Online Textbooks: ChemWiki Part 1

I remember buying my first O-chem books back when I was attending DVC (Diablo Valley College), a not-so-little community college here in the Bay Area. At first I checked the bookstore and lost my lunch when I saw the price of the new books. The text was $215, the lab manual was another $70, and the solutions manual was $100. Unfortunately, a new edition had been released that year, so even though the professor said that we could use older editions, many of the problem sets wouldn’t match up, so we’d have to get the problems from our classmates. In the end, the cheapest and most convenient route was to go online and buy the international editions. Even after extending the method to all my other classes, I still paid almost $500 for books that semester. Now I attended DVC before California went belly-up, so my classes were still a great bargain at $18 a unit. Since I usually took ~19 units, my total tuition cost was around $350 a semester. The cost of the books were actually greater than my cost of tuition. The sad thing is, this wasn’t an unusual case. Luckily this wasn’t too much of a hardship for me; I had a job on campus and money saved up. However, I knew a lot of students for whom the beginning of the semester meant not eating lunch in order to save up gas money.

Now students have probably been complaining about textbooks since time immemorial. Aristotle probably complained that his scribe made spelling mistakes in his copy of The Republic. Most of the time our bellyaching is justified. Not only do textbooks cost a lot, but there is often a gross amount of errors in them. Everyone knows that the first time you find a caption or answer wrong, it makes the rest of the book suspect. Also, these errors give the publishers a reason to release a next edition…that never seems to fix even half of the errors. However, they do switch around problem numbers, add a few pages of new content, and possibly even rearrange chapters. So now the professors lesson and homework plan, that goes by chapter numbers, page numbers, and problem numbers, is moot. And the student is effectively forced to buy the new edition (price “adjusted for inflation”) or suffer some inconveniences. Most choose to simply buy the new edition since tracking down the old one can be difficult and you have to be quick. Also, sometimes bookstores won’t buy back the old edition so if you had it, and an edition switch occurred before you finished your course track, you are up the creek.

Some of these issues can be addressed with online textbooks. The idea of supplementing physical texts with online modules has been around and implemented by publishers for many years. However, I’ve yet to see a good entirely online chemistry textbook. The advantages of online texts are of many: accessible anywhere you get 3G or Wi-Fi and have your mobile device, interactive learning capabilities, easy distribution, instant update/revision, and low cost publishing (server fees). Of course this won’t necessarily result the publisher make more money, but at 4 billion (yea, you read that correctly, billion) dollars a year, the industry doesn’t really need much help.

The student, however, does. We need these online textbooks, not just to save our wallet, but also to help prevent being stuck with an expensive and lousy text for a year that does a poor job of explaining the material. That expensive O-Chem book I bought really was terrible and it forced my professor to do a lot of extra work in teaching us not to follow the book’s direction of simply memorizing 500 reactions, but to see the patterns and the underlying physical explanations. In the end, we learned from his powerpoints and I paid $215 for a glorified reference book.

Well, some people are pioneering an effort to create an “Open Access Textbook”. In a perfect example of “chem 2.0″, UC Davis Professor Delmar Larsen is the project director of the ChemWiki, a truly free online textbook written by everyone, for everyone. In an absolutely Herculean effort, the developers and Larsen (Mary Obrien, Ron Rusay, Brent Krueger, Michelle McCombs) are trying to create a free and complete, as in covering all branches, chemistry textbook using a community of students, faculty, and outside experts from around the world. Of course they aren’t there yet, and there is still a long way to go but hey, their text literally gets better everyday.

Now I know you probably have a lot of questions: what about correctness and plagiarism? Could such a thing ever be considered an Authority? What do the publishers say? Does anyone actually use the thing? Well, it just so happened that a couple of weeks ago, I was at Davis for the Borge fellowship visitation and I had a chance to talk with professor Larsen who agreed to answer some of these questions for me. In a couple of days, I’ll post the interview here. For now, I suggest you go and check out http://chemwiki.ucdavis.edu/ and browse not just through the core, but the wikitexts and community as well.

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SPIE – San Francisco 2010: Day 2

SPIE an international society focused on all things light-based is having their big photonics conference in San Francisco this week. I had the opportunity to sit in the professional development speaker series and thought I would share some of the speakers’ insights.

