Exploring the use of Social Media to support Teaching and Learning Physics

Recent calls for reform in education have focused on 21st century teaching and learning to respond to perceived shifts in the way knowledge is created, stored and shared. Social media tools such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter have quickly become ubiquitous methods of meeting, collaborating and communicating online. A recent report of two and four year colleges in the United States found that 80% of faculty use social media, and 52% use them as teaching tools but are just beginning to realize the interactive and collaborative possibilities (Bart, 2010). In this workshop, participants will be introduced to and learn to use the newest social media tools and mobile technology applications that are currently being employed by students for learning physics and by instructors for teaching physics. Participants will have the opportunity to try out applications for student collaboration, instructor-student feedback and assessment for learning on their own technologies (smartphone/iPod touch/iPad/Android) or on those provided for use during the session. Results from a preliminary study of secondary and post secondary students and instructors on how they use social media to learn and teach physics will also be presented. As a powerful new theoretical perspective in education, complexity thinking (Davis & Sumara, 2006) uses characteristics of complex systems (i.e. crowds, ant colonies) and conditions of emergence to both understand and prompt learning. In the preliminary study, complexity thinking was used to interpret focus group data and to explore questions such as: How are social media embodied into students’ everyday experiences and into their science learning experiences? How can social media facilitate the emergence of ideas from collectives of students and how can teachers promote the kinds of experiences that enable the emergence? Bart, M. (2010). Social media usage among college faculty. Faculty Focus. Retrieved from http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/trends-in-higher-education/social-media-usage-among-college-faculty/ Davis, B., & Sumara, D. (2006). Complexity and education: Inquiries into learning, teaching and research. Mahweh, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates

Painting as Data: A New Way of Analyzing the Landscape

Painting as Data tells a story of the Arkansas Agricultural Research and Extension Center through painting as a way enrich site analysis, as well as discover and analyze both quantitative and qualitative data in landscape architecture. The thesis is composed of three central works that analyse the landscape over eight months through data driven and experiential lenses, including hydrology, geology, and ecology, and the people who cultivate the land with the help of modern machinery and engineered chemicals. These works include: Field B4 - 7:00 AM Triptych 32” x1 44”, Acrylic on Panel The study of time on the shifting landscape is crucial to understanding place. This experiential panorama examines field B4 of the Arkansas Agricultural Research and Extension Center over a calendar year. The interpretation of the landscape through acrylic paint, graphite, and pastels give dimension to the dramatic morning skies and the soybean and rye grass plots below. 7:00 AM Photo Log 6” x 80”, Accordion Book When analysing the Arkansas Agricultural Research and Extension Center, dedicated repetition was needed to effectively show the evolution of the landscape through seasonal, agricultural, and ephemeral changes. A photo log was compiled from photographs taken each Tuesday morning at 7:00 AM from October 11, 2016- February 28, 2017. The three books can be read horizontally to view images from one individual week, or each book can be read vertically showing one location and its changes from one week to the next. Agricultural Horizons 18” x 32”,12” x 16”, Acrylic on Panel with Laser Etching Agricultural Horizons is comprised of 29 paintings studying the Arkansas Agricultural Research and Extension Center. Each painting seeks to enrich site analysis through experiential and data driven layers. Mapping the landscape in both a subjective and objective manner allows for exploration, discovery, and formulates a new form of data through the method of painting

Atomic structure of Mn wires on Si(001) resolved by scanning tunneling microscopy

At submonolayer coverage, Mn forms atomic wires on the Si(001) surface oriented perpendicular to the underlying Si dimer rows. While many other elements form symmetric dimer wires at room temperature, we show that Mn wires have an asymmetric appearance and pin the Si dimers nearby. We find that an atomic configuration with a Mn trimer unit cell can explain these observations due to the interplay between the Si dimer buckling phase near the wire and the orientation of the Mn trimer. We study the resulting four wire configurations in detail using high-resolution scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) imaging and compare our findings with STM images simulated by density functional theory.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Field induced density wave in the heavy fermion compound CeRhIn5

