With this issue the Journal of Chemical Education begins its 80th
year of publication. In many ways we are still what Neil Gordon created in 1924.
Gordon’s vision for this Journal was that it should
- Disseminate and archive chemical education work presented at ACS meetings
- Encourage community of effort in chemical education
- Help teachers maintain an investigational atmosphere in chemistry classrooms
- Keep teacher and student in closer touch with scientific organizations
- Summarize relevant papers from other journals
- Become an international journal
- Publish papers that apply educational psychology to teaching
- Have the spirit of pure research in chemical education
Another former editor, W. T. Lippincott, stated that the Journal should
“provide chemistry teachers with information, ideas, and materials for improving
and updating their background and their understanding of the science, and for
helping them in their teaching and in their effectiveness in developing the talents
of students.” According to Tom Lippincott, JCE should be “a
perpetual and dependable learning source for chemists who teach.”
Hewing to the ideals espoused by Gordon, Lippincott, and other editors has
required that JCE constantly reinvent itself, adapting to new circumstances
both in chemical education and in publishing. What it means to “encourage
a community of effort in chemical education” and to be “a perpetual
and dependable learning source” is not the same today as it was in 1924,
or even 1974. Fortunately each editor, together with the Journal’s
volunteer contributors, has adapted to contemporary circumstances. The Journal
has prospered and continues to anticipate and meet the needs of its clientele.
As this 80th year begins, I am happy to be able to announce another step in
that progression—one that we think will broaden and help perpetuate JCE
as a convenient and dependable source of learning materials involving chemistry.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has provided a substantial grant to JCE
to develop several chemistry collections within the National Science, Technology,
Engineering, and Mathematics Education Digital Library (NSDL) project (1).
These, together with our existing digital offerings through JCE Online
and JCE Software (2), will greatly enhance
the Journal’s ability to serve our readers and authors.
The NSDL intends to make multimedia and other digitized learning materials
readily available to a broad audience of teachers, librarians, students, and citizens.
It is a very ambitious undertaking, and one whose goals overlap substantially
with those of this Journal. We are proud to be part of the program, and
we recognize that it will require substantial new effort from both our editorial
staff and volunteer column editors and contributors. We invite, encourage, even
beg for your enthusiastic participation, and we have set up a special email address
for those who are interested in helping: JCEDigiLib@chem.wisc.edu.
What can you contribute? Our new collections are described in more detail in
News and Announcements. They involve DigiDemos,
a digital library of chemical demonstrations; documents for Mathcad and other
computer algebra systems; Web-deliverable questions for homework and student assessment;
and JCE WebWare, our newest online column (3).
If you have created materials of this kind, or if you know of colleagues or others
who have done so, please contact us and submit or encourage submission of the
materials. If you have discovered animations, simulations, spreadsheets, or other
pedagogically useful items on the Web, bring them to our attention so that we
can evaluate them for JCE WebWare and encourage their authors to submit
them. If you are willing to help evaluate, enhance, catalog, or otherwise add
value to digitized learning materials, please let us know of your interest and
your areas of expertise. We are particularly interested in identifying those who
can help us provide what the NSDL calls “metadata”. This is information
that can be attached to an instructional item to enable others to retrieve it
from a vast digital collection.
Participating in the National Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics
Education Digital Library project is an exciting prospect for JCE. We
expect to be able to make major contributions to the project and derive major
benefits from participating in it. Your help in this important undertaking would
be most welcome and greatly appreciated. Help us demonstrate that an 80-year-old
can dance to a new tune!
Literature Cited
- Read an overview of the
NSDL (accessed Nov 2002).
- See JCE Online and JCE
Software features in this issue for the latest examples.
- See JCE
WebWare (accessed Nov 2002).
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