app001

=App001: Using a wiki and Google Spreadsheets for student generated content=

Creators
Jean-Claude Bradley (bradlejc@drexel.edu ) (Dept of Chemistry, Drexel University) Andrew Lang (Dept of Mathematics, Oral Roberts University)

Application category

 * 1) instructional learning
 * 2) open

Application Goal/Utility
Assignments are designed in regular courses to generate new useful knowledge that is shared publicly.

Documentation
Bradley, J.-C. **Dangerous Data: Lessons from my Cheminfo Retrieval Class** UsefulChem blog (Jan 2, 2011) ([|link] ) Bradley, J.-C. **Chemical Information Validation from Fall2010**, UsefulChem blog (Jan 5, 2011) ([|link] )

Tools

 * Wiki**: Wikispaces is recommended to provide free hosted wikis. Wikis can be tagged as "Higher Educational Applications" and many educational projects have been run there for over 6 years. This allows unstructured data to be recorded by students.
 * Google Spreadsheets**: These [|free hosted services] allow for structured data to be recorded by students. A Google API allows for easy querying of the Spreadsheets for additional ways of searching and displaying the results.

Implementations
Students were asked to find 5 sources for each of 5 different properties for a chemical of their choice. They recorded their findings in a Google Spreadsheet and were given feedback via a column labeled "Instructor Comments". Students could communicate back via the "Student Comments" column. When the entry was validated by the instructor, "done" was entered by the instructor in the "status" column. From a class of 25 students, 657 validated results were generated. The instructor blogged about the results and was subsequently contacted by one on the chemical vendors for ideas of further collaborating with the course. This company then agreed to donate their entire collection of melting points (>13,000) to the public domain. This triggered a domino effect with other companies and government agencies (The EPA donated >10,000 melting points). The current total number of entries is 27,000. All collections are linked on a wiki page.
 * 1. The Winter 2010 course of Chemical Information Retrieval (CHEM367/767 ) taught by Jean-Claude Bradley at Drexel University.**