Learning on ScreenEnlightening Science
Like the experiments and lecture courses of the eighteenth century, which circulated between genteel and scholarly locales, Enlightening Science is aimed at scholars and the general public, and is intended to be both informative and entertaining. The resource was created with three specific audiences in mind. Early on in the implementation of the materials on the site, we tested them on a group of schoolchildren and undergraduates in Sussex. By the time most students reach the age of 15 in the British school system, they have already begun to specialise in either humanities or STEM subjects. Obviously, this process is more deeply ingrained by the time they study A-levels, or arrive at university. In the course of the project were able to introduce humanities students to the basic laws and concepts of physics, while engaging students of the natural sciences in the historical contexts and nuances of the basic features of Newtonian physics.
Secondly, we presume that the broader public can learn from the materials on the site in much the same way as students. They also provide a much more palatable way of accessing the more abstruse written resources that are on the Newton Project site. The scientific and mathematical papers are especially forbidding since they are in Latin and composed in a notation that has long been obsolete. It is a longer term aim of the Newton Project to overlay these original materials with modern versions/translations of the originals along with the conventional accoutrements of introductions and commentaries. Nevertheless, a general lesson learned from the process of implementing Enlightening Science is that video introductions to textual materials, whether 2, 5 or 30 minutes, are quicker to produce, more entertaining, and more informative than written commentaries. Initial feedback shows that the scholarly community, the final audience for the resource, can derive great benefit from the interviews and demonstrations and also use the site as a gateway to the textual resources.
These are early days in the formation of the website, and we hope to build on what we have done so far by creating a forum where a broad and interdisciplinary community of users can add to and comment on the resources that already exist. Ultimately, we hope this will help lessen the gulf that currently divides the humanities and the sciences.
Professor Rob Iliffe
www.enlighteningscience.sussex.ac.uk
