We Bring Chemistry to Life > Summary

Affiliation: Soundview Preparatory School
Starts: 9/12/04      Ends:
Leaders: mrglouie
Keywords: Chemistry, Teaching, Best Practices
Participants: 0 (view all)
Description:

Our Motto is "We Bring Chemistry to Life!"

We are a group of dedicated Chemistry professors, instructors and teachers interested in improving chemistry education.  This site will chronicle our exploration of these three questions:

1.  What are the fundamental principles of chemistry that lead to a deep practical understanding of chemistry?

2.  What are best practices that can convey this fundamental knowledge to our students?

3.  What is a developmentally appropriate and logical sequence of presentation that is effective for high school chemistry?

To promote thoughtful discussion we will be using H2O's rotisserie technology, described below.

"Rotisserie discussions represent an innovative approach to online discussion that encourages measured, thoughtful discourse in a way that that traditional threaded messaging systems do not, in the process solving some of the universal complaints about online discussion boards: that the substance of discussions is poor, that participants post quickly rather than thoughtfully, that participation is uneven (most people lurk, and a few posters dominate the rest), and that discussion forums are segregated into balkanized communities of people with similar thoughts and beliefs."

"How do rotisserie discussions work?

Rotisseries are group discussions with structural support for determining when participants should respond and which participants should respond to which other participants.

The basic rotisserie begins with a project leader sending out a question to all project participants along with a deadline for responding to that question. Once the response deadline has arrived, the system takes all of the received responses and assigns one of those response to a participant for further discussion. For example, suppose that Joe, Mary, and Sue are the participants of a rotisserie and that each of them respond to the initial question by the deadline. Once that deadline has been reached, the system may assign Joe's response to Mary, Sue's to Joe, and Mary's to Sue. Once this assignment has been determined, the system will send out a notice to each participant of a new deadline, by which time each participant should respond to the assigned post.

A rotisserie can continue for any number of rounds, can have any number of participants, and can have different numbers of participants in each round (as users enter and leave a project). Also, each round after the first includes a rating system, whereby each user rates a small number of posts by other users before responding to her assigned post. This rating system allows the most interesting discussion threads to become evident at the completion of a rotisserie, allowing more meaningful navigation of archived discussions.

A rotisserie may also include any number of projects as its pool of participants, allowing several different projects to collaborate with one another. This functionality allows, for example, a professor using a project for his course to include another professor's course project in a discussion."

For more information on this site see the FAQ.  http://h2o.law.harvard.edu/about/faq.jsp