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The concept of this Journal as a living textbook of chemistry has always appealed to me. Enabling many chemists/teachers to communicate their best and most effective ideas, helping many others to adopt and adapt those ideas, and providing continual communication among all concerned is a goal worthy of our best efforts. I have several times used this editorial page to indicate how I thought this living textbook could develop (1). I am excited to announce that the living textbook has new capabilities that enable even better communication among teachers, students, lifelong learners, and many others. In this issue, Pence and Pence describe their use of the Web, specifically social tagging, as a means by which their students could find, evaluate, categorize, and share with other students Web sites relevant to specific course assignments. Using Delicious, an online social tagging tool, students shared with each other and their teacher Web sites that enhanced and updated the textbook for an environmental chemistry course. You can now do something similar, sharing with other readers your enhancements of a general chemistry textbook. A general chemistry textbook is now available in a wiki at the Chemical Education Digital Library (ChemEd DL) (see announcement on p 27). Titled Chemistry, the textbook is one that I co-authored in 1978. It has been out of print for more than 20 years. You will probably not be surprised to learn that it includes most of the topics that are in today's general chemistry textbooks—there has not been a lot of change in 30 years. The format is simpler, there are fewer pages, and the mass of a bound volume is about half that of a modern book. There are fewer figures and, except for a special eight-page color section, illustrations are varying shades of black and red. Other features of modern books, such as boxes that describe applications of chemistry in the environment, industry, human bodies, modern research, and other areas of interest to students are absent. Though these might seem to be deficiencies, read on to see how they can be turned to our collective advantage. The goal of using a wiki format is to enable the chemical education community to edit and augment the written text, the figures, the problems and examples, and other aspects of the book. Thus any of us could choose any chapter, section, or topic within this textbook and modify it to meet our exact needs and pedagogical preferences. I suggest that you go online and view the wiki as you read this. To edit or make suggestions for changes you must create an account and provide a valid email address. Once you have logged in, we prefer that you use the "discussion" tab at the top of the page to suggest changes, rather than actually editing the text. We encourage you to make as many suggestions as you like. What kinds of changes might you suggest? You could certainly consider which resources in the ChemEd DL would appropriately augment a chapter in the online textbook. Videos or still images from Chemistry Comes Alive! could be linked to discussions of chemical reactions so that readers could easily see what the reactants, the reaction process, and the products look like. In a discussion of decomposition reactions, videos of several reactions, such as decomposition of ammonium dichromate could enliven the topic. When a molecule is being discussed, a link to Molecules 360 would allow readers to view and manipulate the molecular structure in several different formats. When descriptive chemistry of an element is the subject, a direct link could be made to the page in Periodic Table Live! that describes the element. (Because Periodic Table Live! also has a wiki, others will probably have upgraded the information about the element recently.) You could also link students to a Netorial to provide tutorial material in areas from chemical reactions and stoichiometry through biomolecular structure. Instead of printed end-of-chapter questions, homework assignments can be constructed from JCE QBank. You could also suggest links to worksheets you had designed yourself or to external Web sites that would help the reader understand the topic at hand. All of this could be packaged into a course by using the ChemEd DL's Moodle-based course-management facility. Visit the ChemEd DL Web site and explore the tools for building your own textbook and managing course content. The only restriction is that the ChemEd DL will expect to be able to distribute your creations as well as those we already have. If you are interested in adding to or modifying the online textbook, or in collaborating in other ways, please contact me directly or put your ideas into the "discussion" tab of the wiki. There are lots of opportunities in the ChemEd DL for improving chemistry education. Please take advantage of them! Literature Cited- Moore, J. W. J. Chem. Educ. 1997, 74, 1149; Moore, J. W. J. Chem. Educ. 2001, 78, 567; Moore, J. W. J. Chem. Educ. 2001, 78, 703.
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