4th EucheMs chemistry congress

tuesday, 28-Aug 2012
s623
chem. Listy 106, s587–s1425 (2012)
Education and History, Professional chemists Ethics, Employability, labels
European Chemistry thematic Network – i
o - 1 3 9
virtuAL CoMMunitieS in SCienCe And
eduCAtion
A. LAGAnA 1
1 University of Perugia, Department of Chemistry, Perugia, Italy
The evolution of networked distributed computing
technologies is fostering the advent of virtual communities and
service oriented approaches. Such evolution is bound to provide
“integrated services through unified access to and seamless
integration of the underlying networking, computing and data
infrastructures” to research, innovation and education.
At European level distributed technologies can rely on the
European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) and, for Chemistry, on
COMPCHEM a virtual organization committed to design,
implement and develop specific Grid services as well as tools
carrying out the evaluation of the quality of the services. As to
Education, a protagonist of this evolution is the European
Chemistry Thematic Network (ECTN) Association that has
undertaken the highly innovative engagement of pursuing long
term sustainability by building a Virtual Educational Community
(VEC) aimed at developing a distributed service oriented
environment.
Cooperative/competitive educational approaches leveraging
on the specific features of the VEC are already being adopted to
allow software reuse and interoperability by developing
repositories of higher education electronic teaching and learning
materials and Learning Objects (LO) are being created. The most
important shared patrimony of VEC is a set of electronic selfevaluation
tests (EChemTest) in chemistry and related support
material meant to enhance knowledge and skills in chemistry.
EChemTest covers the European Core Chemistry topics at three
different levels, corresponding to the end of compulsory studies
and the beginning of university studies and the completion of the
core chemistry syllabus in analytical, biological, inorganic,
organic, and physical chemistry. Moreover, tests are provided for
synthetic and computational chemistry and specialized question
banks have been created for chemistry applied in cultural heritage
preservation. EChemTest contents are based on a syllabus
developed by analysing the major European educational system
and related teaching program contents.
Keywords: virtual community; learning object; self evaluation;
compchem; service oriented;
European Chemistry thematic Network – i
4 th EucheMs chemistry congress
o - 1 4 0
e-tooLS for the CheMiStry virtuAL
eduCAtion CoMMunity
A. LAGAnA 1
1 University of Perugia, Department of Chemistry, Perugia, Italy
Among the integrated services built for the Virtual
Educational Community (VEC) established by the European
Chemistry Thematic Network (ECTN) are some e-tools useful for
carrying out the activities of VEC. Some of these tools are focused
on the management of the knowledge developed within ECTN,
on the support to the association activities and some others to
communication. In this contribution we shall focus on two
communication products: the Newsletter and the Magazine with
the aim and the structure of the two e-tools being quite different.
The Newsletter is a way of disseminating the activities
carried out by the community and illustrating their nature. ECTN
has published its first “News” information in 1999, renamed
ECTN Newsletter in March 2000. Following the evolution of the
various ECTN projects the Newsletter has become the EC2E2N
one about the end of the year 2009. At present it consists of a
bimonthly electronic bulletin freely accessible on the ECTN
website (http://ectn-assoc.cpe.fr/news/index.htm) dealing with the
activities of the eCtn Association and the european Chemistry
and Chemical engineering education network. More in
general, however, it deals also with any information related to the
chemistry education in the European Higher Education Area and
the extended European area. The announcement of the publication
of the issues of the Newsletter is widely disseminated throughout
Europe and abroad. Chemical Societies are also receiving our
Bulletin, as well as the Members of the ACEN (Asia-Pacific
Chemical Education Network).
The electronic magazine is a biannual publication addressed
to Virtual Innovation Research Teaching & Learning
Communities. The magazine is the result of a joint endeavour of
the COMPCHEM Virtual Organization (VO), of the European
Chemistry Thematic Network (ECTN) Association and of the
University of Perugia spinoff MASTER-UP. The magazine is
specialized in Molecular and Materials Science, Teaching and
Learning, Computer Science research, education and innovation
and focuses on Service Oriented approaches. In addition to full
papers, it publishes reports of (successful or failed) attempts to
build services relevant to the field of interest, lists of best
practices, products used, the advantages and disadvantages of the
solutions adopted will be considered for publication. In particular,
all the information useful to build the puzzle of innovative
complex applications in education, ICT and Molecular and
Materials science are accepted.
AUGUst 26–30, 2012, PrAGUE, cZEcH rEPUbLIc