During
the summer of 1993, I organized the first
CHEMCONF on-line conference. A total of 450 participants
used Listserv e-mail to discuss fifteen papers, which were
available on FTP and Gopher servers. (The Web was not fully
established by that date, but all subsequent conferences
have been Web-based). Participation has approximately
doubled since the first CHEMCONF, and the frequency of the
on-line conferences, now called CONFCHEM, has expanded to
several per year.
CHEMCONF '98: School-year Online Conference on Chemical Education
My wife Mary
taught 4th, 5th, and 6th grades at Fairland Elementary in
Montgomery County, MD. In the 1990s, in the early years of the
Internet and computers in schools, I helped her set up a computer
lab in her school with a local area network and a shared printer
(no Internet access for students). Students in several grades used
the computers for their writing projects and other tasks, using
such software as KidPix, Hypercard, and a simple word processor.
We created a website to display some of those student projects.
The site won a number of awards.
In the long run, however, this project was scrapped, I believe for two main reasons: (a) it was not an official project sanctioned by school administrators, and (2) we did not have a competitive scoring system that would determine which students' work was the best, which was second best, etc. The "sports model" of education continues to dominate.