The prestigious journal Nature has commissioned a series of articles in which experts speculate on important developments in the next few years in their fields. One of the first is “Chemistry for Everyone“, which describes an ‘open’ approach to chemistry. In this approach, chemists format data to help computers access the scientific literature in order to make scientific information freely available and accessible. This will facilitate better sharing of ideas between professional chemists as well as teachers, students, and anyone interested. For example, CrystalEye is a free web application that gathers open-access crystallographic data and allows it to be searched and manipulated. This article is an exciting look at the future:

“As new ideas and technologies arise, the blogosphere spreads them almost instantaneously. And the message from the blogosphere is clear: the next generation of chemists needs open, integrated, semantic systems.”

Read some of the Chemistry blogs on Chemistry Blogspace.

And if you are looking for service learning ideas in Chemistry, check out the blog Chemists without borders.

A post about open source Chemistry requires mentioning my favorite open source Chemistry project by Jean Claude Bradley. Read about his open notebook laboratory, and get more information about this project here. He makes the process of science totally transparent, shares all lab results (positive and negative), and finds great new collaborators.

Share This

To incorporate real-world, current issues in your course, consider using resources recently made available about the human impact on the oceans. There are engaging photos, interactive graphics and accessible articles, which could complement courses on public policy, the environment, biology, chemistry, writing and social sciences, as well as others.

The New York Times has a series of thought-provoking articles and resources about human impact on the seas:

* “Human Shadows on the Seas” reports on the first worldwide portrait of human impacts on the oceans, revealing a planet-spanning mix of depleted resources, degraded ecosystems and disruptive biological blending as species are moved around the globe by accident and intent.

* Pictures of reefs and the scientists working at them are in a slide show “Before they vanish“.

* An interactive map, “Mapping the Other 70 Percent”, allows you to display data on the human impact, shipping, invasive species, temperature, ultraviolet light and acidification.

* An article “Coral Reefs and What Ruins Them” describes recently published research results (listed below) . Comparing the popular press version with essays written by the authors and the scientific research report could be a useful educational opportunity.

PLOS Biology has an open access essay on “Shifting Baselines, Local Impacts, and Global Change on Coral Reefs” to accompany two research reports published in PLoS ONE. These research reports, “Baselines and Degradation of Coral Reefs in the Northern Line Islands” and “Microbial Ecology of Four Coral Atolls in the Northern Line Islands”, are open for online discussion and annotation. Currently, readers can access the Editor’s comments and comments by the Faculty of 1000. Discussing research papers online provides a window into the process of scientific research and showcases critical thinking.

For more information about Coral Reefs, engaging photos and other multimedia, see the Coral Reef Alliance. The resource library section has extensive links to visualizations about changing climate, videos, photographs and other educational organizations.

Share This

Here’s a great story for Lincoln’s birthday. An essay by Kitty Eisele on National Public Radio this morning described photographs of Abraham Lincoln that were recently found in the Library of Congress. They had been misclassified in the past, but a researcher using the Library’s digital image collection noticed the error. The NPR essay, Uncovered Photos Offer View of Lincoln Ceremony, states that the library had received a large collection of Civil War photographs in the 1940s, with handwritten logs. Some of the writing was hard to read, and over time, the caption for these photos were misplaced. But recently, a researcher in Colorado spotted the mislabeled Lincoln photographs in the Library’s online collection.

The Library of Congress is also experimenting with putting some of its image collections on Flickr and asking the public to add descriptions to them. Try tagging some of the photographs yourself - who knows what you’ll find!

Share This

Besides email applications and web browsers, most of us use Microsoft Word on a daily basis. Certainly Word has its benefits - compatibility, comfortable familiarity, general availability, steep academic discounts, etc — nearly everyone knows what to do with a ‘.doc’ file. However, with a newer version of Word out there (Office 2007 featured a pretty extensive overhaul of all the Office products, and Mac Office 2008 now offers them for Apple users), it looks like as good a time as any to reflect on one’s use of Word…is it the best tool for what we’re trying to achieve when we write?

A recent New York Times article includes several suggestions for other applications that work just as well as Word, and perhaps better, depending on your individual goals. The article mainly focuses on Scrivener, a tool that takes the word processor a bit further and actually encourages outlining, storyboard, and managing of notes and sources. Similar tools, such as the Mac-based DevonThink, have also begun to catch on with academics.

Not ready to take the plunge into a completely different set of software? Free, web-based writing applications give you a chance to spend some time outside of Word, and perhaps even increase your ability to write collaboratively with others. Companies like Zoho have been getting some recognition for providing entire Office-like suites completely online. Of course, there’s always the ever-popular GoogleDocs, which some suggest may be a great tool for the collaborative writing of books.

Share This

EveryBlock is a new website that aims to collate localized information for major cities and urban areas. The site, which now includes information on New York, San Francisco, and Chicago brings together publicly available mapped information, such as Flickr photo feeds and restaurant inspections, with local news and other information from providers such as CraigsList entries.

Mapping is a larger trend on the Internet, with services such as GoogleMaps proving to be popular among users. EveryBlock, as it expands listings for other cities, could prove to be a useful resources for visualizing a wide range of information about cities for discussions and class activities.

http://www.everyblock.com/

Share This

Have you twitted? Twitter can be used to track friends and send short messages either to a select group of people or the world, online and by mobile phone. My colleagues use it as an in/out board. Can it be used to facilitate learning? Apparently, yes. AcademHack: tech tools for Academics describes a Twitter assignment in which students virtually followed classmates over a weekend to explore new media. The success of this assignment inspired 13 (thirteen!) ideas for using Twitter in the classroom.

For more, see the Educause Learning Initiative 2 page document “7 things you should know about Twitter“.

Share This

You may post your vacation snapshots on Flickr, the photo-sharing site, but the Library of Congress has bigger plans.

This week the library was overwhelmed by the public response after it put 3,100 of the most popular photos from its collection online at Flickr, getting them outside the Washington library walls and into the hands of people who want to use them. (The selected photos have no known copyright restrictions.)

See more at The Wired Campus

Share This

Some 200 science bloggers, scientists, journalists, educators and readers met on Saturday, January 19, 2008 for the second Science Blogging Conference organized by Bora Zivkovic and Anton Zuiker and held at Sigma Xi in Research Triangle Park, NC. Others participated online via streaming video (many courtesy of Wayne Sutton) and chat rooms.

The format was an “unconference”, where discussion, dissent and debate is crucial for each session; some sessions achieved this. As most of the attendees were bloggers, the sessions have been recorded in blogs, photos, video and audio. Below are descriptions of sessions with links to selected summaries.

(more…)

Share This

BiomedExperts.com, a social-networking Web site for health-care and life-science experts, was unveiled on January 11, 2008 at the American Library Association’s midwinter meeting, in Philadelphia. The site includes profiles of more than 1.4 million biomedical experts in 120 countries. Researchers can gain access to the site for free and search for colleagues based on their areas of expertise, where they live, or other variables. The site also allows scientists to share data and analyses, and view summaries of their colleagues’ research papers.

Article at the Chronicle of Higher Education

Share This

A recent new blog, From Toy to Tool Cell Phones in Schools, highlights new developments in web 2.0 applications focusing on mobile learning in k-12 and higher education. With the high proliferation of cell phone use among k-12 and college students across this country, more and more applications seek to structure niche social networks and experiences based solely on how users access information through cell phones. With the cost and use of cell phones significantly lower, than acquiring a computer with high broadband internet service, educators are designing course curricula around cell phone technology and the way their students communicate and access information.

Share This