A New Generation of Learners Sacha Noukhovitch Ph.D OCT Ahmed Hasan, B. Sc. I lead Canadian society and scholarly journal focused on data-native generation talent development through Big Data learning and scholarly writing peer mentorship. I work on the National Taskforce on Education and Skills that develops a strategy to address IT talent shortage. I am a practicing educator teaching data science at Earl Haig Secondary School in Toronto. The new generation of students is so interesting that I could not miss the opportunity to work with them.

Who are they? A new generation of data-native students taps directly into research papers alongside professionals. They actively bring a non- traditional approach to academic inquiry. There is an uninvited readership of your publication. Innovative scholarly publication formats like Open Access, Facebook academic journals or e-print platforms have a far-reaching effect that goes beyond traditional audience of researchers and academics. A new data-native generation of students joins professionals and tap directly into research papers. They are an odd but very active new academic audience.

They grow up as natural data scientists and use those skills to understand and interpret the world around them (online and offline) The new generation of students grow up as natural data scientists and happen to be in the constant search of information online. Have you ever paid attention to how wasps come on barbeque meet. It is usually one stumbling on it by accident and then there is whole team coming for it. This is what happens with scholarly publications discovered by students. Their learning styles does not always go along traditional pedagogy of academic subjects. They collect information and form the knowledge by jumping from one topic to another; they are trying to look up answer, they seek and collect pieces of knowledge that sometimes fall together to form very interesting innovative and transdisciplinary ideas. It is very interesting how students utilise these talents. Every year we run Big Data Challenge for High School Students by offering students with no prior knowledge and analytics experience real data sets and professional analytics software to mine it. The outcome is really interesting and sometimes bring quite unexpected and innoavtive ideas.

What is different? They use online academic communities to understand complex concepts Modern students read research papers and use online academic communities to understand and interpret complex concepts. They crowdsource scientific knowledge and make unorthodox interdisciplinary connections between formal research and informal facts and findings. Students are the driving force behind the Reading group approach like Papers We Love

Papers we love, Quora and others are not institutionalised or associated collectives of scientists that team up to research one or another topic of interest. They feature very interesting format of scholarly interaction. Absolutely independent participants here complement each other presentations and contribute to Q&As. Not institutionalised or associated collectives of scientists that team up to research one or another topic of interest

They crowdsource scientific knowledge Data-native students is the dominant crown in these online research and learning communities. They are picking into scholarly publications, crowdsourcing opinions and creating totally new “group knowledge” on the subject. Internet creates Renaissance like environment where different kinds of knowledge happen to be in one place and modern students thrive on it. They crowdsource scientific knowledge

Where do we fit in? STEM Fellowship and STEM Fellowship Journal Clearly, this type of student requires a forum to facilitate their scholarly intentions and to help develop their research potential. STEM Fellowship and STEM Fellowship Journal do exactly that. The journal, generously supported and published by the Canadian Science Publishing, provides students with a unique opportunity of their first scholarly editorial and publication experience. The organization is present on 10 university campuses including the Universities of British Columbia, Calgary, McGill, Western Ontario, McMaster, Waterloo, and Toronto, in addition to a wide array of secondary schools across the nation, with over 40 high school ambassadors and over 45 student executive members across Canada.

STEM Fellows bridge learning styles between different academic schools Student-editor review process is an independent, fresh inquiry into the research paper’s topic Polyglot student editors can interpret scientific phenomena from multiple viewpoints Without exception all student editors are multilingual and bridge between different academic schools For example, Mohammad Asadi Lari, Managing Director for Scholarly Writing and Publication resorts to English and Persian research communities in review of life sciences papers. There is a specialization in student review but the nature of their review is different from expert referring. Student-editor review process is often an independent, fresh inquiry into a manuscript’s topic.

Why... New level of thought and innovation among modern learners New ways of knowledge acquisition and requirements to education New life expectations of a data-native generation

What should we do? How can we reframe pedagogical approaches to meet this new generation of data-native students halfway? How do we enact these changes within learning institutions?

Thank you to learn more about STEM fellowship visit stemfellowship.org and journal.stemfellowship.org