It has been 10 years since I was an Asst. Prof. of Chemistry. My jump to the dark side (business) has largely disconnected me from the latest trends in chemical education. Much has changed in regard to information technology. Students now show up in class with laptop computers and cell phones. They didn’t 10 years ago.
I do have a question in regard to the Internet and how it may add or subtract from use of the literature. Are students referencing web sites in lab writeups or papers? How does that work? Just what kind of legitimacy does the internet enjoy today as a “reference”? How has the internet affected how we archive information?
And just how do you handle the matter of students and their cell phones? Calls and text messaging could be pretty disruptive to the classroom.
Lamentations on Chemistry 
Well, cell phones are off during class. Period. Anyone whose phone has to be on can leave. I haven’t had a phone ring in class, yet. I accept Internet referencing if its from a prestigious University, but I tell my students that I don’t accept Internet references in general. Just to make them think on wether this reference is trustworthy or not. Would you accept someone referencing a forum page?
The big problem with the internet is editing- or the lack therein. Just read my scribbling in this blog. I do edit as I write it, but I almost never do a draft beyond the first. How can you tell if the content is constant over time? The fleeting nature of content on the internet makes it automatically suspect as a reference. A person could write a scholarly work based on internet references that could be subject to erasure by a server crash somewhere. Print media by its nature is relatively permanent and dispersed over hundreds locations. Plus, once you have the information in a library, you don’t have to pay to download 6 or 8 references at $30 a copy. You go to another stack and pull a copy of the journal.
I think I would be very “Old Testament” about internet sources were I back in the classroom.
I’ve heard phones go off once or twice. It’s generally embarassing and the call is never answered.
As far as referencing websites: Some classes require pages like the course syllabus or online CRC handbook (and such) to be referenced, usually in lab reports (for beyond-stupid graduation requirement lower-division classes). I include those where needed, but generally don’t reference anything but journal articles for formal papers and “journal-format” lab reports.
If it is not in a journal that is indexed by CAS, it is transient.
How has the internet affected things: Get someone to show you vpn if you havn’t seen it “virtual private network”. So I’m at home and it looks like I’m connected to the university’s network. Then I have access to scifinder scholar and all the online journals. (We are a small school, we cannot afford tetrahedron’s outlandish prices, but we do get ACS jouranals and a few others). It is like having a university’s library at your desk. We can search and find articles on a whim.
When I think back to the days and stacks of Chem Abstracts searching – there is no other word than “stone age” that describes how I view those old times.
Well, that is nice if you have such connectivity. That is, if you’re connected to a university. But for we flightless birds without affiliation to such higher institutions, we have to pay retail for our services. Just kidding. I don’t miss the bad old days of paging through the collected indices for references. Electronic retrieval is best.
But I still prefer to seearch the stacks at a good college library rather than use the internet. I think browsing is important. When you download articles, you miss interesting and useful articles that are in the same issue.
We use SciFinder for most of our work. It has +’s and -‘s. It is expensive for industrial users so it is hard to justify browsing with it. Browsing is half of the reason I like to go to a library. Serendipity happens there.