JCE Software, 2B1: Editorial

Spreadsheets, Tools, Hypermedia

John W. Moore
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706-1396

Note:
This issue is out of print.

In his introduction to the programs in this issue David Whisnant refers to a call for "...imaginative chemical applications for VisiCalc and other spreadsheet programs..." that we wrote for the Computer Series (1) in September 1983. Because Dave referred to it, I reread the article, and it generated some thoughts that seemed appropriate to pass along in this editorial.
Spreadsheets in Physical Chemistry provides an excellent response to our suggestion that spreadsheets be adopted more widely. Dave Whisnant and Pat Flath have made it much, much easier for the rest of us to make effective use of spreadsheets in our teaching, and they have provided a way for a great many students to learn on their own about the many benefits these high-level programming languages can bring to a calculation-intensive discipline like chemistry. But using spreadsheets was only one of the suggestions that we made six years ago. Other useful techniques, such as statistical analysis of data, word processors to improve report writing, communication among microcomputers and mainframes, and well-thought-out instructional software, are also coming into being. All of these represent new tools that students can apply to increasing their knowledge and comprehension of chemistry and to speeding up their development into contributing members of our profession.
"Tooling Up for the 21st Century" was the title of the FIPSE Lecture that I gave last summer at the Tenth Biennial Conference on Chemical Education (2). That lecture followed up on the ideas that had appeared in 1983 and suggested a great many new aspects of the glorious tool kit that technology has provided to chemistry teachers. It is my hope that JJCE: Software will be an important mechanism by which those ideas can be made concrete and comprehensible, and this issue provides one example.
Of course JCE: Software will be influenced to a considerable degree by what is submitted for publication. We strongly encourage all authors who have new ideas for applications of technological tools to the teaching of chemistry to submit their materials. Although initial issues have depended on many programs prepared by Project SERAPHIM Fellows, it is not our intention to make this a trend. We need and welcome submissions from anyone who has a good, new idea and can implement it to provide effective learning materials.
We too, by our editorial decisions and by the nature of what is published, intend to influence JCE: Software--we hope for the better. One such decision we made early in the process of developing the first issue was to include printed material along with the computer disk. Subsequent issues, including this one, have contained printed handouts to which students refer as they use the computer programs. Initially we had thought that everything could be provided on disks, but for certain things the printed page is more effective than the screen. Standardized printer technology that can produce high-quality documents will soon become widely enough available that subscribers can print their own handouts, and higher-quality displays may eventually obviate the need for printed material completely--but not yet. For now we are shipping with every disk printed material that makes a complete learning package, and we expect to do so for some time.
This together with the publication of a videodisc has made JCE: Software a multimedia production. It is challenging and exciting to participate with authors, reviewers, and other editors in the process of creating instructional packages that subscribers can use more or less unchanged. In this respect we differ somewhat from the Journal of Chemical Education, which more often describes innovations in chemical education rather than publishing specific implementations, but this is understandable since we are dealing with a new medium (or rather new media). Indeed these may be the media of the future for all scientific communication if the ideas expressed in a recent article in Academic Computing come to fruition (3).
The authors of that article, Louie and Rubeck, recount that at a conference honoring the 25th anniversary of John von Neumann's computer the mathematician Stanislau Ulam estimated that on the order of one hundred thousand mathematical theorems are published each year. Ulam raised the question, "If the number of theorems is larger than one can possibly learn, who can be trusted to judge what is `important'? One cannot have survival of the fittest if there is no interaction." Louie and Rubeck state that in 1986 more than one million scientific articles were published and refer to the problem of the "...chaos of prolific knowledge." Their proposed solution is "...the linking potential of hypertext techniques..." , which "...suggest that novel and more compelling organizations of knowledge await those comfortable with technology." In other words, a possible response to Ulam's query is that the knowledge generated by scientists ought to be cast into hypertext or hypermedia (4) rather than ordinary publication. In hypertext form new research results would be more readily accessible and better articulated with the rest of our vast store of scientific knowledge. In addition Louie and Rubeck argue that it would be easier to test the originality of the work published as hypertext.
If indeed hypertext is the wave of the future for scientific communication, then JCE: Software may well be on the crest, and our authors may have an excellent opportunity to become involved in a major effort to change the way results of scholarly work are published. We are already at the multimedia stage, and the step to hypermedia may not be such a large one. Our first Macintosh issue, scheduled for December of this year, will involve a HyperCard stack that will drive the Periodic Table Videodisc published as a special issue in January. That stack will allow students a variety of access routes to a great deal of information about the elements, just as KC? Discoverer (Vol. IB, No. 1) did, but the video will be completely integrated with the Macintosh program.
Louie and Rubeck provide strong support for my personal view that the biggest problem facing science today is communication, not discovery of new knowledge. By implication teachers and others who can create the connections among the incredible number of pieces of information science has already accumulated play a far more important role than has been recognized hitherto. More power to them!
Literature Cited

Moore, J. W.; Moore, E. A. J. Chem. Educ. 1983 60, 730.
Moore, J. W. J. Chem. Educ. 1989 66, 19.
Louie, S.; Rubeck, R. F. Acad. Computing 1989 3(9), 20.
Conklin, J. IEEE Computer (September 1987), 17-41.

First Published: June 1989
Citation: Moore, J. W. Spreadsheets, Tools, Hypermedia J. Chem. Educ. Software 2B1
Keywords:

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Last Updated: April 26, 2001
Created: December 3, 1996 Created by: J. L. Holmes
Comments to: jceonline@chem.wisc.edu

© 1997 Division of Chemical Education, Inc., American Chemical Society. All rights reserved.



