Learning and Teaching in the 21 st Century: Realities and Possibilities of Social Media

The objectives of this international collaboration are to: a) study students’ and teachers’ use of social media for learning science across age groups and contexts, b) develop a model for understanding science learning through social media, and c) make recommendations for the use of social media as new and innovative tools for instructional practice in secondary and post-secondary science and science teacher education. A complexity thinking perspective (Davis & Sumara, 2006) was used to interpret student focus group data for the extent to which students embrace the interactive potential of social media to facilitate “unprecedented opportunities and affordances for emergent learning” (Williams, Karousou, & Mackness, 2011, Knowledge Ecologies, para. 4). Results indicated that students and teachers used social media, but not in ways that significantly improved the in-school and out-ofschool learning environments. Focus group data informed the design of a survey of science student social media use which will be used to get a broad sampling of how students use social media to support their science learning and to identify cases for in depth study. Future work will examine student learning in case study contexts of social media use in science classrooms.