Andrea Armani a 2nd year assistant professor at USC in chemical engineering spoke on Leading a Well-Adjusted Research Group. She stated that she gives her students Fridays off from their main research endeavor and allows them to tackle any question they want; which is a very new generation Google-esque approach to student mentoring. She also explicitly establishes that a particular older graduate student will mentor a younger graduate student in the lab, so that the younger student will always have someone to answer their questions. The most interesting story told was how she deftly managed to diffuse the amorous advances of a student, a very awkward position indeed, and a situation not covered in the manual.

Thomas Tongue gave a talk on Peaks and Pitfalls of Professional Communication, but it mainly focused on how to deliver what he calls The Elevator Pitch. He says that in scenarios where you would like to collaborate with an other scientist, or a scenario where you feel you could contribute to a team in the company if only you were placed on it, that you essentially have 60-90 s with that collaborator or vice-president to make your best pitch. The pitch has to be clear, compelling, conceptual (not bogged down in technical jargon), concrete (a specific quantifiable metric should be given), consistent (story should flow well), customized for the the target audience, and always given in a conversational tone. His advice is similar in nature to what Peggy Klaus advocates in her book The Art of Tooting Your Own Horn without Blowing It but she terms them brag-a-logs. Peggy Klaus’s book is a good read for those interested in professional development and especially for those that have problems vocalizing their contributions.

The chair of the session was Dirk Fabian from SPIE Student Services and I’m glad they were able to put together a good mix of speakers; as this type of information can be hard to extract from PIs.

Mitch

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Web 2.0: In the Classroom?

I went to a workshop a while ago under the title of Teaching During Budgetary Crises.  Among the topics covered were alternative teaching methods and free or inexpensive methods of interacting with your students other than traditional the 50 minute lecture.

We were given a list of a variety of web 2.0 platforms and suggested ways to use them in a classroom setting.  The workshop participants spanned a variety of departments across the university, so as I glance through the list, I can see how some platforms would lend themselves to use in certain departments, while others might make more sense for the physical sciences.

Here’s the list we were given, with links to information about the site.  Have any of you seen any of these technologies used in a classroom or seminar setting?  If so, how were they implemented?  Were they successful?  Would you have done it differently?

I think I could see myself using Jing as a resource to walk through out-of-class examples of more complex or complicated synthesis problems and mechanisms.  Jing is a screen-capture technology that allows you to upload video of your onscreen actions.  I could propose a synthesis problem, jump to my slides covering the needed concepts, and jump to ChemDraw to illustrate my thought process and the correct answer.

Times and technology are certainly changing before our eyes.  Are educators going to stick with the traditional lecture model, or are we going to move with the trends to bring content to students in new and exciting ways?  Or, if we do move with the trends, are we going to end up sacrificing quality to increase curb appeal?

Tools for Interactive Questioning

• Audience Response Clickers (more)
• Surveys/Discussion boards w/i the universities course management system (like Blackboard)
• Google Forms
• Harvard’s Berkman Center’s Live Question Tool

Strategic Recording

• Broadcasting classroom lectures for students taking the course online
• iMovie or Windows Movie Maker
• Jing
• CamStudio (open source screen capture)
• VoiceThread
• iTunes U
• Vimeo
• Ning (create your own social network) (more)
• Facebook

Collaborative Learning

• XMind Concept Mapping
• Google Docs/Google Sites
• PBWorks (formerly PB Wiki)
• Zoho Writer
• Wordpress/Blogger.com course blog
• Skype
• Elluminate/Adobe Connect/DimDim and other e-conferencing platforms

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Like Natalie Imbruglia’s One Hit Wonder, I’m Torn

So it’s been a while since my last entry, but grad school has eaten me up. But over the past several months, I have been getting seduced by the Dark Side of the Force. No, I’m not talking about industry, I’m talking about another entity entirely.. the world of intellectual property law.

OMGWTFBBQ? That’s probably your response right now, but as someone who has been rather myopic in my career path due to academe being the only thing I know, (and me not really feeling like a perfect fit in industry), the seductive path of law school is in the way.

One of the things I have learned through informational interviews with my local alumni is that law schools LOVE technical backgrounds and patent law is one of the hottest and fastest growing fields at the moment. Of course, things are cyclical which means it might not be great later, but the past 5 years has seen tremendous growth.

