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.

RSS/Podcast Presentation (Slideshare)

Just loaded my first presentation up to Slideshare. It's #3 of the 6-part Web 2.0 workshop series I'm teaching for library staff. Tomorrow's class is on social software tools (bookmarking, citations, and media sharing), so this will give me something else to show them for the media sharing part along with Flickr and YouTube.