Science and the Internet

Things to see (TES 1998)

Let’s get the history sorted first: scientists have been using this Internet marvel since its early days. They’ve used it to read journals, look things up and to exchange results. They use it to test their ideas on others, refine them and say things like "Good point, but I think…".

To them this transport medium for thought is nothing new. It links together the scientist’s community. For the pupil and teacher scientists who now use it there are opportunities, which people are beginning to toy with.

One is that the Web is a publishing space for pupils’ science reports. If you visit Sci-Journal at the University of Southampton – not that you ever notice where things are, you’ll find a number of pupil projects. The idea, in the tradition of scientist’s using the Internet, is that their work is a starting point for discussion. Like the scientists, the Internet is being used to comment on the quality of work, the ages of the kids and see what other teachers’ are doing. But does it hint that one day, everyone’s exercise book will be on the Web?

After ‘the exercise book’, another metaphor – the book or brochure is guiding people. At Liverpool John Moore’s University Sci-Centre you’ll find an attractive site providing information and multimedia visuals about the human body. When you’ve done compare it with Innerbody (www.innerbody.com/) another cutting edge look at your innards, good on looks and information but short on things to do with it. At the Natural History Museum, the QUEST project (www.nhm.ac.uk/SIMILE) presents objects that you can look at close-up, weigh and investigate. It’s cryptic but surely an example of this developing art of making something more interactive than page turning. And with the exam season approaching, see BBC Education’s Bitesize www.bbc.co.uk/– a collection of tutorials, advice and exam questions for pupils to swot at home.

But metaphors aside, there are examples of new ground being broken. For example, we’ve taken groups to places like The Science Museum and we’ve taken them home again. But maybe there’s a way to feedback on the place, share your thoughts, share worksheets or borrow other peoples. Their STEM project aims to encourage this, and if it helps there are prizes as incentives. And if you replace the words ‘Science Museum’ with any resource or teaching topic, you’ve got a model for a National grid for science teaching offering help on everything at the flick of a switch.

One of the biggest science Internet projects in this country was Schools OnLine, which although it shut shop last year, still has its Web pages to see. They model themselves around a prep room (for teachers), a lab (for investigating), and a library (for finding things on the Internet). Here too is a Science Café for asking scientists questions. Project leader John Wardle from Sheffield Hallam University points you to its lab feature which sought to team up schools doing investigations – the use of energy round the school or testing reaction times – both examples which benefit from pooling results to make a better set of data. He reports how some project schools have been organising Internet pages on their networks and building local caches of resources. He adds that while it’s ideal to have access to ‘live’ material, building Intranets (local Internets) may be one avenue that schools will want to develop. For examples, visit Brackenhale and St Aiden’s Schools.

For ‘live’ material, maybe you want science news which you’ll find at Helios. Or you might want to see a solar eclipse happening in another part of the world, or maybe one you just missed. The Exploratorium has an example.

Teachers could gain greatly from having a place where you can pop a question like ‘how do I…’ or ‘where do I get…’. Yet it is a fact that while most Internet projects invite discussion, it’s tragic not to find one that generates more traffic than an Arctic footpath. Part of the solution is to abandon technology where you have to ‘go get’ stuff instead of have it delivered, part of it is having a critical mass of teachers but much of it would come from the research that universities rarely do called market research.

Schools using the Internet do not need to emulate how real scientists use it - there’s clearly more to it and it does need discussion. If anywhere ought to be a place for that, maybe the Association for Science Education www.ase.org.uk is. Their Internet space is a few months old, beginning to look useful and to prove its immediate worth, it threw me an article about the Internet in science from a recent journal. There’s further discussion that comes to you as mail from group called Sci-Ed-Inet   keen to attract teachers for a chat. Just follow the instructions on the page to sign up.

Places

Science Museum STEM project www.nmsi.ac.uk/education/stem/

Schools Online – project school pages www.ultralab.anglia.ac.uk

Sci-Ed-Inet discussion www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/sci-ed-inet/join.html

Exploratorium – solar eclipse www.exploratorium.edu/eclipse/

Association for Science Education - www.ase.org.uk

BBC Education - Bitesize revision www.bbc.co.uk/

Innerbody – biology www.innerbody.com/

Sci-Centre – biology www.lmu.livjm.ac.uk/

Sci-Journal - www.soton.ac.uk/~plf/ScI-Journal

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