All of the needs assessment responses I have received so far are now posted. If you submitted your answers to me and do not see them here, please let me know (mhristov@brynmawr.edu). If you have any comments or suggestions, please email me and I will make the changes. Thank you and enjoy the conference!

* Please click on the school link and it will take you directly to the responses from that particular school.
 

School	Information Technologist	Librarian	Professor	Student
Mount Holyoke College:
Vassar College:
Hampshire College:
Amherst College:
Haverford College:
Swarthmore College:
Smith College:
University of Massachusetts
Bryn Mawr College:

Describe the course your team will be working with on. What are the pedagogical approaches for which you want to draw on technological resources? Map out the range and variation, including both the content and the kinds of resources you encounter and need.

Chemistry 101 is the first chemistry course in the "Core" sequence at Mount Holyoke. Most of the students are "first years"; many are taking the course as a prerequisite to courses in other disciplines (biology, environmental science, neuroscience) or as a part of pre-health requirements. Students spend ~3.5 hours/week in lecture or recitation, and 3 hours/week in lab.

In the past, "technology" has been used in the course in several different ways:

(1) A course web page was used primarily to disseminate information and materials to students (problem sets, answer keys, lab handouts, etc.).

(2) Lectures were supplemented by powerpoint slides, made available to students after class on the web.

(3) Molecular modeling and visualization software was used in a laboratory exercise to give students an opportunity to manipulate and extract information from model
structures.

These are all examples of using classroom technology for providing information to the students; the interactions were always "one way," with the instructor using the technology as a means to deliver particular pieces of information. In our preliminary conversations about the course, all of the ideas we've discussed involve using technology to allow the students to retrieve information on their own, to organize their own data and ideas, and to share data with their peers (and the instructor). How do we develop exercises and materials to teach new students how to access and critically analyze ifnromation from the chemical literature or from databases or other resources? How can we use contemporary tools (such as electronic, online lab notebooks) to help students organize, process, and share data? Can we make students active and creative users of technology instead of just passive consumers?

What roles and responsibilities do you currently assume regarding the use and instruction of technology?

In general, I believe that use of technology (especially technology relevant and necessary to professional activity within a discipline) should be thoroughly integrated throughout the basic curriculum of a field. In advanced courses, chemistry faculty at MHC have worked with others on campus (Sandy Ward, the science librarian, and Mary Glackin, the technology specialist for the sciences, among others) to train students to use technology resources (ranging from online literature searching to use of molecular modeling in class presentations). We hope to strengthen these features in the introductory courses as well.

What goals do you have for collaboration in this area?

While our members of our "team" have worked with each other before on smaller scale or ad hoc projects, this is the first time we have joined in
a coordinated effort to work on a course. I hope that our efforts in this project may work as a model for future synergies.

What roles and responsibilities do librarians on your campus currently assume regarding the use and instruction of technology and electronic resources?

We select and evaluate databases for information retrieval, deciding which ones to acquire (or license) for our campus. We lead workshops for students, faculty. We tailor our instructional workshops to the needs of specific courses, at the request of faculty. We also teach students one-on-one as they come to us at the Reference desk or request help in other ways (email, phone). We design and maintain webpages that lead people to electronic (and other) resources. Increasingly, we are selecting e-journals and online reference tools.

Are there specific resources in the sciences that you think contribute to or support student learning in the classroom? For each, explain briefly how it could help expand the students' critical information gathering skills.

Science Citation Index (Web of Science) is particularly useful in helping students discover journal articles from a wide variety of science disciplines and follow the trail of cited referencees, realizing the interconnections over time. Chemical Abstracts (CA Online via STN) could be a more useful tool, but our limited only-after-5pm access is a barrier. General Science Index (or GenSciAbstracts via FirstSearch) is a simpler, smaller index that overlaps well with our journal holdings, so it is a good starting point. JSTOR's General Science collection (and Ecology and Botany collections) are even smaller in terms of number of journals covered, but exceptionally powerful with full-text searching going back so many years; the immediate availability of the fulltext is also very helpful and popular with students. Other e-journal collections such as the new ACS Journal Archive will help reduce barriers to scientific literature.

