We are now concluding the second session of the Spring 2006 CONFCHEM conference on Web Based Applications in Chemical Education <http://www.stolaf.edu/depts/chemistry/bh/confchem/confchem_s2006.htm#session2>. Please join me in a round of applause for Robert Lancashire and for the Jmol team and all those who participated in this past week's excellent discussion, which can be accessed in full at the CONFCHEM archives <http://majordomo.clarkson.edu/archives/confchem/200605/>. Clearly we have many exciting applications of JSpecView and Jmol to look forward to in the near future. [applause] Today we start Session 3. <http://www.stolaf.edu/depts/chemistry/bh/confchem/#session3> Two papers will be discussed concurrently: 3A: ChemPrep: Self-paced OWL preparation for first semester general and organic chemistry, Beatrice Botch, Roberta Day, William Vining (University of Mass Amherst) <http://www.stolaf.edu/depts/chemistry/bh/confchem/confchem_s2006.htm#botch> 3B: BestChoice, a model for interactive web-based teaching, Sheila Woodgate and David Titheridge (University of Auckland) <http://www.stolaf.edu/depts/chemistry/bh/confchem/confchem_s2006.htm#woodgate> Please join us in welcoming these authors: [applause] Beatrice Botch <http://www.chem.umass.edu/Faculty/botch.htm> is at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she was the Director of the Chemistry Resource Center at the University of Massachusetts for over a decade, and is presently the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the department, in addition to her ongoing teaching duties as Lecturer. She received the 1998-99 College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics Outstanding Teacher Award and was the Project Director of the National Science Foundation sponsored Northeast Regional Molecular Modeling Workshop held from 1994 to 1998. Current interests include the development and dissemination of OWL - Online Web-based Learning, an electronic homework and tutoring system for general chemistry. Roberta Day is a professor emeritus at U Mass, where she has received honors for her outstanding teaching. She is co-principal investigator on the ChemPrep grant. David Vining <http://www.chem.umass.edu/Faculty/vining.htm> is a professor of chemistry at U Mass. His principal interest lies in developing and testing educational materials and methods for chemistry. He has coauthored several outstanding CDs that include hundreds of videos and animations, interactive simulations, tutorials and exercises. Sheila Woodgate <http://www.che.auckland.ac.nz/staff/staff.aspx?staffid=36> is a Senior Tutor at The University of Auckland in New Zealand where she has taught first year Chemistry since 1977. She has had a long-standing interest both in instructional design for lecture-based teaching and in facilitating learning using computer-based activities. Her work designing a DOS-based interface and populating it with content laid the foundations for BestChoice, the student-friendly interactive learning system that she has designed for the web. David Titheridge, a graduate chemist who is currently doing honours in theology, has done all of the programming for the BestChoice student interface, editor and reporting system, contributing significantly to the design of all of these. Please take a look at these papers and over this coming weekend address your short questions for the authors to CONFCHEM@clarkson.edu with a subject beginning with "CONFCHEM 3A" or "CONFCHEM 3B". Full discussion will resume with the authors' replies to these short questions early next week. For those of you not yet subscribed to the CONFCHEM mailing list, it's not too late to join us. See <http://www.stolaf.edu/depts/chemistry/bh/confchem/confchem_s2006.htm#brief> for brief instructions. Bob Hanson Bob Belford