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Earlham Professor Participating in For Immediate Release: 
Lori Watson is an assistant professor of chemistry at Earlham College. RICHMOND, Ind. — Earlham College Assistant Professor of Chemistry Lori Watson says that she finds the College's science faculty to be collegial, supportive and easy to work with. She also finds that it is sometimes challenging to find other inorganic chemistry professors to share ideas with. That's because Watson is the sole inorganic specialist at Earlham. And, she says, her position is not rare. "There's seldom more than one of me at a small liberal arts college," says Watson, smiling. Wanting to share experiences and increase professional development opportunities has led Watson and inorganic chemists from eight other schools to participate in a collaborative effort headed by DePauw University to use Web-based resources to extend the reach of their teaching. The National Science Foundation has given a $150,000 grant to fund this initiative. Known as the Intellectual Online Network of Inorganic Chemists or IONiC, the site is being touted as "a cyber-enabled community of practice for improving inorganic chemical education." The idea for the Web site began, says Watson, because "a group of us was concerned by a lack of professional development opportunities. We thought that if we could share resources and knowledge with other inorganic chemistry faculty, we could eventually have classes interact and share knowledge online as well." And while professors and undergraduate students at liberal arts colleges are the project's primary audience, that's an incredibly broad spectrum of interests, says Watson, noting that the field of inorganic chemistry is vast, covering the entire Periodic Table of the Elements, and is also subdivided into many different specialties. "This is going to help all of us," says Watson, whose specialty is organometallic chemistry. "This site will be a repository of teaching material and a place where we can test and evaluate new curricula. It will also have all of the typical social networking tools that we need to meet other inorganic faculty so that we can share ideas. We believe that the use of the site will increase the number of people collaborating with each other in chemistry and that this collaboration will include students as well. Down the line, we envision participation in video conferences during class and even having students participate in virtual experiments with peers from colleges across the country." Linking computer users by interest is nothing new. In fact, years before the creation of what we now know as the Internet, books such as The Network Nation, first published in 1978, theorized that computer networks would be a key to social interaction in the future. Today, of course, tens of millions of computer users are members of mainstream interest-based social networking sites. Lori Watson says IONiC is just another tool to assist her in expanding educational opportunities for students. "I try to help students discover what's cool about science," she says. "Guiding a student to the feeling of discovery; that's a very powerful thing. You're contributing to this vast body of knowledge. The more opportunities we have to do that the better." Even though Watson remains the College's only inorganic chemistry professor, she's confident that this is where she belongs. "I came to Earlham because I wanted to get to know my students, to work with them on collaborative enterprises. And, really, there's no better place to teach undergraduate science than at a liberal arts college." She pauses for a moment, "We do real science here!" Of the nine schools participating in the first phase of the IONiC program, three colleges — Earlham, DePauw and Hope — are members of the Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA). Other participants include James Madison University, Reed College, Harvey Mudd College, and the Joint Sciences Department of Pitzer, Scripps, and Claremont McKenna Colleges. The IONiC Web site is currently undergoing tests of its initial content and is expected to be launched in February 2008. — EC — Contact:
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Earlham
College · 801 National Road West · Richmond,
Indiana 47374-4095 |