New Opportunities for Authenticity in a World of Changing Biology

Biology now produces massive data, genomic and other types. New ways of building knowledge are thus increasingly reliant on data processing. Biological data and analytical tools, widely accessible via the internet, offer new authentic opportunities to explore, test and validate hypotheses in numerous fields of biology and allow students to engage in the same cognitive processes associated with hands-on biology. New authentic text resources are also freely available, enabling students to practice the authentic scientific process of knowledge validation. Indeed science is a process of building knowledge by confronting ideas, and discussing their certainty, the links to the data that they are built on and their source. Framing authenticity in terms of resources and student activities, we have spent 7 years refining designs for building scientific knowledge within wiki-supported learning environments that confront students with an overabundance of resources of differing authenticity. We will discuss the influence of resource authenticity, and of the students being progressively given responsibility for validation, on the development of scientific knowledge and learning strategies. Results include an increase in the epistemic complexity of student-produced texts, a shift towards using increasingly authentic resources, and autonomy in validating information. Some authenticity-linked design features, and generalisability, will be discussed.