CSPC 2018

Organized by: STEM Fellowship, Mohammad Asadi Lari

Current class and curriculum structures don’t answer a data-native generation’s knowledge acquisition needs and practices. This generation has honed its skills through the years of using information technology, the Internet, and yes, gaming. Modern students come to school with already developed learning techniques, which some of them may hide, keeping teachers happy within the current model; however, some cannot and end up getting into trouble by not meeting the curriculum expectations.

Following the paths of social media and open access culture, academic publishers consciously or unconsciously invited a new generation of learners to scholarly communication. Modern scholarly publication formats like Open Access or even Facebook academic journals have a far-reaching effect triggering students’ curiosity and challenging them with real scientific findings. Introduction of electronic impact factor indicators like Altmetric went even further, allowing a new generation to become participants of the public “peer-review” process.

The new generation of science learners often start with derivatives of research that they pick up in the form of social network reflections on scholarly publications and academic findings. They grasp the concepts from blogs, news stories and even Youtubes and Facebook posts that lead them directly to abstracts and manuscripts. The last often present information far beyond their ability to comprehend, which results in two new science learning phenomena. On one hand, they skim through publications and extract facts and theories within the scope of their understanding. On another, these elements serve as a new motivation for science studies and often leads them to generate unorthodox interdisciplinary ideas and theories. In order to bridge their knowledge gaps they form groups, which are fertile ground for non-institutionalized scholarship. Within these groups, it is possible to observe very interesting forms of scholarly interaction. These are collective presentations and Q&As where presenters complement and change each other without formal moderation.

STEM Fellowship (SF) is a unique example of a largely youth-led initiative to bridge these gaps. As a Canada-wide community, we focus on bridging gaps in data science (with our acclaimed Big Data Challenges), scientific communication (through challenges, workshops and the Canadian Science Publishing sponsored STEM Fellowship Journal) and community (through a network of high schools and university campuses dotted all across Canada. This panel would not only focus on our experience on the data-native generation’s approach to science, but also that of our numerous partners, which also shows how important cross-sector collaborations and discussions are in generating multi-dimensional solutions.