The aim of this study is to gain knowledge about children’s participation in digital communities and to develop a model that can be used as a tool for practitioners. The research question guiding the study is: What kind of participation emerges from children’s shared experiences when engaging in digital communities? Lave and Wenger’s theory about communities of practice, and their notion of legitimate peripheral participation, are used. The data consist of nine individual interviews with children. Through nexus analysis, four different kinds of participation are identified: friendship-driven, interest-driven, knowledge-driven and performance-driven. The study generates an empirical model that can be used for interpreting and understanding children’s participation. The main findings are significant aspects of participation, linked to friendship, the connection between digital cultures, learning, literacy, identity and performativity, democratic implications and practices in constant change.

This is a study of how children represent themselves when performing participatory identities in social media communities with relevance to constructing a learning self. Data was generated by filming eight children (6–11 years of age) talking about and showing their multimodal self-re- presentations. On their out-of-school learning journeys, the children came into presences as ‘a someone’, in social media communities. The theoretical foundation informing the study is Wenger's theory on learning as social participation. Multimodal interactional analysis was ap- plied to move the analysis beyond transcripts of texts to include actions children take with or through multimodal mediational means. The results display significant aspects of children's learning trajectories in self representation, presented as: Input from comments, understanding the other, preparing for a performing self and taking actions. Out of these acts of participation, three different participatory identities were constructed: the user, the producer and the designer. The main results show how children through participation, widen their learning repertoire and critically reflect on space and place. This research adds to the educational field by presenting children's experiences from navigating new worlds and enacting participatory identities, which is of relevance for their ongoing construction of a learning self.