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In January 1924 founding editor Neil Gordon listed as one of four goals for this Journal that it “encourage community of effort in chemical education” (1). The Journal has assiduously pursued this goal for 83 years under seven different editors. Serving as a nexus among all aspects of education involving chemistry is a major part of what we are about. I am happy to report that we now have a unique, new opportunity to pursue that goal even further.
In collaboration with the ACS Education Division and the ChemCollective project at Carnegie-Mellon University, we are initiating the Chemical Education Digital Library (ChemEd DL), a Pathways project in the National Science Digital Library (NSDL). You are probably already familiar with the JCE Digital Library’s participation in the NSDL and with our eight collections: JCE ChemInfo, JCE DigiDemos, JCE Featured Molecules, JCE LivTexts, JCE LrnCom, JCE QBank, JCE SymMath, and JCE WebWare (2). There are many other NSDL projects that have collected resources as we have, but only a few Pathways projects (3). Each Pathway aims to provide a conduit to and from the NSDL for a clearly defined clientele—in our case chemists and chemistry teachers.
What will be the goals of the ChemEd DL as a Pathway? We plan to build on the strong foundations of the JCE Digital Library, the ACS Education Division (which has many useful items on the ACS Web site), the fact that the ACS is reinventing its Web presence (4), and the excellent tools already developed by the ChemCollective project. We plan to greatly expand existing collections by adding new materials and assigning metadata (keywords) to resources such as JCE articles and Chemistry Comes Alive! videos. We will consolidate existing digital assets into more extensive learning objects that correspond in scale with textbook sections or chapters. Through our own resources and in collaboration with the NSDL and other Pathways we plan to develop online tools to help participants in the ChemEd DL to submit, review, and publish excellent learning materials online and to communicate with each other. We expect to make the digital library the beginning of the publication process by enabling online submission of resources that can later be peer reviewed and published, but that can be used immediately (just as JCE WebWare open-review items can be used now by non-subscribers and subscribers alike). To make as many people as possible aware of all of these resources, we plan extensive outreach through workshops, presentations, symposia, and booths at regional and national meetings.
Two major aspects of the ChemEd DL deserve more extensive description. We will be initiating communities of developers, users, and adapters of online materials. The communities will create, evaluate, adapt, and use the ChemEd DL’s contents. We are looking for volunteers who can actively participate in identifying members for each community, nurturing the community, and overseeing the materials developed by the community. And we have funding to support initiators of communities who wish to spend time at the University of Wisconsin–Madison working to get a community started. During each year of this three-year project a community will be developed in each of three major areas: educational level, such as high school or two-year college; subject areas, such as physical, organic, or general chemistry; and pedagogical techniques, such as testing or problem-based learning. If you are interested in participating, please contact me.
We will also be enhancing the library with a new means of browsing for resources. We call it Textbook Tables of Contents (TToC). Because textbooks remain the basis for course content in many instances, and because the table of contents of a textbook outlines that content, the table of contents can be a powerful tool for organizing online resources. Metadata (keywords) are already assigned to each resource in the digital library, and the same keywords can also be assigned to each entry in a table of contents. This makes possible a browsing mode in which a teacher or student can call up the table of contents of the textbook being used, click on an appropriate chapter and section, receive a list of available resources, and rapidly click to a resource that can provide appropriate instruction. A prototype TToC interface for JCE QBank is available (accessed Oct 2006).
We are looking for a great many volunteers to participate in the ChemEd DL and serve as nuclei for the many communities we plan to develop and the outreach programs we plan to carry out. There are endless possibilities on the Web for improving instruction in chemistry. Please join us in finding them and communicating them to the entire chemistry education community.
Literature Cited
- Gordon, Neil. J. Chem. Educ. 1924, 1, 1–2.
- Each collection appears in JCE Online (accessed Oct 2006) and can be selected from the menu on the left side of the page . A link to the NSDL is also available at the bottom of that page.
- See the announcement.
- Jacobs, Madeleine. Chem. Eng. News March 20, 2006, 84 (12), p 47.
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