Chemical Education Today
Editorial
A Living Textbook of Chemistry—for Everyone The concept of this Journal as a living textbook of chemistry appropriately augment a chapter in the online textbook. Videos has always appealed to me. Enabling many chemists/teachers to or still images from Chemistry Comes Alive! (http://www.jce. communicate their best and most effective ideas, helping many divched.org/JCESoft/jcesoftSubscriber/CCA/index.html) could be others to adopt and adapt those ideas, and providing continual linked to discussions of chemical reactions so that readers could communication among all concerned is a easily see what the reactants, the reacgoal worthy of our best efforts. I have severtion process, and the products look The goal of using a wiki format al times used this editorial page to indicate like. In a discussion of decomposition how I thought this living textbook could reactions, videos of several reactions, is to enable the chemical education develop (1). I am excited to announce that such as decomposition of ammothe living textbook has new capabilities nium dichromate (http://www.jce. community to edit and augment that enable even better communication divched.org/JCESoft/jcesoftSubscriber/ among teachers, students, lifelong learners, CCA/CCA1/R1MAIN/CD1R1430. the written text, the figures, and many others. HTM#1440) could enliven the topic. On p 41 in this issue, Pence and Pence When a molecule is being discussed, a the problems and examples, describe their use of the Web, specifically link to Molecules 360 (http://chemedsocial tagging, as a means by which their dl.org/collections/molecules/index. and other aspects of the book. students could find, evaluate, categorize, php) would allow readers to view and and share with other students Web sites manipulate the molecular structure relevant to specific course assignments. Using Delicious, an in several different formats. When descriptive chemistry of an online social tagging tool, students shared with each other and element is the subject, a direct link could be made to the page their teacher Web sites that enhanced and updated the textbook in Periodic Table Live! (http://chemeddl.org/collections/ptl/index. for an environmental chemistry course. You can now do somehtml) that describes the element. (Because Periodic Table Live! thing similar, sharing with other readers your enhancements of also has a wiki, others will probably have upgraded the informaa general chemistry textbook. tion about the element recently.) You could also link students to A general chemistry textbook is now available in a wiki at a Netorial (http://www.jce.divched.org/JCESoft/jcesoftSubscriber/ the Chemical Education Digital Library (ChemEd DL) (see netorial/index.html) to provide tutorial material in areas from announcement on p 27). Titled Chemistry, the textbook is one chemical reactions and stoichiometry through biomolecular that I co-authored in 1978. It has been out of print for more structure. Instead of printed end-of-chapter questions, homethan 20 years. You will probably not be surprised to learn that work assignments can be constructed from JCE QBank (http:// it includes most of the topics that are in today’s general chemwww.jce.divched.org/JCEDLib/QBank/index.html). You could istry textbooks—there has not been a lot of change in 30 years. also suggest links to worksheets you had designed yourself or The format is simpler, there are fewer pages, and the mass of a to external Web sites that would help the reader understand bound volume is about half that of a modern book. There are the topic at hand. All of this could be packaged into a course fewer figures and, except for a special eight-page color section, by using the ChemEd DL’s Moodle-based course-management illustrations are varying shades of black and red. Other features facility at http://moodle.chemeddl.org/. of modern books, such as boxes that describe applications of Visit the ChemEd DL Web site and explore the tools for chemistry in the environment, industry, human bodies, modbuilding your own textbook and managing course content. The ern research, and other areas of interest to students are absent. only restriction is that the ChemEd DL will expect to be able to Though these might seem to be deficiencies, read on to see how distribute your creations as well as those we already have. If you they can be turned to our collective advantage. are interested in adding to or modifying the online textbook, or The goal of using a wiki format is to enable the chemical in collaborating in other ways, please contact me directly or put education community to edit and augment the written text, your ideas into the “discussion” tab of the wiki. There are lots the figures, the problems and examples, and other aspects of of opportunities in the ChemEd DL for improving chemistry the book. Thus any of us could choose any chapter, section, or education. Please take advantage of them! topic within this textbook and modify it to meet our exact needs and pedagogical preferences. I suggest that you go online and Literature Cited view the wiki as you read this (http://wiki.chemeddl.org/index. php/Collections:Texts:Chemistry). To edit or make suggestions 1. Moore, J. W. J. Chem. Educ. 1997, 74, 1149; Moore, J. W. J. Chem. for changes you must create an account and provide a valid Educ. 2001, 78, 567; Moore, J. W. J. Chem. Educ. 2001, 78, email address. Once you have logged in, we prefer that you use 703. the “discussion” tab at the top of the page to suggest changes, Supporting JCE Online Material rather than actually editing the text. We encourage you to make http://www.jce.divched.org/Journal/Issues/2009/Jan/abs11.html as many suggestions as you like. Full text (HTML and PDF) with links to cited URLs and JCE articles What kinds of changes might you suggest? You could certainly consider which resources in the ChemEd DL would Blogged at http://expertvoices.nsdl.org/chemeddl/ © Division of Chemical Education • www.JCE.DivCHED.org • Vol. 86 No. 1 January 2009 • Journal of Chemical Education
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