There are lots of other scientists going to the other side, but here’s my dilemma…

There are firms that offer patent agent programs to seduce scientists to law. What is this patent agent program? You work at a firm (with zero to little experience in law) and get trained as you work. You get paid a great salary (think average 2.5 to 4 times the highest grad student stipend depending on where you go), with amazing benefits (401k plan, full medical/dental/vision benefits, etc), get to work in a fancy office, feel like a real world adult, get to dress up in fancy clothes and get trained. After a year, you’re probably ready for the patent agent exam, and if you pass, said firm will offer tuition reimbursement if you attend law school.

Yes, they’ll pay for expensive law school. Then you go back to the firm as a full J.D/(M.S. or PhD) as well, get promoted and commit for a few years, then you can go around to other firms as well!

So what’s a chemist to do? I do love research and academe, but my pragmatic side is telling me to join the dark side.

I know I’m not the first to be seduced, and I definitely won’t be the last! Intellectual property law, when it concerns chemistry, is actually quite fascinating. It’s like being a grad student with all the reading, researching and writing you have to do, but you get paid way more and you’re not inhaling chemical fumes. It’s another career path available out there for grad students in chemistry, and I know I hadnt considered it before and just recently learned about it, so I’m throwing it out there, so like me, perhaps your blinders can be taken off and you might consider more options post PhD!

That’s all! I’ll let y’all know what I do in the coming months! For now I have lots of thinking to do.

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Maz Goes Politician

Ever since the budget crisis began here in California, Mitch and I have debated how we would fix the problem if we were in positions of power. While we had some pretty great, and pretty terrible ideas, we soon stopped wondering what we would do in hypothetical situations and began to wonder how we could actually make a difference. Well, we decided to begin stepping into the world of politics; hoping to influence policy decisions that affect scientists and chemists for a start.

Enter ACR 88, a bill introduced by assembly members Torlakson (D-Martinez) and Furutani (D-Carson) in California.

The bill creates the California Task Force on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education (Task Force) to promote the improvement of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education across the state. The task force would generate discussion on policy that would improve the teaching of those subject areas for California’s K-12 students. It has no fiscal impact (the task force members are not paid).

You see, currently a full third of the 4th graders and a fifth of the 8th graders in the nation can’t preform basic computational math, and US high school seniors recently tested below the international average (out of 21 countries) in math and science.

Out of this poor group, take the fact that California ranked 46th (against other states) in math proficiency and 42nd in science proficiency on recent 8th grade National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests.

And it still gets better. More than 50 percent of California 4th and 8th grade students scored below the basic level in science and 40% ranked below basic in math as determined by NAEP.

Given these statistics, it becomes obvious that California needs to drastically rethink it’s teaching methods and policies for K-12 math and science. As energy production, global warming, water purification and other scientific issues become more common to the 10 o’clock news, and therefore more salient in the public mind, we need to also focus on preparing the coming generations for the problems we are going to leave them. Also, the United States Department of Labor has recently shown that math or science preparation will be crucial to successfully competing for a job in 15/20 of the fastest growing occupations right now.

The President is also focusing national attention on scientific research, innovation, and math and science education. In a speech at the National Academies on April 27th, President Obama promised to make U.S. students the international benchmarks in the next decade by doubling budgets at certain science and technology agencies, policy change to enhance math and science education, and beginning to allot more than 3% of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to research and development. Obama said he wants to involve everyone from governors to parents to students to help increase support for science and technology and the quality of teaching. Supposedly 5 billion dollars is available in federal funds to help states improve their math and science teaching.

This is well and good, but throwing money aimlessly at the issue won’t solve anything. Bills like ACR 88, creating task forces to investigate effective policy change and inform the legislators, are the correct first step to tackling science and math education reform.

If any of you readers live in California, I urge you to write to your assemblyperson telling them that you believe we need science and math education reform and that you want them to support ACR 88. For any of you that are ACS members, they made it supremely easy for you. Simply go to http://www.act4chemistry.org/action/STEMtaskforceca/ and enter the relevant information. They will automatically send it to the correct representative for your district depending on your address. In fact, they even wrote the letter for you too!

Comments PLEASE. As a California public school survivor for my entire academic life, I have been through (and seen the failings) of the system first hand. I have some ideas on how to fix the issue, but I want to hear from ppl not in California too. Leave your two cents on what needs to be done to improve K-12 science and math education. Move calculus to required at 10th grade? do away with optional general physical sciences and the like? make everybody take biology followed by chemistry and then physics? in that order? what about elementary school? when to start teaching the scientific method? If 5th graders get sex. ed., should they also get newton ed.?

Lets see your ideas.

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