What goals do you have for collaboration with faculty, students, and information technologists in the field of electronic information? What goals do you have for collaboration with faculty, students, and information technologists in the field of electronic information?

I look forward to working with this team in reforming the introductory chemistry course. I also hope we'll identify ways to incorporate library/information instruction into the chemistry curriculum. No course-integrated workshops for chemistry have been taught since the old Chem 306 course was dropped a few years ago. I'm delighted that we are considering an information-seeking assignment within Chem 101.

What roles and responsibilities do you currently assume regarding the use and instruction of technology?

What technologies could enhance student and faculty research/ teaching/ learning? Include a brief description of the technology and a brief explanation of its potential usefulness.

What resources are you considering devoting to its future development?

What are your learning and research needs as defined by course assignments in both this course (if you have taken it) and in others? Map out the range and variation, including both the content and the kinds of resources you encounter and need.

This course is the laboratory companion to a lecture class. If taught well, the lab will enforce the concepts taught in the lecture, as well as offer hands-on practice, which will make these concepts more interesting and real. When I took the course myself, Microsoft Excel was the main form of technology integrated into the learning process As use of a spreadsheet in order to perform calculations is laborious and un-exciting, I believe the use of a Mathematica template would greatly increase the enjoyment and ability of students to learn from the lab. Also, Vassar has a number of molecular modeling programs which are currently not being used in this course. The inclusion of modeling will make the laboratory more applicable to chemistry. In addition, a literature search aspect will familiarize students with both the library and the research process.

What goals do you have for collaboration in this area, both as a student-learner and student-assistant.

As a student-learner, I hope that this collaboration will allow me to better understand the roles of the professor, librarian, and information technologist in the classroom use of technology. I will be able to use this understanding to facilitate my own future learning. As a student-assistant, I will learn how to help students use technology such that their learning is maximized.

Describe the course your team will be working on. What are the pedagogical approaches for which you want to draw on technological resources? Map out the range and variation, including both the content and the kinds of resources you encounter and need?

Our team will be working on the thermo-statistical mechanics physical chemistry laboratory. This laboratory is intended to give students some
hands on laboratory experience with the ideas of thermo-statistical mechanics. This will be done through five multi-week laboratory units that
are being developed specifically for the course. The central pedagogical idea in the development of these units is that a combination of experiments, simulations, and theory can complement our learning of physical phenomena. Through the experiments, students learn how to manipulate nature to measure quantities of interest; through simulations, students can tie the resuls of these experimental results with what is occuring at the atomic scale; combining both experiments and simulations can help students understand the theories presented in class better. Additionally, in the fourth unit, students are asked to go to the literature to help them design an experiment. Here are the tentative ideas for the laboratory units.

The fist unit will introduce students to using models to aid their understanding of physical phenomena in gases. They will obtain experimental
data about the pressure of fixed amounts of several gases at different volumes. To complement their experiment, molecular dynamics simulations
using Cerius2 for non-ideal models of the gases in their experiment will be performed. From these simulations, they will see how the pressure of these gases varies with the volume using these non-ideal models. The experimental data will then be compared with the ideal gas model, the non-ideal models used in their simulations, and well known non-ideal equations of state.

The second unit will introduce students to how the degrees of freedom in molecules influence heat capacities. A standard experiment to measure the ratio of heat capacities for different gases will be performed. This experiment will be complemented by a calculation of the vibrational frequencies and rotational constants for these molecules using Gausian98. The students will combine these vibrational frequencies and rotational constants into the partition function for the molecule. With the aid of Mathematica, the students will go from this partition function to the average energy and then to the heat capacities. The ratio of heat capacities will be compared to the experiment.

The third unit will introduce students to using calorimetry to find changes in enthalpy of reactions in solution. Some classic experiments will be
complemented with calculations that include the effect of solvation. The Gaussian98 program will be used.