Metals containing Ce often show strong electron correlations due to the proximity of the 4f state to the Fermi energy, leading to strong coupling with the conduction electrons. This coupling typically induces a variety of competing ground states, including heavy-fermion metals, magnetism and unconventional superconductivity. The d-wave superconductivity in CeTMIn5 (TM=Co, Rh, Ir) has attracted significant interest due to its qualitative similarity to the cuprate high-Tc superconductors. Here, we show evidence for a field induced phase-transition to a state akin to a density-wave (DW) in the heavy fermion CeRhIn5, existing in proximity to its unconventional superconductivity. The DW state is signaled by a hysteretic anomaly in the in-plane resistivity accompanied by the appearance of non-linear electrical transport at high magnetic fields (>27T), which are the distinctive characteristics of density-wave states. The unusually large hysteresis enables us to directly investigate the Fermi surface of a supercooled electronic system and to clearly associate a Fermi surface reconstruction with the transition. Key to our observation is the fabrication of single crystal microstructures, which are found to be highly sensitive to "subtle" phase transitions involving only small portions of the Fermi surface. Such subtle order might be a common feature among correlated electron systems, and its clear observation adds a new perspective on the similarly subtle CDW state in the cuprates.Comment: Accepted in Nature Communication

Electronic in-plane symmetry breaking at field-tuned quantum criticality in CeRhIn5

Electronic nematics are exotic states of matter where electronic interactions break a rotational symmetry of the underlying lattice, in analogy to the directional alignment without translational order in nematic liquid crystals. Intriguingly such phases appear in the copper- and iron-based superconductors, and their role in establishing high-temperature superconductivity remains an open question. Nematicity may take an active part, cooperating or competing with superconductivity, or may appear accidentally in such systems. Here we present experimental evidence for a phase of nematic character in the heavy fermion superconductor CeRhIn5. We observe a field-induced breaking of the electronic tetragonal symmetry of in the vicinity of an antiferromagnetic (AFM) quantum phase transition at Hc~50T. This phase appears in out-of-plane fields of H*~28T and is characterized by substantial in-plane resistivity anisotropy. The anisotropy can be aligned by a small in-plane field component, with no apparent connection to the underlying crystal structure. Furthermore no anomalies are observed in the magnetic torque, suggesting the absence of metamagnetic transitions in this field range. These observations are indicative of an electronic nematic character of the high field state in CeRhIn5. The appearance of nematic behavior in a phenotypical heavy fermion superconductor highlights the interrelation of nematicity and unconventional superconductivity, suggesting nematicity to be a commonality in such materials

One session of fMRI-Neurofeedback training on motor imagery modulates whole-brain effective connectivity and dynamical complexity

In the past decade, several studies have shown that Neurofeedback (NFB) by functional magnetic resonance imaging can alter the functional coupling of targeted and non-targeted areas. However, the causal mechanisms underlying these changes remain uncertain. Here, we applied a whole-brain dynamical model to estimate Effective Connectivity (EC) profiles of resting-state data acquired before and immediately after a single-session NFB training for 17 participants who underwent motor imagery NFB training and 16 healthy controls who received sham feedback. Within-group and between-group classification analyses revealed that only for the NFB group it was possible to accurately discriminate between the 2 resting-state sessions. NFB training-related signatures were reflected in a support network of direct connections between areas involved in reward processing and implicit learning, together with regions belonging to the somatomotor, control, attention, and default mode networks, identified through a recursive-feature elimination procedure. By applying a data-driven approach to explore NFB-induced changes in spatiotemporal dynamics, we demonstrated that these regions also showed decreased switching between different brain states (i.e. metastability) only following real NFB training. Overall, our findings contribute to the understanding of NFB impact on the whole brain's structure and function by shedding light on the direct connections between brain areas affected by NFB training