C&E News Article on Social Software and Chemistry

The April 23, 2007 Chemistry and Engineering News article on the Social Software in Education symposium at the American Chemical Society spring meeting in Chicago has come out. I gave a talk there on using blogs and wikis to teach organic chemistry.

The article is a pretty comprehensive report on the session and does a good job of summarizing the key technologies currently being tried without much hype. Podcasting, vodcasting, tagging and wikis were discussed from teachers and librarians using them in different ways. Of course the controversial issue of attendance was highlighted.

Although the session was primarily about education, UsefulChem got a nice plug.

Bradley posts his lectures and all other information for his class on a wiki with open access. He also has an open-access wiki for his research group (usefulchem.wikispaces.com), where the students' lab notebooks are freely available to anyone in the world who wants to read them. His group will write and edit manuscripts using the wiki itself and invite any interested person to edit them.