A friend at BECTA recently drew my attention to Learning from Digital Natives, a research project report recently produced by The Higher Education Academy. It offers a useful insight into how Web 2.0 or “social technologies” can benefit learning. One of the most intriguing recommendations is to “build a campus culture rich in social networking opportunities”. It got me thinking: smart-libraries that can recommend books to students; or a smart-bar in the students union that knows when you have had enough…!

This research was focussed on HE. It would be great to see a comparative study in secondary or primary schools. I’m not sure there are many teachers currently using Bebo or MySpace as an aid to learning but this paper clearly shows that there are benefits in doing so.

The report concludes:

“What we have learnt from our ‘digital natives’ in this study is that new e-tools and technologies afford processes with an informal focus on self-direction, communities of practice, collaboration, sharing and even identity exploration.

These young, and old, adults are active constructors of knowledge and are self motivated. These are skills we desire in our graduates and this provides a compelling argument to bring these skills and supporting technologies together…”

Hooray! Alien Invasion, the interactive classroom resource we’ve been developing over the past 18 months for the Bowland Trust, is about to be launched alongside 22 other case studies, at the annual conference of the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics (NCETM) held at The Royal Society. Alien Invasion has been selected to be showcased… as part of the Workshop programme.

The Bowland Initiative was set-up to help to address the drop in the rate of progress and in attitudes to Key Stage 3 mathematics (critical in the maths development of many pupils) by making maths fun. Alien Invasion contains a set of four interactive lessons about a full-scale alien attack that coincides with a class visit to a fictional city. To set the scene and support the lessons, live TV news bulletins, radio broadcasts and telephone messages help to develop the story line. The invasion leads to a series of non-routine problems for pupils to solve as the narrative unfolds. The problems are on the theme of mathematical communication and are intended to promote discussion, reasoning and creativity.

Trials, testing and evaluation took place at each main stage of development. We worked closely with maths education expert, Anita Straker, former head of the government’s national numeracy strategy, and now Education Consultant. Several teachers from schools across Devon and Cornwall acted as impartial advisers and trialled the project in their classrooms.

The case studies will be available to schools for the 2008/9 school year.