We live in a globalised world where Information and Communication Technologies allow our communication to take place immediately. The vast majority of today's college students were born after the advent of the Internet. They have grown up connected to virtual environments and have access to more information than any other generation (Seemiller & Grace, 2017). Moreover, they live in an increasingly digital world that transforms people's lifestyles by reshaping personal, educational and professional environments. In this increasingly digital world, the human relationship with technology has changed considerably (Marín & Castañeda, 2022, p. 16). As stated by Acevedo-Gutiérrez, Cartagena-Rendón, Palacios-Moya, and Gallegos-Ruiz (2019), the introduction of digital technology in education has impacted the improvement of education quality. It has meant the opening of services, the personalisation and flexibilisation of conditions in training, given the creation of strategies to support learning. However, according to UNESCO (2020), the excessive use of digital technology is increasing the isolation of university students, becoming one of the main concerns.

At present, each person inhabits their learning ecosystem with multiple interactions. Thus, today's society's distinctive features cause changes in how new generations learn and access knowledge. They also influence how they relate and their personal and social interactions (Pérez-Escoda et al., 2016). For example, Castro et al. (2019) argue that this generation tends to communicate, relate, generate and share content through networks in real-time, but without boundaries between public and private. Currently, young people use multimodal forms of communication and information search (McCrlinde & Wolfinger, 2011), giving preference to non-textual content platforms (Geraci et al., 2017).

Universities must face challenges related to these new scenarios, heavily influenced by corporations, and consider the new students' profiles. Educators and researchers are key players in meeting these challenges, particularly in their relationship with a student body that grows and learns differently. (Castro et al., 2019). To address these challenges, it seems necessary to understand young people and hence the need to deepen and understand the changes taking place in the meaning they give to learning and knowledge, both at the University and outside it. That is why we set out to carry out research that would offer ways of understanding the question: how do young people learn inside and outside the University? What are their conceptions, strategies, technologies and contexts of learning? What is the role of relationships and interactions during their learning processes?

This paper builds on the research project [project name], whose main objective is to address the above challenges by exploring, through participatory and inclusive research, how, where, with what and when university students learn.

[Project] has been developed following a participatory and inclusive type of research (Bergold & Thomas, 2012; Nind, 2014). [Project] project intends to know the learning needs of current university students and how to meet them. To this end, we contacted students of different profiles to study their learning life experiences and inquire about them. In the last 20 years, this generation has been considered the best prepared in history (Howe & Strauss, 2000). But in return, also superficial, unable to pay attention, more fearful, conservative and less prepared for adult life (Carr, 2010; Desmurguet, 2020; Twenge, 2017). In the first phase, fifty university students participated in the [Project] project, 28 from Catalonia and 22 from the Basque Country. Of these, 30 are women, and the rest are men, a sample close to the distribution in Spanish universities in the 2019-20 academic year (Ministerio de Universidades, 2021, p. 25). With each of them, we held four meetings to explore and build their learning lives (Erstad & Sefton-Green, 2012). In the first meeting, we explained to each participant the research goals and the type of engagement for all involved. They signed the ethical protocols. Then, we shared different statements, some contradictory, obtained from scientific publications and media discourses on the attitudes of today's young people towards education and society. In the second meeting, they shared a reconstruction of their learning trajectories from childhood to the present. Through textual, multimodal and rhizomatic narratives, they highlighted moments, places, people, activities, objects, frames, turning points, and everything they considered fundamental in their learning trajectories. The third focused on the moments, methods, and strategies they develop and use in their daily learning, whether academic or non-academic, inside and outside the University. After compiling and conceptualising the information generated, for the fourth and last session, the researchers wrote and shared with the students a draft of their learning trajectories so that they could review and validate it, thus contributing to the final version of the text. We recorded and transcribed all meetings' content. Almost all meetings took place during the COVID-19 pandemic but fortunately, most were face-to-face. Throughout all the sessions, we emphasised the relationship with institutions, digital technology and people, both as motivators of learning and distractors. Our contribution builds on the analysis of the meetings' content based on concepts derived from the theoretical basis of the research and those arising from the participants' productions.

Our research participants live in an analogical and virtual universe that influences their learning and relationships. They state that the COVID-19 pandemic has influenced their personal and social life and pedagogical relationships. Students generally explained that they missed social contact and interaction with their teachers and peers. They perceived online communication and collaboration as more strained due to more screen time and a lack of non-verbal communication. They also experienced a greater sense of isolation and anxiety. They point out that, in the special moments of the COVID-19 pandemic, the University did not prioritise accompaniment and care as emotional and affective dimensions of learning. Thus, some students were not motivated to participate in online learning and showed different levels of psychological distress, from moderate to severe (Arënliu & Bërxulli, 2020). Others had negative experiences connecting from familiar environments that were not conducive to digital distance learning (Killian, 2020). Also, participants discovered new possibilities for learning, collaboration, and sharing and identified severe limitations of online teaching and learning. This last point is in line with Pineda (2018), who concludes that there is a significant relationship between the use of digital educational resources and autonomous learning, taking into account the categories of motivation, self-direction, and self-efficacy. Participants value the ability of people to interact and collaborate. Interactional practices are generally considered a central factor in developing well-being, productivity and innovations at work (e.g. Kauppi et al., 2019). Thus, the importance of learning interactional skills has also increased (Kauppi et al., 2019). Learning interaction skills can be addressed in various ways with approaches that facilitate effective and active collaboration and interaction and the learning of such competence. The current university context needs more research to become more inclusive, participatory, and humane institutions where meaningful and responsible learning and education occur.

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