Communicating Chemistry at ACS

Yesterday I presented my second talk, this time on the use of blogs and wikis to do laboratory research. This was under the Chemical Education symposium: Communicating Chemistry. Most of the talks were about teaching so it was perhaps not the best audience but that doesn't concern me as much since I started recording my talks at conferences.

And if I hadn't presented there I would have missed meeting Thomas Poon, whose high quality organic chemistry pre-lectures I have used in my classes as an extra resource for a while. I would have also probably missed Michelle Francl's talk about her podcasting adventures in Quantum Chemistry. She has had her podcasts downloaded 250 000 times so far!

In the afternoon I headed over to the Evolving Network of Scientific Communication symposium. I heard Joanna Scott again, this time discussing in more detail Nature's experience with social software, like Connotea. She kept repeating that Nature is not just a journal article publisher and is serious about experimenting with other forms of science communication. From what I have seen they are certainly one of the most aggressive publishers on this front.

Joanna also invited me to join the Nature island in to continue the work we started on using Second Life for chemistry research and teaching. The following images were taken from here: slurl. (Beth is posing next to the quiz in the first pic)