Social Software & Chemistry

This week's Chemical & Engineering News has an article about the March 25th Using Social Networking Tools to Teach Chemistry symposium (morning & afternoon abstracts) from the Chicago ACS meeting. This was a great program and I was delighted to be the lead-off presenter.

One idea discussed was integrating Wikipedia-writing into coursework. A research paper assignment could be revamped so students have to write it like a Wikipedia entry.

I expect we'll see more of this at the next few ACS meetings, how faculty are using Wikipedia like this and the impact it has on their students' work. And I just found out last week one of the chemistry faculty here is trying it in a grad/undergrad combo class this quarter. The grad students are to write their papers as Wikipedia articles--and post them.

From Blogs to Wikis

Testing out the blog for my Staff Development Workshop. TGIF!!