Healthy Digital Futures
Helping young people thrive as digital media and AI transform how they learn, live, connect, and play.
New technologies are creating extraordinary possibilities for learning, creativity, connection, and opportunity, while raising real questions about their effects on health, relationships, work, and safety. As technology continues to rapidly evolve, the challenge is to harness its possibilities while understanding and addressing its risks.
The goal with building healthy digital futures isn’t simply keeping up with the latest technology. It’s ensuring that technology expands human potential and opportunity rather than diminishing it.
Building healthy digital futures requires connecting efforts across the many places where technology shapes people’s lives: schools and workplaces, families and communities, health systems and digital environments, all grounded in evidence about what helps people thrive.
Building healthy digital futures requires action on three fronts:
Today’s digital tools will change. EDC helps people across the lifespan build capabilities that endure regardless of the platform—from strong foundations for learning and critical thinking to media, data, and AI literacy, healthy decision-making, agency, adaptability, and social and emotional skills. We also work with educators, employers, families, and other trusted adults and institutions to help young people develop and apply those capacities throughout their lives.
People should not carry responsibility for navigating technological change alone. EDC strengthens the relationships, practices, policies, workplaces, and systems around them. Across schools, workplaces, out-of-school-time settings, health systems, families, and communities, we help partners create environments in which technology supports learning, opportunity, connection, and well-being.
Technology is changing faster than our understanding of its effects. EDC brings decades of research and evaluation on how media and technology shape learning, development, relationships, health, and work. We translate what we know into practical guidance while continuing to study emerging technologies and evaluate what works as the landscape evolves.
Our Work
At EDC, we bring decades of research and experience to this challenge. No single program, technology, or institution can create a healthy digital future on its own. Our breadth across education, health, and workforce development allows us to connect research with practice and bring together perspectives that are too often addressed separately.
Featured Project
MetroWest Digital Wellness Collaborative
The MetroWest Digital Wellness Collaborative is identifying, developing, and applying community-driven strategies to promote digital wellness among youth.
Read more
Enduring Questions
For more than four decades, EDC has studied technology and human development, from the earliest computers in classrooms to today’s questions about AI.
