In an article titled "More Information, Less Credibility" my Sunday newspaper (1) quotes several pundits on the web. "It's more than we can handle. It's coming at us faster than we can possibly fathom"Carol Koehler, University of Missouri­Kansas City. "It's easier to get information today than ever before, [but] it's harder to get the right information"Tom Rosenstiel, former Los Angeles Times media critic. "[There is] a flood of dubious information on the Internet"Brooke Shelby Biggs, media columnist for the online magazine HotWired.

In an article titled "Web of Deceit" a computer magazine (2) describes web sites that appear to be providing unbiased, independent information, but whose fine print indicates sponsorship by companies that are selling products the sites recommend. And there are other sites whose chief function is to obtain personal or family information from net surfersmany of them children. Your online habitswhere you click and whencan be recorded by "cookies" sent surreptitiously to your computer. Owners of the web sites may use the information to make their offerings work better for you, or they may use it to profile your preferences and sell them to others.

Though it might seem premature for a historian to be interested in the web, at least one is. In The Key Reporter, newsletter of Phi Beta Kappa, Gertrude Himmelfarb (3) sees an electronic revolution that is affecting " the nature of learning and education." This revolution is " salutaryup to a point. But, like most revolutions, it tends to go beyond that point." That point is where democratization of access to knowledge turns into democratization of knowledge itself. In Himmelfarb's words, "In cyberspace, every source seems as authoritative as every other." Because of this, "It takes a discriminating mind to distinguish between the trivial and the important, the ephemeral and the enduring, the true and the false." She sees the web as appropriate for amassing facts but inimical to thinking seriously about ideas.

These arguments are valid, but they do not imply that we ought to ignore the internet. Even though you can read about spontaneous human combustion, it is possible to find reasoned discussions of such topics, some of which may even promote critical thinking. (See for example http://dcn.davis.ca.us/~btcarrol/skeptic/shc.html and http://www.heimbaugh.com/death/spontaneous.human. combustion/.) Some books from well-known publishers have been debunked on the web ( http://dcn.davis.ca.us/~btcarrol/skeptic/philadel.html ). Teaching students to approach any source of information with healthy skepticism is good, and the incredible expansion of information available via the internet makes it even more important.

A strong argument can be made (4) that the most effective use of the web in science will be to foster collaboration among groups of researchers who are not in face-to-face communication and to greatly enlarge the number of such collaborations. A similar argument can be made by changing the word "researchers" to either "students" or "teachers". There are already a great many innovative and effective uses of the web to expand communities of chemists and chemistry students. I know of one instance where a group of faculty at small colleges that otherwise would lack a critical mass of students has arranged for students to interact via the web and email. This is an ongoing process that is being refined and improved, but it certainly uses the web to good advantage.

In support of its goal of building the community of chemical educators, your Journal has been publishing on the web for some time (5). We have been using email for return of manuscript reviews for about a year, with kudos from both editors and reviewers. Some have argued that the web obviates the need for peer review (6). Why don't we just tell everyone to put whatever they want onto the web and let the community decide whether it is valuable or not? My problem with that approach is related to many of the comments above. Most of us don't have time to evaluate the accuracy of everything that we might come across on the web, and we need things organized in a way that helps us find what we want. High quality work by reviewers and editors helps us find accurate information quickly and easily. That's what a journal is all about.

But how about applying the web to the peer review process in a creative way? In the near future, under Jon Holmes's able direction, JCE Internet will begin a process of open review. Papers will be posted online for review, reader-reviewers will be able to comment directly to the author or anonymously via the Journal, and when, in the editor's opinion, an adequate evaluation has been made, the paper will be accepted and moved to a different area of JCE Internet. Check the News area of JCE Online for more information about this process.

The web is certainly a fount of information, but it faces all of us with the perennial problem of the freshman chemistry student: getting a drink from a fire hose. The web is also a vanity press extraordinaireor an instance of complete democratization of knowledge. But neither of these aspects should prevent us from exploring, defining, and refining its role as a very powerful intellectual tool that all of us in chemical education can use to advantage.

Literature Cited

1. Canon, S. Wisconsin State Journal Sunday, July 27, 1997, p 1B.

2. Chapman, F. S. PC World August 1977, 145.

3. Himmelfarb, G. Key Reporter 1997, 62(3), 1-5.

4. King, E. Scientific Computing & Automation July 1996, pp 41-42.

5. Lagowski, J. J. J. Chem. Educ. 1995, 72, 957.

6. News report in Science 1997, 276, 1035.