Chemical Education Today
Editorial
A Living Textbook of Chemistry From its inception, this Journal has aimed to be a “living textbook of chemistry”, a phrase coined by an early editor. This has always seemed to me an excellent goal—one that reflects founding editor Neil Gordon’s statement that JCE should “have the spirit of pure research in chemical education”. A living textbook should be something that each of us can use to learn more about chemistry and pedagogy, and to which each of us can contribute new ideas and new chemistry content. Ideally, each of us should be working energetically and enthusiastically to enhance this living textbook. A broad range of tools is currently available to enhance teaching and learning, and many more have come and gone. Certain ideas about effective pedagogy are currently favored, and others have also come and gone. Most tools and ideas of the past have been published and preserved in this Journal, and we need to make certain that current and future ideas will also be disseminated and preserved in appropriate media and formats. In the paragraphs that follow I summarize many of JCE’s activities that we think are needed to support our aspiration to be a living textbook of chemistry. More than 40 volunteer column editors encourage and evaluate submissions in many specific areas, thereby broadening the range of material included in print. Some examples are Tested Demonstrations, Chemical Education Research, Microscale Laboratory, and Classroom Activities. More than 3000 reviewers have volunteered to evaluate manuscripts and contribute to the quality of what we publish. We are collaborating with Project Chemlab to enhance the quality of published laboratory experiments and to categorize and index them more effectively. Since 1996 we have captured every page of the printed Journal and published it on the Web via JCE Online, which is included as part of every subscription to JCE. Abstracts of all papers are available in HTML, and full papers are available in PDF format. In addition, we have created JCE Index online, which includes the entire 77-year span of Journal issues. For issues that are available on the Web, the index provides direct links to specific papers. We are also working to digitize issues of JCE that were printed before our publishing system allowed us to capture them in digital format. For the past four years we have required that authors of laboratory experiments provide supplemental materials including handouts they give to students, information for storeroom personnel about preparing chemicals, solutions, and apparatus, directions for safe handling and disposal of chemicals, and other information useful to teachers. All this material is peer reviewed along with the content that appears in print. The supplemental material appears in JCE Online in a format that teachers can download and edit for their own use. Since 1988 JCE Software has collected, published, and provided user support for a large number of peer-reviewed software programs for teaching chemistry. Authors, or our staff, update programs so that software can continue to be used as instructional technology develops. Many JCE Software programs incorporate multimedia, especially digitized
…we would wish that readers might think of this Journal as a place wherein countless generative ideas, old and new, that form both the substance and the catalysts for chemical science and chemical thought are described with a freshness and excitement akin to that accompanying their discovery, and wherein a thousand great chemistry teachers of the past and present live and speak and teach and write. W. T. Lippincott, JCE 1973, 50, 799
video. We have a large collection of video on videotapes, published videodiscs, and published CD-ROMs, and we continually update it. We include convenient means by which teachers can readily find and use the digital video. For example, each Chemistry Comes Alive! CD-ROM keys its video content to the chapters in popular high school and first-year college chemistry texts. We license JCE digital material to schools and colleges for use on their own Web sites; some colleges have had their students purchase the CD-ROMs as required course materials; and some of the video material is being used by authors to create their own derivative works. In JCE Internet we publish peer-reviewed papers that require the Web medium for their delivery (see http://jchemed. chem.wisc.edu/JCEWWW/Articles/DynaPub/DynaPub.html ). There are also columns, such as Mathcad in the Chemistry Curriculum and Biographical Snapshots of Famous Women and Minority Chemists, that appear only in JCE Internet. And we have just inaugurated JCE WebWare (http://jchemed. chem.wisc.edu/JCEWWW/Features/WebWare/index.html ), in which we publish brief, Web-based instructional materials created as spreadsheets, virtual reality files, or Java applets. In the rapidly changing, technology-intensive world of modern publishing, there is probably much more that we could (or should) be doing. I encourage you to think about what that is and to communicate your thoughts. Continuing to be a living textbook of chemistry has important implications about the future of JCE. What should JCE consist of? How should it be maintained and delivered? What should we aspire to become? These are questions that JCE’s entire constituency needs to consider and on which I hope you will provide guidance and wisdom.
JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu • Vol. 78 No. 5 May 2001 • Journal of Chemical Education
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