The reactions of education systems to the global lockdowns implemented during the COVID-19 epidemic highlighted that there remain questions regarding how everyday technologies might be used to support mass education. This paper draws on Conversation Analysis in online textual communication to study key features of mobile text communication by analysing book discussions among adult students of an online reading programme. We captured and analysed three patterns of interaction (i.e., single linear conversations; intertwined conversations; trunk-branch conversations) as to their affordances for educational communication. This study shows that synchronous text has distinctive communicative features, including short text exchanges and various turn-taking patterns, which are different to the elaborated forms of discourse expected in schools. Though “disorder” and “messiness” accompanied the interactions, we take them as opportunities rather than challenges of education and suggest that appropriate pedagogic design may enable teachers to utilise this distinctiveness to develop various learning environments.

Despite an extensive body of literature that has examined the role of museums in cultural reproduction and public education, most of the current discussion is western-centred. Whilst explorations of museum education in developing countries often focus on the institution, the agency perspective regarding how different social groups negotiate access to museum resources is relatively understudied. Aiming to address these lacunae, this paper presents a qualitative case study of a major museum in Hangzhou, China, focusing on how people from distinct social groups, with different orientations to cultural consumption, developed multiple strategies for cultural participation in museums. Their practices arguably reinforced and justified a dispositioned judgment of taste and class identities that mirror the social transition of contemporary China. Conceptually addressing Bourdieu’s theories of ‘cultural capital’ and ‘taste’, this study explores the dialectics between culture and power and demonstrates the complexity of cultural reproduction in a state-funded museum.