Chemical Education Today
Editorial
Computers and the Internet have revolutionized dissemination of information and made it much, much easier to reproduce works created by others. This has implications for anyone who creates or disseminates intellectual property— teachers of chemistry included. I pointed out some of these implications in last month’s editorial and suggested that neither complete freedom from copyright and other restrictions nor complete control by the owners of intellectual property would be most effective in promoting chemistry education. For us teachers, who think primarily of helping students learn, freedom from restrictions on use of intellectual property is certainly appealing. Doubly so because our budgets are often minuscule, making it difficult to pay for anything new. Why, then, should we want to have any control over intellectual property? There are two main reasons. One is that we place great value on creativity and originality. Those who are creative have a right to expect their efforts to be acknowledged. We have always maintained that plagiarism is wrong. The other is more practical. Monetary recompense for intellectual effort provides strong support for creativity and for the intellectual infrastructure needed to produce new and effective materials. This can be illustrated by an example. About a year ago a high school student named Kara Bruce was directed by her teacher to JCE as a source of information about how to achieve her goal of making chemistry videos. Because JCE edits and disseminates significant quantities of video material, I invited her to spend the summer with us. She did so and participated in shooting a large number of videos of chemical reactions in aqueous solutions. She also scripted, directed, and produced her own video on Magic Sand (1– 3), showing close up the striking properties of this fascinating material (see image on this page). Eventually these videos will be published and Kara will receive credit for helping create them. It would be shameful for someone else to use her work without citing her contribution. Kara did not work in a vacuum. She collaborated with half a dozen people here at UW–Madison, most notably Jerry Jacobsen of the JCE staff and Gordon Bain, the general chemistry laboratory director. In addition she used a wide range of equipment for shooting and editing video. (You could do this too—see box on page 424.) Both the ease of achieving her goals and the technical quality of the results were greatly enhanced by the facilities and people available. For Kara to have developed these resources on her own would have been extremely difficult, and the effort of doing so might well have detracted from her creativity or even prevented its expression. Appropriate intellectual infrastructure is an essential component of creativity. Collaboration among content experts, curriculum designers, and multimedia experts is typical of modern materials development, as is specialized equipment. Even more important, review and evaluation, both formative and summative, should be part and parcel of every project to develop new learning materials. Users of multimedia often need technical support to make materials work. Everyone knows
photo by Jerry J. Jacobsen
Maintaining Intellectual Infrastructure Appropriate intellectual infrastructure is an essential component of creativity.
http://jchemed.chem.wisc.edu/Journal/Issues/2000/Jan/abs40A.html
how to use a book, but how many of us know how to make a Quicktime movie run on a recalcitrant computer? To support the necessary infrastructure requires some restrictions on, and some charges for, copying of intellectual property—but not too many. JCE attempts to achieve an appropriate balance. We provide to authors the services of review and evaluation, thereby also providing readers with a much better product. We coordinate the efforts of many volunteer reviewers (see the thank-you on page 302). Many items, such as the JCE Classroom Activity on Magic Sand that appeared in January (2), involve considerable editorial effort to make them as useful as possible to teachers. We also provide support for those who have technical difficulties using our computer-based and multimedia materials. Finally, we print and distribute copies of the Journal, and we maintain a Web site whose URL will not disappear and whose content is continually updated. JCE provides this intellectual infrastructure at the minimum possible cost. We do not make a profit, but we cannot give away all the intellectual effort that goes into what we publish. Therefore everything is copyrighted and its use is restricted. Those who use more are asked to pay more, but we attempt to be as liberal as possible. For example, although every page of this issue is copyrighted, you will find on page 312 permission to make one copy for each student in your class free of charge. A similar notice appears on each Classroom Activity. A major goal for JCE is to maintain existing and develop new intellectual infrastructure for chemical education. I welcome your comments regarding how successful we are at providing the best possible service to Journal users at the lowest possible cost. Literature Cited 1. Hoffman, A. B. J. Chem. Educ. 1982, 59, 155. Vitz, E. J. Chem. Educ. 1990, 67, 512. Goldsmith, R. H. J. Chem. Educ. 2000, 77, 41. 2. Journal Staff. J. Chem. Educ. 2000, 77, 40A. 3. Robson, D. P. ChemMatters 1994, 12(2), 8–9. Black, H. ChemMatters 1995, 13(1), 14–15.
JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu • Vol. 77 No. 3 March 2000 • Journal of Chemical Education
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