in a digital age, inspired by the pioneering spirit of Sesame Street.

Links:

https://www.youngfutures.org/

https://joanganzcooneycenter.org/initiative/ritec/

https://www.scratchfoundation.org/

https://joanganzcooneycenter.org/initiative/well-being-by-design-fellowship/

https://www.gamesforchange.org/

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Roderic Crooks is an associate professor in the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. His research examines how the use of digital technology by public institutions contributes to the minoritization of working-class communities of color. His current project explores how community organizers in working-class communities of color use data for activist projects, even as they dispute the proliferation of data-intensive technologies in education, law enforcement, financial services, and other vital sites of public life. He has published extensively in HCI, STS, and social science venues on topics including political theories of online participation, equity of access to information and media technologies, and document theory. He is the author Access Is Capture: How Edtech Reproduces Racial Inequality, published in 2024 by the University of California Press (https://www.ucpress.edu/books/access-is-capture/paper).

Access is Capture

Racially and economically segregated schools across the United States have hosted many interventions from commercial digital education technology (edtech) companies who promise their products will rectify the failures of public education. Edtech's benefits are not only trumpeted by industry promoters and evangelists but also vigorously pursued by experts, educators, students, and teachers. Why, then, has edtech yet to make good on its promises? In Access Is Capture, Roderic N. Crooks investigates how edtech functions in Los Angeles public schools that exclusively serve Latinx and Black communities. These so-called urban schools are sites of intense, ongoing technological transformation, where the tantalizing possibilities of access to computing meet the realities of structural inequality. Crooks shows how data-intensive edtech delivers value to privileged individuals and commercial organizations but never to the communities that hope to share in the benefits. He persuasively argues that data-drivenness ultimately enjoins the public to participate in a racial project marked by the extraction of capital from minoritized communities to enrich the tech sector.

Links:

1. Amazon listing for Access Is Capture
2. University of California Press page for Access Is Capture
3. Author's personal website
4. Talks and events from Civics of Technology featuring Roderic N. Crooks
5. Article co-authored by Crooks discussing intersectional themes in feminist formations

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Sylvia Martinez was an aerospace engineer before becoming an educational software producer and vice president of a video game company. She spent a decade as the President of Generation YES, the groundbreaking non-profit that provides educators with the tools necessary to place students in leadership roles in their schools and communities. In addition to leading workshops, Sylvia delights and challenges audiences as a keynote speaker at major conferences around the world. She brings her real-world experience in highly innovative work environments to learning organizations that wish to change STEM education to be more inclusive, effective, and engaging.

Sylvia is co-author of Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom, often called the “bible” of the classroom maker movement. She runs the book publishing arm of CMK Futures, Constructing Modern Knowledge Press, to continue to publish books about creative education by educators.

Ken Kahn has been interested in Al and education for 50 years. His 1977 paper "Three interactions between Al and education" In E. Elcock and D. Michie, editors, Machine Intelligence 8: Machine Representations of Knowledge may be among the first publications on the topic. He received his doctorate from the MIT Al Lab in 1979. He designed and implemented ToonTalk, a programming language for children that looks and feels like a video game. He has developed a large collection of Al programming resources for school students (https://ecraft2learn.github.io/ai/). He recently retired as a senior researcher from the University of Oxford.

Links

1. https://constructingmodernknowledge.com/about-the-cmk-hosts/
2. https://sylviamartinez.com
3. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/garystager_ken-kahn-speaks-with-sylvia-martinez-about-activity-7303865110035341313-BcUl
4. https://uk.linkedin.com/in/ken-kahn-997a225

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