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Online environments can cultivate what have been referred to as 21st century skills and capabilities, as youth contribute, pursue, share, and interact around work and ideas. Such environments also hold great potential for addressing digital divi des related to the devel opment of such skills by connecting youth in areas with fewer resources and opportunities to s oc i a l a nd material supports for learning. However, even with increasing attention to the importance of 21st century skills, there is still relatively little known about how to measure these sorts of competencies effectively. In this paper, we offer an exploratory approach for interpreting student user trace log data to reveal opportunities for creative production, self-directed learning, and social learning online. Our approach engages social learning analytics to code actions according to relationships between users and engages in self-report and ethnographic methods to supplement initial results. We share our methods; provide rich descripti on of the unique learning environment; present results of logged opportunities for creative production, selfdirected learning, and social learning across the sixth grade cohort; and explore these results through the lens of individual learners, including cohort self-reports of identity, interest, and perceptions, and qualitative case studies of two students.

Educators broadly agree that interest plays an important role in learning. In our work, we develop learning environments that align learner interest and important adult-defined learning objectives. Through this work we have come to recognise the complexity of the enterprise of this kind of learning environment design.1 At this stage, we have a relatively stable design model in the passion curriculum design approach.2 Missing, however, is a basis for analysing the interests and engagement of individual learners as they interact with a learning environment over time. This paper describes the theoretical and design frameworks we use, and recounts our most recent curriculum implementation, Multimedia Studio, and how it exposed this critical gap in the design model. We found that designing for learner interest is an even more complex undertaking than we originally understood. The lessons learned demonstrate the challenges of interest-centred approaches to curriculum design and can inform the work of other learning environment designers and researchers working in similar contexts.

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