A brave new world developing methodology to investigate individual and collaborative student practice in computer science education

In the past decade, a wealth of new resources have become available to students in tertiary education. Some of these have been designed to assist teaching and learning, whilst others, such as social networking sites and the wide availability of mobile devices, have become ambient in our students lives. The impact of this on us (as academics), is that the academic study (of computing, in our case) has become unbounded from physical space, no longer isolated to lecture theatres and seminar rooms. We could attempt to follow our students into this new world, but to understand how students learn to navigate and utilise these new spaces in relation to their academic studies, we need to understand the practices, social structures and identities that they develop within them. To do this, we need to provide a way for students to show us these spaces and for them to become our guides. In doing so, we can improve our understanding of students individual and collaborative working practices during academic study.