Making Algorithms Visible

The paper, "Materializing Social Media Youth Practices for Algorithmic Learning," is the result of the Connected Algorithmic Learning project, which observed and interviewed teenage girls across social media platforms to understand how they navigate algorithmic systems in their everyday digital lives. What emerged was a picture of young people who are far from passive; they experiment, adapt, and develop intuitions about how platforms work — but who largely lack the conceptual tools to make that tacit knowledge explicit or transferable.

Grounded in constructionist learning theory, the research argues that the solution is not more warnings or top-down media literacy curricula, but rather hands-on environments where young people can externalize their own practices: making the algorithmic logic they already navigate feelable, visible, and discussable. This means developing tangible and digital activities like workshops, focus groups, or curriculum interventions, that treat social media as a tinkerable system rather than a black box.

The implications stretch beyond computational concepts on social media and extend to risks on digital environments. As Santiago put it: 

"Risks are similar across social media and AI. Supporting young people in learning about them prepares them for using such everyday technologies critically."

By recontextualising digital risk as a learning opportunity rather than a threat to be managed, the work offers a model for how schools and educators can build genuine algorithmic literacy and empower young people as informed co-designers of the digital environments they inhabit.