Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
readers. The Digester is presently in a testing phase with the RSC editors
and we expect to roll it out to general usage within the organization
shortly.
3.5 Learn Chemistry Wiki
The RSC's objective is to advance the chemical sciences, not only at a
research level but also to provide tools to train the next generation of
chemists. The RSC's LearnChemistry platform [47] is currently being
developed to provide a central access point and search facility to make it
easier to access the various different chemistry resources that it provides.
ChemSpider contains a lot of useful information for students learning
chemistry but there is also a lot of information which is not relevant
to their studies, which might be confusing and distracting. As a result,
the RSC is developing a teaching resource, which will belong to
LearnChemistry, for students in their last years of school, and fi rst years
of university (ages 16-19), which restricts the compounds and the
properties, spectra and links displayed for each, to those relevant to their
studies. However, students do not just need compound information in
isolation - it is most useful when linked to and from study handouts
and laboratory exercises. In addition, this resource is not just intended to
be read and browsed, but interactive - allowing students to answer a
variety of quiz questions, and allowing chemical educators to contribute
to the content - so this resource is to be called the Learn Chemistry Wiki
(see Figure 3.6 [48]). The platform on which this community web site is
built is required to support the ability for multiple users to contribute
collaboratively and to be easily customizable both in terms of appearance
and functionality.
As such, an obvious start point was MediaWiki open source
software [49]. It is easy to administrate and customize in terms of initial
setup, managing user logins, tracking who is making changes and
reverting these when necessary. It is also easy for untrained users to
add pages and edit existing ones as many people are familiar with the
same editing interface as Wikipedia [50]. It is also easy to program
enhancements to the basic functionality as not only is all of the PHP
code itself open source, but it has also been designed to allow
extensions (programs called when the wiki pages are loaded) to be built
into it. There are many extensions already available [51] and as these are
also open source, it is straightforward to learn how they work and
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