Chemical Education Today
Editorial
Celebrate Communication! All of us are dedicated to communicating chemistry in particular and science in general, so it is nice to see an important, international award program focus on communicating science. It is even nicer to receive one of the major awards from such a program, and that’s what has happened to JCE Software’s Chemistry Comes Alive! collection of chemistry videos. As I write this, JCE Software editor Jon Holmes is in Italy where he has accepted the 11th edition of the Pirelli Internetional Award for chemistry. More information is available on pp 1098 and 1105. What has become the Pirelli Group was founded in 1872 by Giovanni Battista Pirelli. It originally manufactured rubber products, evolved into making insulation for transatlantic telegraph cables and automobile and bicycle tires, and now includes broadband access and photonics. Marco Tronchetti Provera, president of the Pirelli Group, describes the Internetional Award as “the world’s first Internet multimedia award aimed at the diffusion of scientific and technological culture worldwide”. The Pirelli Group believes that “the diffusion of social, economic, and technological advances is as important as their discovery” and supports such diffusion through the Internetional Award program. Provera argues that the time has come for communication to be recognized “as a fundamental actor in the social and political development of the world”, in parallel with the recognition of economics in 1968 by the Royal Swedish Academy of Science. The Chemistry Comes Alive! collection arose out of a chance meeting between John and Betty Moore and Nick Cominos in Wuhan, China in 1985. The Moores wanted videos to be integrated into a software program that enabled students to learn about reactions of the elements and to correlate those reactions with the periodic table. Cominos wanted more interesting projects for his Radio, Television, and Film students at the University of Texas at Austin. The first analog video was collected by those students (who were surprised by how exciting some of the reactions were) under the supervision of Alton Banks, John Moore, and J. J. Lagowski. It appeared in 1989 as The Periodic Table Videodisc, the first Special Issue of JCE Software (1). Since then the NSF has supported collection of many more videos (grants ESI-9154099, DUE-9455928), videos have been digitized, compressed, and recompressed, and video delivery has progressed to eight CDROMs from analog 12-inch laserdiscs or videotapes. It takes a lot of work and a lot of people to create and maintain a video collection like Chemistry Comes Alive! JCE Software editor Jon Holmes has provided editorial supervision and technical know-how required to keep the collection available as methods for delivering video evolve. Authors are listed below, but many more people were involved in creating the eight CD-ROMs. For example, CCA! Volume 1 lists 17 contributors in addition to the two designated as having put the collection together. Authors of each CCA! volume are • Volume 1: Jerrold J. Jacobsen, John W. Moore • Volume 2: Jerrold J. Jacobsen, John W. Moore • Volume 3: Jerrold J. Jacobsen, John W. Moore
www.JCE.DivCHED.org
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It has been exciting to create Chemistry Comes Alive! It is even more exciting when students can safely observe vigorous reactions such as Na ⫹ H2O close up… • Volume 4, Reactions in Aqueous Solution and Reactions of the Elements: Jerrold J. Jacobsen, Gordon A. Bain, Kara Bruce, John W. Moore • Volume 5, Organic and Biochemistry: Gary Trammell, Jerrold J. Jacobsen, Kristin Johnson, John W. Moore • Volume 6, Laboratory Techniques: Lois M. Browne, John F. Zimmerman, Jerrold J. Jacobsen, John W. Moore • Volume 7, Flames and Explosions: Rachel Bain, Jerrold J. Jacobsen, James H. Maynard, and John W. Moore • Volume 8, A Visual Library: C. Jonathan Mitschele, Rachel Bain, Jerrold J. Jacobsen, James H. Maynard, John W. Moore
We extend thanks to the many contributors to the CCA! collection during the past two decades. Recognition of the collection as a whole also recognizes each contributor’s ideas and hard work in creating videos that are useful to teachers and students—from middle school through graduate school. It has been exciting to create Chemistry Comes Alive! It is even more exciting when students can safely observe vigorous reactions such as Na ⫹ H2O close up, with chemistry at the center of the action. Where do we go from here? We are putting all eight CDROMs into a single package. We are creating more and better ways for teachers and students to search for and find videos. We expect to make all of the video available on the Web in streaming format and to provide institutional subscriptions so that all faculty and students will have instant access. Even more important, you will be able to link these videos into your own presentations or lessons and deliver them any time. The videos will soon be cataloged by the Chemical Education Digital Library so that they can be found using the table of contents of your textbook (2). Most important of all, we encourage anyone who has chemistry videos, or ideas about videos that could be made, to contact us and participate in the expansion of this award-winning project. Many contributors to the existing collection spent a few weeks, a summer, or a sabbatical year in Madison working on video and related projects. If you would like to do the same, let us know! Literature Cited 1. Banks, Alton J. Abstract of The Periodic Table Videodisc. J. Chem. Educ. 1989, 66, 19. 2. Moore, J. W. J. Chem. Educ. 2006, 83, 1735.
Vol. 84 No. 7 July 2007
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Journal of Chemical Education
1079
