As usual, it was an exciting and exhausting ACS meeting. Our sessions were good. The poster session seemed to be pretty well attended, but I admit, it was hard to judge that based on the location of our posters. For the second straight year I had hotel issues; last year it was a power outage and this year an evacuation due to the fire alarm going off. We had an excellent social gathering at the Pin-Up thanks to Anne Bentley. I even got to sneak off to Oakland to see an Angels-A's game.

You may have seen my Tweet about looking forward to the announcment of the most read author of 2016. I really am! Hopefully it will be a friend of VIPEr. And I am really excited about our sessions which will all be held in room 2016 in the Moscone Center. We start off Sunday morning at 9 am with eight talks in the coordination chemistry session. This will be followed at 1:30 by nine talks in the organometallic chemistry session. That wraps up at 4:45 pm and I'll have to slither pretty quickly to Hall D for the poster session from 5:30-7:30 pm.

How many of us have cringed at the basic lack of chemical knowledge on display on your friend's Facebook page?

What is our responsibility to teach in these circumstances?  Maybe none at all.  This is a social space after all.  

But in our classrooms and teaching labs, our responsibility is different.  

I've been thinking a lot about how we teach chemical safety lately.  As I set up a new laboratory at UM Dearborn, a decade and a half into my independent career, I am trying to take the opportunity to make my workspace  and my work habits safer, both for myself and for the next generation of students who will move through my lab.

In January I wrote about the most adopted/favorited Lit. Discussion LOs and at that time I promised to make this a somewhat regular series on BITeS. Not wanting to disappoint my vast audience, I thought it was time for the second in the series, this time taking a look at the most adopted/favorited Problem Sets. Once again, there are some ties, so the numbering might look a little odd, but trust me, there will be 10. Just a reminder, this list comes from you, the loyal VIPEr users.

Greetings everyone,

I thought I would take a break from basking in the sun to tell you a little bit about things going on with your favorite site dedicated to improving the teaching and learning of inorganic chemistry.

Over the years, I’ve adopted (and adapted) many LOs in my inorganic courses. My courses have changed not only because of the LOs that I’ve used, but also because of the tips I’ve taken from members of the IONiC community.

One of my favorite things to do is to recognize outstanding undergraduate students. It's even more special to be able to recognize outstanding inorganic students!

Inorganic Chemistry Trainwreck

The great experiment, 2017

At a recent local section meeting I talked with some folks about VIPEr. And one of the complaints (and a very fair one) is the bewildering array of content to sort through. We are perfectly willing to admit, there is a lot of great content on the site that can be a bit intimidating to sort through. While our search engine has improved, it is far from perfect and can often lead to lots of results that you have to sort through. In thinking about ways we could try and help you navigate the content, I thought of using BITeS to help a little bit.