You might recall a BITeS from earlier this semester about a community challenge. If not, you can read about it here. A brief summary would be that I challenged the community to develop some literature discussion LO's on organometallic chemistry. The idea was to model the workshop experience without having a workshop. I got a greater response than I was expecting and we formed two groups. One group, Kyle Grice, Fabiola Barrios Landeros and Marion Cass, focused on a classic Kubas paper and their excellent LO was just published. They went over and above the challenge making some great jmol materials to help illustrate important parts of the paper. The second group is nearly finished with their LO. I don't want to spoil their surprise at this point, but I will be sure to announce it when it goes live. Feeling bad about challenging people without actually doing any work myself, I decided to contribute an LO on a fun little paper on ethylene compounds of the coinage metals that you can see here.

While I am very proud of the work done so far I am also here to tell you that it is not yet complete. So, I am rechallenging the community to do some more virtual workshop LO creation. The theme remains the same, but this time I am going to give you more insight into why we are doing it. Adam, Drew and I are going to be making a virtual issue of Organometalliacs. This was inspired by the J. Chem. Ed. paper Drew and Adam wrote about using papers to teach organometallics (J. Chem. Ed. 2007, 84, 443). We thought it would be great to create a virtual issue with papers linked to VIPEr LOs (hence the requirement that the LOs be from papers in ACS journals). And we are very close, but there is still a little more to do. So, please contact me if you are interested in participating. 

If the virtual workshop doesn't sound like your thing, (spoiler alert) there might be another small IONiC workshop coming this summer...stay tuned!!!