As part of the knowledge mobilization strategy for my SSHRC funded research grant I’m going to maintain a blog to collect and share my thoughts, findings, and what I’m learning along the way.  Here are some of the things I’d like to do with this blog over the next few months:

• share findings from my research project entitled “Learning and Teaching Science in the 21st Century: Realities and Possibilities of Social Media” [2011-2013]
• summarize and share findings from literature in this area that I have been reading and hearing about at conferences…recently AERA 2012 in Vancouver, BC and Learning and the Brain: Web Connected Minds (May 2012) in Arlington, Virginia.
• document experiences from this summer’s trip to Australia on an Australian Endeavour Executive Award [more about this later!]
• much much more!

So that gives you a hint of what the content of this blog will be. In this post I’ll briefly provide a preview some of my data results which are represented in the header picture. The graphic at the top of my blog was designed by my colleague Julia Hengstler, educational technologist at VIU, and represents some recent results from focus group interviews I conducted over the last year with high school and undergraduate physics students about their social media use as they are learning physics. Represented within the individual balls of the Newton’s cradle are the icons that represent the top four resources students say that they use [BTW here’s a Newton’s Cradle app for your iPhone that kids get a kick out of]. When students are stuck on a physics question the first thing they do is try to ask a friend (via Facebook usually) for help.  They also search YouTube for educational videos, they ‘Google it’ and younger students tend to frequently access sites such as Yahoo Answers or Answers.com.  A couple of interesting results related to this are:

• students don’t use email to get in touch with their peers…they only use it because teachers use it!
• high school students were much more likely to search the internet for ‘the right answer’ than first year and upper year physics students who used the internet to compile resources to support their learning.

I’ll post more about the research project that I’m currently running out of VIU, which is a collaboration between the Physics Education Research Group at Uppsala University in Sweden and the Faculty of Education at University of Wollongong in Australia. We are looking forward to sharing our work with you!