Submitted by Joanne Stewart / Hope College on Wed, 09/09/2015 - 07:47

While I realize that the last person you want to hear from at this crazy-busy time of year is someone on sabbatical, I’m hoping that I can channel some Zen-like calm your way. This is the first sabbatical leave that I’ve taken that hasn’t involved moving my entire family across long distances. So it’s the first time that I’ve actually felt that sabbatical Zen-like calm myself.

 

One of my sabbatical plans is to write up some of the research that my students and I have done on the IONiC community. We’ve been looking at the impact of IONiC on professional practice, and we’ve started a new project on “distributed leadership,” studying the wacky, always changing yet always the same, IONiC Leadership Council. This work will hopefully go into some higher education journals that I haven’t published in before. So I’ve been warned to be very patient. Evidently chemistry publishing occurs at lightning speed compared to the rest of the academic universe.

 

More importantly, in order to keep the IONiC/VIPEr community going, it’s time to submit another proposal to the National Science Foundation (NSF). We plan to submit a proposal to the NSF-IUSE program called “Development and Implementation Tiers for Engaged Student Learning & Institution and Community Transformation.” The proposal deadline is January 13, 2016 and we need your help!

 

IONiC started out with support from several organizations, including the NSF. The first grant was used to build the web site and to begin to populate it with learning objects. The second NSF grant, the one we have now, is being used to grow and sustain the community--hence, the focus on faculty development workshops and other outreach activities. And while we certainly need to continue to support the web site and the community, we think it’s time to look seriously at the impact on student learning. So stay tuned! We will send out a request in October for you to be part of a grand experiment in teaching inorganic chemistry. An experiment with broader scope than has ever been attempted in chemistry! We can’t wait.