Social Media Used as an Effective Tool in an Organic Chemistry Lab Course
Social media is getting a lot of attention as a way to disseminate information and to get students involved in chemistry classes.
Chemistry
Using MOOCs to Create a Flipped Classroom
Universities, community colleges, and high schools can use MOOCs to create an environment to enhance student learning. Last fall a professor at San Jose State used recorded MOOC lectures in an introductory electrical engineering course to create a flipped classroom. Students passed at a much higher rate than usual—91%, compared with 59% and 55% in two other, more traditional sections of the
Life's Ratchet: How Molecular Machines Extract Order From Chaos
Peter Hoffman is a physicist and materials scientist, and he brings those perspectives and sensibilities to the description of how life converts chemical energy into order and motion. The "Ratchet" in the title is Feynman's Ratchet, a gedanken experiment described in Feynman's "Lectures on Physics" and reminiscent of Maxwell's Demon.
Gas Laws HD Lite
Gas Laws HD Lite is a free iOS app that allows students to discover the relationship of Boyle’s Law and Charles Law.
iGasLaw
iGasLaw is a free iOS app that provides useful tools for studying properties of gases and gas laws.
The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know has an Expiration Date
Samuel Arbesman, a mathematician and network scientist, uses the idea a half-life as an analogy for the changes in human knowledge that science brings. He discusses both the changing rate at which new science is done and the speed at which old results are replaced by newer ones. The analogy is far from perfect, but it emphasizes some critically important aspects of the processes of science.
Dr. Joe's Brain Sparks: 179 Inspiring and Enlightening Inquiries Into the Science of Everyday Life
Professor Joe Schwarcz of McGill University is Canada's foremost public spokesperson for science. His columns in the Montreal Gazette and in Canadian Chemical News and his radio program on CJAD in Montreal reach thousands of readers and listeners, and have provided grist for his many popular books about science and especially chemistry.
Why is Pioneer Slowing?
The fact that spacecrafts Pioneer 10 and 11 are not moving quite as fast as they were predicted to, has led to speculation that there might be something wrong with general relativity. Einstein may be dead, but his concepts still reign.
Consumatory Scholarship
Bruce Henderson in The Chronicle of Higher Education calls faculty to be more proactive in defining their contributions to educational institutions. In this time of cuts to education, university and secondary school faculty must help the general public understand the nature of their contributions.
Chemistry no mystery; or, A lecturer's bequest. Being the subject-matter of a course of lectures, delivered by an old philosopher, and taken in short-hand by one of the audience, whose name is not known
I have in my library several chemistry textbooks from before 1860, but "Chemistry No Mystery" is not one of them. Reflecting as they do an approximation of the chemistry known at the time, they provide insight about the history of both science and pedagogy. I learned about this one from my friend Ron Perkins, a skilled chemical demonstrator, and "Chemistry No Mystery" is the most demonstration-oriented of the old textbooks I have seen.
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