Chemical Education Today
Editorial
Resolving to Contribute Comparisons with other journals invariably reveal that JCE produces a wealth of materials, with limited resources, and provides subscribers with high quality at minimal cost. We are able to do that because many people voluntarily contribute their effort, expertise, and experience to making this a great journal. These contributions are organized and enhanced by a paid editorial-office staff whose exceptional dedication to JCE induces them to rise well above the call of duty. As a new year and a new semester begin, I encourage you to consider what you can contribute to JCE. Even if some of your New Year’s resolutions have already been broken, please resolve to do more in the coming year to support your Journal—and follow through on your resolution. Reviewing Is Rewarding How can you participate? The possibilities are nearly endless. Many involve volunteering to review submissions. If you are not already a reviewer, complete one of our reviewer questionnaires (available at http://jchemed.chem.wisc.edu/ Contributors/Reviewers/Question.pdf ) and help us make published manuscripts the best they can possibly be—you will learn a lot, too. If you already are a reviewer, consider taking on a more specialized reviewing task. For example, if you are interested in laboratory teaching, consider becoming a Project Chemlab reviewer. Chemlab reviewers volunteer to review at least six laboratory-experiment manuscripts each year, to be especially cognizant of lab issues such as safety, cost, and feasibility of experiments, to assign special lab-oriented keywords, and to write a brief description of each published paper for the Chemlab data base. Some special training is required from the DivCHED Committee on Project Chemlab, but the rewards of seeing excellent laboratories in print and in JCE Online are well worth the effort. If you are interested in computer-based materials, opportunities are available for reviewing submissions to JCE Software, online columns such as JCE WebWare and Mathcad in the Chemistry Curriculum, or existing WWW sites (for inclusion in our online listing of reviewed Web sites). Send Us Your Best Another important area where volunteers are crucial is submissions. Tell others about the good things you are doing. Write a manuscript, submit software or other computerrelated materials, send us exam and quiz questions for Resources for Student Assessment or Conceptual Questions and Challenge Problems, contribute WebWare materials or Mathcad documents, or tell our readers about how you have incorporated JCE Software videos into your own presentations, tutorials, quiz or exam questions, or other aspects of your teaching. Even if you think your use of JCE materials does not justify developing a full paper, we are interested in hearing about innovations and will pass your good ideas on to many other people. If you have new ideas about how JCE
could improve, or criticisms of what we are currently doing, we are interested in hearing them, even if you cannot volunteer to bring your ideas to fruition. You can also contribute by volunteering to enhance our online presence. We need people who can assign keywords from our current list to articles in JCE issues that appeared before 1995. We also need volunteers to write abstracts for these articles and, if you are gung-ho, to scan and digitize them. The editorial staff in Madison have our hands full getting an issue out and getting all the additional material that appears in JCE Online prepared each month, so we will have to count on volunteers to develop other content that will make JCE Online even more useful than it is now. You may be just the person we need. Join a Forum I also encourage you to participate more fully in what JCE has to offer. For instance, we have recently instituted online discussion forums that allow many people to interact electronically on various topics. Currently forums are open on JCE High School CLIC and JCE Software. A forum on the General Chemistry Curriculum will open soon. JCE forums provide for back-and-forth communication on a much faster time scale than do letters to the editor, and like the Journal itself they are moderated by an editor. This means that contributions are categorized to make them easier for you to find and extraneous topics (such as personal attacks or flames) are edited out. We expect that during 2002 JCE forums will provide readers with a convenient and interesting way to share ideas with the entire community of chemical education. Become an Ambassador Perhaps you are already doing many or all of the things suggested above. If so, bravo! However, you can still do more. Become a JCE Ambassador. Support JCE by distributing JCE promotional materials at a conference, ACS meeting, or workshop in which you plan to participate. We can supply you with exactly the handouts you need to enable participants or attendees to learn about JCE and become subscribers and contributors just as you are. If you are on the organizing committee or program committee for a conference, invite JCE editorial staff to present a JCE Workshop on our high school materials (JCE Classroom Activities) or on using our digitized video materials (Chemistry Comes Alive! CD-ROM series). Our Ambassador program has been highly successful—more than 70 people were Journal Ambassadors during 2001. We want to have even more ambassadors in 2002, and you can help us achieve that goal. Resolve to support JCE in as many ways as you can in 2002. We look forward to working with you to improve chemical education.
JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu • Vol. 79 No. 2 February 2002 • Journal of Chemical Education
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