Chemical Education Today
Editorial
JCE: 80 Years New 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
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Encourage community of effort in chemical education
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Help teachers maintain an investigational atmosphere in chemistry classrooms
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Keep teacher and student in closer touch with scientific organizations
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Summarize relevant papers from other journals
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Become an international journal
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Publish papers that apply educational psychology to teaching
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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 Participating in the one whose goals overlap substantially with those of National Science, this Journal. We are proud to be part of the program, and we recognize that it will Technology, Engineering, require substantial new efand Mathematics fort from both our editorial staff and volunteer column editors and contributors. Education Digital Library We invite, encourage, even project is an exciting beg for your enthusiastic participation, and we have prospect for JCE. set up a special email address for those who are interested in helping:
[email protected]. What can you contribute? Our new collections are described in more detail on pp 27–28. 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 1. For an overview of the NSDL, go to http://about.nsdl.org/ (accessed Nov 2002) 2. See pp 105–112 for the latest examples. 3. JCE WebWare is at http://jchemed.chem.wisc.edu/JCEWWW/ Features/WebWare/index.html (accessed Nov 2002).
JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu • Vol. 80 No. 1 January 2003 • Journal of Chemical Education
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