Chemical Forums
General Forums => Comments for Staff and Comments from Staff => Topic started by: jasongnome on September 22, 2016, 04:34:39 AM
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Don't know if there's any demand for this, or if people think there's already a place for it, but a forum for chemistry teachers and lecturers could share practical tips would be incredibly useful.
The general rules on this forum, regarding students and citizen scientists are 100% correct for those forums, but I would envisage this forum being slightly different in that more specific advice would be given in how to do things. If someone can't get a practical to work, and someone else has experience of it, that experience would be shared. The reason for the rules being different is that it's not a case of a student, who needs to work things out for themselves in order to learn, but effectively to help educators to help their students to learn.
As an example, I moved to Cyprus 7 years ago, some experiments that work perfectly in the UK's temperate climate are much more difficult to do here due to heat, and more to excessive humidity. Some things I've worked out alternative methods, others I'm still struggling with. We could help each other.
(I've currently got my class 12's nickel sulfate evaporating in an incubator with a pot of calcium chloride as a drying agent as I know from experience they'll never crystalise here on the open bench as they do in the UK!).
It's not just geographical problems though, anyone teaching for a long time will have found methods that work a bit better than those published, or worked out completely new ways of doing things, or practical ideas that aren't even published. It would be good to have somewhere specific to share these for mutual benefit.
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You are right - it is demand that is a problem. I can add new subforum with its own rules at any moment, however, creating such a forum will not change anything - it won't attract traffic, it will just sit there empty. I prefer to add new subforums to channel the existing traffic, not the other way around, in my experience that's what works (and even then not always, I have seen sites where the specific kind of traffic died after being given its own subforum, as large part of those posting were just casual readers, not interested in following hidden discussions).
So - sure, no problem, the moment there will be traffic we can consider the idea.
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Fair enough.
After posting this I found one or two posts in this vein that I've responded to (but I agree, not enough for their won forum yet - there's nothing worse on a forum site than empty forums).
In the meantime, where do you think is the correct place for such posts?
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Even though it's not currently used for this purpose (most of the post seem to be students asking questions about school), isn't this what the Chemical Education (http://www.chemicalforums.com/index.php?board=24.0) is supposed to be for?
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Even though it's not currently used for this purpose (most of the post seem to be students asking questions about school), isn't this what the Chemical Education (http://www.chemicalforums.com/index.php?board=24.0) is supposed to be for?
Possibly, but not according to its description.
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Simple enough to amend the forum description then. Discussion of teaching philosophies and strategies is certainly within the domain of chemical education.