Although focused more on communicating research activities rather than teaching and learning, Alan Cann’s blog post on the ‘(Post)Digital Researcher‘ is worth flagging here. He links to an article in Nature Chemistry, titled ‘Communicating Chemistry’, which discusses the use of social networking and other web 2.0 tools to “disseminate results, collaborate, and share data and knowledge.” Apparently, Chemists are not, compared to other disciplines, keen to adopt new web-based models of scholarly communication and appear more reluctant to share the results of their work informally, through blogs, and formally, through Open Access repositories.
Background
Background: The Fund for Educational Development
For the last two years, the Centre for Educational Research and Development have managed a Fund for Educational Development (FED), a competitive fund for projects that support the University’s Teaching and Learning Strategy 2007-2012 (PDF). The Chemistry.FM project is based on a FED project that Dr. Mark Baron and Dr. Jose Gonzalez-Rodriguez worked on during 2008-9. Incidentally, they’ve also been funded by the FED to continue their work again this year, producing further videos for a second year ‘Analytical Techniques for Forensic Science’ course.
We thought it might interest you to read more about the original FED proposal that eventually became the Chemistry.FM project. Here’s the original FED project outline. Continue reading