Spreadsheets, Tools, Hypermedia
John W. Moore University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706-1396

Note:	This issue is out of print.

In his introduction to the programs in this issue David Whisnant refers to a call for "...imaginative chemical applications for VisiCalc and other spreadsheet programs..." that we wrote for the Computer Series (1) in September 1983. Because Dave referred to it, I reread the article, and it generated some thoughts that seemed appropriate to pass along in this editorial. Spreadsheets in Physical Chemistry provides an excellent response to our suggestion that spreadsheets be adopted more widely. Dave Whisnant and Pat Flath have made it much, much easier for the rest of us to make effective use of spreadsheets in our teaching, and they have provided a way for a great many students to learn on their own about the many benefits these high-level programming languages can bring to a calculation-intensive discipline like chemistry. But using spreadsheets was only one of the suggestions that we made six years ago. Other useful techniques, such as statistical analysis of data, word processors to improve report writing, communication among microcomputers and mainframes, and well-thought-out instructional software, are also coming into being. All of these represent new tools that students can apply to increasing their knowledge and comprehension of chemistry and to speeding up their development into contributing members of our profession. "Tooling Up for the 21st Century" was the title of the FIPSE Lecture that I gave last summer at the Tenth Biennial Conference on Chemical Education (2). That lecture followed up on the ideas that had appeared in 1983 and suggested a great many new aspects of the glorious tool kit that technology has provided to chemistry teachers. It is my hope that JJCE: Software will be an important mechanism by which those ideas can be made concrete and comprehensible, and this issue provides one example. Of course JCE: Software will be influenced to a considerable degree by what is submitted for publication. We strongly encourage all authors who have new ideas for applications of technological tools to the teaching of chemistry to submit their materials. Although initial issues have depended on many programs prepared by Project SERAPHIM Fellows, it is not our intention to make this a trend. We need and welcome submissions from anyone who has a good, new idea and can implement it to provide effective learning materials. We too, by our editorial decisions and by the nature of what is published, intend to influence JCE: Software--we hope for the better. One such decision we made early in the process of developing the first issue was to include printed material along with the computer disk. Subsequent issues, including this one, have contained printed handouts to which students refer as they use the computer programs. Initially we had thought that everything could be provided on disks, but for certain things the printed page is more effective than the screen. Standardized printer technology that can produce high-quality documents will soon become widely enough available that subscribers can print their own handouts, and higher-quality displays may eventually obviate the need for printed material completely--but not yet. For now we are shipping with every disk printed material that makes a complete learning package, and we expect to do so for some time. This together with the publication of a videodisc has made JCE: Software a multimedia production. It is challenging and exciting to participate with authors, reviewers, and other editors in the process of creating instructional packages that subscribers can use more or less unchanged. In this respect we differ somewhat from the Journal of Chemical Education, which more often describes innovations in chemical education rather than publishing specific implementations, but this is understandable since we are dealing with a new medium (or rather new media). Indeed these may be the media of the future for all scientific communication if the ideas expressed in a recent article in Academic Computing come to fruition (3). The authors of that article, Louie and Rubeck, recount that at a conference honoring the 25th anniversary of John von Neumann's computer the mathematician Stanislau Ulam estimated that on the order of one hundred thousand mathematical theorems are published each year. Ulam raised the question, "If the number of theorems is larger than one can possibly learn, who can be trusted to judge what is `important'? One cannot have survival of the fittest if there is no interaction." Louie and Rubeck state that in 1986 more than one million scientific articles were published and refer to the problem of the "...chaos of prolific knowledge." Their proposed solution is "...the linking potential of hypertext techniques..." , which "...suggest that novel and more compelling organizations of knowledge await those comfortable with technology." In other words, a possible response to Ulam's query is that the knowledge generated by scientists ought to be cast into hypertext or hypermedia (4) rather than ordinary publication. In hypertext form new research results would be more readily accessible and better articulated with the rest of our vast store of scientific knowledge. In addition Louie and Rubeck argue that it would be easier to test the originality of the work published as hypertext. If indeed hypertext is the wave of the future for scientific communication, then JCE: Software may well be on the crest, and our authors may have an excellent opportunity to become involved in a major effort to change the way results of scholarly work are published. We are already at the multimedia stage, and the step to hypermedia may not be such a large one. Our first Macintosh issue, scheduled for December of this year, will involve a HyperCard stack that will drive the Periodic Table Videodisc published as a special issue in January. That stack will allow students a variety of access routes to a great deal of information about the elements, just as KC? Discoverer (Vol. IB, No. 1) did, but the video will be completely integrated with the Macintosh program. Louie and Rubeck provide strong support for my personal view that the biggest problem facing science today is communication, not discovery of new knowledge. By implication teachers and others who can create the connections among the incredible number of pieces of information science has already accumulated play a far more important role than has been recognized hitherto. More power to them! Literature Cited Moore, J. W.; Moore, E. A. J. Chem. Educ. 1983 60, 730. Moore, J. W. J. Chem. Educ. 1989 66, 19. Louie, S.; Rubeck, R. F. Acad. Computing 1989 3(9), 20. Conklin, J. IEEE Computer (September 1987), 17-41.


News \| Issues \| CD-ROM / Video \| Find It! \| Technical Support \| For Authors
JCE Online \| Journal \| Software \| Internet \| Happenings \| About JCE \| Contact JCE

Last Updated: April 26, 2001 Created: December 3, 1996	Created by: J. L. Holmes Comments to: jceonline@chem.wisc.edu

© 1997 Division of Chemical Education, Inc., American Chemical Society. All rights reserved.