The fourth unit will introduce students to finding binary liquid/solid phase diagrams in a classic experiment. The students will then be asked to apply
this knowledge to finding the phase diagram of chocolate caramel mixtures and use this diagram to come up with ways of making candies with solid chocolate outsides and liquid caramel insides. This project will introduce students to searching through library resources to find data useful in
designing of their experiment.

The fifth unit will introduce students to the study of kinetics in ground and excited states through the use of spectroscopy. This series of experiments are taken directly from J. Chem. Ed. Complementing this sequence will be a calculation using Gaussian98 which will show the students where the electron density in the molecule is in the ground and excited states. They will use this infomation to help explain their experimentalresults.

What roles and responsibilities do you currently assume regarding the use and instruction of technology?

I have developed laboratories for the quantum mechanics physical chemistry laboratory that make use of Mathematica and Gaussian98. Physical chemistry students have used these resources in my research computers where I installed the software. This past year, these resources have been
implemented in Vassar's Scientific Visualization laboratory which our information technologist takes care of. This has been a wondeful time saver
for me. I continue to develop experiences for students that make use of computer simulations in learning about chemistry.

What goals do you have for collaboration in this area?

I would like to develop a dialogue with our team to understand better how the expertise they provide can be used in our teaching program. I hope that this course will serve as a concrete case study through which to explore how we can all contribute to student learning through our collaborative efforts. In particular, I would like to explore the applications of the software in our Scientific Visualization laboratory to chemistry courses; additionally, I want to explore the introduction of library searches into laboratory courses to help students think about the design of their experiments. Later, I hope to extend these ideas into other courses.

What resources are you considering devoting to its future development?

I plan to give of my time to our collaboration in this course and continued discussions on other courses.

What roles and responsibilities do librarians on your campus currently assume regarding the use and instruction of technology and electronic resources?

Are there specific resources in the humanities that you think contribute to or support student learning in the classroom? For each, explain briefly how it could help expand the students' critical information gathering skills.

What goals do you have for collaboration with faculty, students, and information technologists in the field of electronic information?

Cristian Opazo Castillo, Information Technologist, Vassar College

What roles and responsibilities do you currently assume regarding the use and instruction of technology?

I am one of the three instructional computing consultants here at Vassar (my field of expertise relates to the natural sciences, whereas my other colleagues work in humanities/social sciences, and geography/geology respectively). I am in charge of running and maintaining software and hardware at the Scientific Visualization Laboratory, a multi-platform (Windows, Mac, Unix) computing facility where teaching and research in the sciences takes place. I work closely with faculty and students helping them using the various software packages and developing solutions to particular problems related to analysis and visualization of scientific data. In addition to these user-related tasks, I am responsible for finding and testing new technologies that can be helpful to the teaching/learning process at the Sci Vis Lab and other labs on campus.

I also work at the teaching side of the IT spectrum. I am a lecturer for the Physics Department and teach a class on computational methods. In this class I want to make the students comfortable with using two of the most popular programs for scientific computation: Mathematica and Matlab. During the course of a semester, our work ranges from the basic arithmetic calculations up to the development of computer code as a way of modeling natural phenomena.

What technologies could enhance student and faculty research/teaching/learning? Include a brief description of the technology and a brief explanation of its potential usefulness.

I think one of the most important and challenging of issues to solve is the one related to standardization of the various computing services across different operating systems and hardware across campus (email client/server, networked file sharing, printing, directory services, etc.). Users tend to get frustrated (with reason) from having to learn 10 different methods to accomplish different 10 computing tasks (sometimes in 10 different places), so we have to be able to provide a simpler, more efficient solution. In this respect, we have already gave the first step into standardization by introducing the Blackboard course management system across the entire college about a year ago. The standard web interface provided by Blackboard allows faculty and students to seamlessly do the same tasks across the curriculum. The response has been a very positive one from most users. We are currently working on the other systems mentioned above.

What resources are you considering devoting to its future development?

More than particular hardware or software tools, as an instructional technologist I have to figure out and develop more efficient ways to let people know about my role within the academic community. Sometimes problems that users face simply drag for too long because people do not seem to know where to look for help. Being in real contact with the academic community on a one-on-one basis is the key to offer effective solutions. The technology is the easy part.