ChemPaths

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ChemPaths is a tool for developing online curriculum for students. It combines features from online news sources, build-your-own pages and extensive use of cross-linking.

That all sounds complicated, but in the end, this is a tool to build an online textbook where the students can feel free to meander around and follow links, while never getting lost along the path! This is currently under intense development, but feel free to check out the Sample Pathway on the ChemPaths website. On this page, you will find the motivation for ChemPaths and what it intends to do, as a project. Other pages can be found below:

ChemPaths: Learning to Meander

“The stone age was marked by man's clever use of crude tools; the information age, to date, has been marked by man's crude use of clever tools.” (Anonymous)

“Imagine a school with children that can read or write, but with teachers who cannot, and you have a metaphor of the Information Age in which we live.” - (Peter Cochrane)

The internet is alive with information. Any topic covered in today's General Chemistry Texts can be found on the internet in some form or another. The knowledge is there, and is being used more and more rapidly by students. Today's society raises students who ask how and won't always come to an instructor or a book for that answer. They will turn to search engines, wikis or forums. Currently instructors across the globe are developing online textbooks, wikis, web tutorials, and online learning games. Slowly teachers are incorporating online resources into their classrooms and often with great success! Each generation of courses becomes more and more interwoven with the web resources and some instructors have even taken steps to turn their entire course into an online textbook complete with tutorials and videos. This embraces a near-linear approach to learning by guiding students through what the instructor knows to be a vast field of knowledge.

In addition to those incorporating technology into the more linear approach to teaching, many efforts are being made to enter into what is commonly referred to as Web2.0: an age where teachers interact instead of instruct and students can enter into a community of learning on the web. In this style of teaching, students write, publish, edit and often grade each other based on interacting with each other and relying on collaboration to encourage growth and responsible investigation. The results have been remarkable - especially in fact-finding and aggregation type of explorations. Topics like art, history, and natural science lend themselves well to this collaborative creativity.

“Wisdom is perishable. Unlike information or knowledge, it cannot be stored in a computer or recorded in a book. It expires with each passing generation.” (Anonymous)

“Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification.” (Martin H. Fischer)

General Chemistry presents a unique problem for Web2.0: the existence of ever more complex theories involving oftentimes too rigorous of mathematics. The advent of the web as a teaching resource has made the historical linear progression of models (Lewis Diagrams, Line Structures, Atomic structure, etc.) nearly impossible to maintain in a completely open forum. Although there are those who would insist that these linear approaches are entirely archaic and unnecessary. On the other hand, not many students learning the structure of the hydrogen atomic orbitals will be able to even remotely grasp the meaning inherent in the Schrodinger Equation. In fact, even many honors-level freshmen do not have the mathematical knowledge necessary to even recognize what a matrix element could possibly signify. The difficult things for students to grasp are frequently 'how' to think about a molecule. When should a molecule be imagined as having localized electrons (as in a Lewis Diagram), when is VSEPR best used, or what problems are best approached from a quantum MO point of view? That is where the wisdom of today needs to be passed down.

The purpose of this project is to recognize the purposes of both the historical linear approach and the modern Web2.0 approach to education, creating a resource that utilizes the strengths of each while attempting to not reinvent the wheel in a new format. Towards this end, a web resource has been developed called ChemPaths. The motivation for this project is to imagine a complex web of knowledge as a stone walkway. Each stepping stone leading to a choice of many other ones. ChemPaths allows instructors to choose a path through these stepping stones while still allowing freedom for students to explore (or meander) off-path, but yet still keeping within the same level of complexity. As instructors (or students) add sites to the registry, these sites are linked together by an instructor into a pathway. This pathway has comments by the instructor about what important points of each web resource pertain to the topic at hand, and perhaps admonitions about what some of the unexplained math/concepts mean in a more general way.

ChemPaths has been built from the ground up as an independent website hosted here at the UW-Madison. As a prototype topic a novel approach to atomic and molecular structure is being developed and implemented. After exploring options for presentation and navigation, it has successfully been implemented as an additional resource into an honors general chemistry curriculum. The site offers interconnected websites related by topics, and dynamic linking to the National Science Digital Library for relevant resources to each text page. During the implementation of the website, the online resource Diigo was discovered as an excellent complementary tool to monitor student's interactivity and encourage collaborative learning. The Diigo site allows students to use the ChemPath like a textbook: highlighting and commenting pages live. Students can read comments by instructors, cite other resources, and share useful insights. By using the Diigo Group utility, these comments are easy to locate, read and discuss.

Currently, efforts are mainly focused on creating a robust interactivity network for both student use and instructor management. As the semester progresses, more modules and interactive modules will be developed and implemented using student and instructor feedback. The final ChemPaths resource will allow instructors to access a network of reliable teaching resources (including an online textbook) and generate linear flows which will cover specific goals as dictated by the teacher. The website will return a pathway along these resources with student teacher interactivity via Diigo and resource interconnectivity provided by the ChemPaths resource itself and its collaboration with the NSDL. e

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