NukWik

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Welcome to the NukWik site for learning aids in Nuclear Chemistry. Everybody is welcome to use this wiki, but it's primarily aimed at Nuclear Chemistry teaching at Universities.

This Wiki is open access, but if you want to contribute you must register as a user (it's free and we will not distribute your e-mail address to others). We strongly urge you to contribut
Teaching Radiochemistry in Europe Jan2011.jpg
e, in particular if you are using material from NukWik in your own teaching - the more material you contribute, the more useful and better NukWik will be, and then we can all give better lectures and enhance the quality of our teaching!

NukWik was created as part of the CINCH EU-project for evaluating and planing radiochemistry teaching in Europe. Please refer to the CINCH web-pages at:

    http://cinch-project.eu/index.php


How should I use NukWik?

NukWik provide teaching tools and ideas for radiochemistry teaching. Everything from simple drawings, diagrams or pictures of basic principles and typical equipment to more fancy stuff (we hope!) like animations and videosnippets can be put on NukWik - provided there is no copyright restrictions. It should be clearly understood that by entering material on NukWik you agree to let other people use your material - for non commercial/no profit purposes.[1] Do not enter material which you have "borrowed" from somebody else (or a web-site), you have no right to publish such other peoples material. If discovered, such material will be deleted from NukWik and the rightful owners notified about the violation.

Material on NukWik is not restricted to just single files. On the contrary, one of the ideas behind NukWik is that teachers can put together small or large topic modules. Such a module can be suggested teaching paths for e.g. explaining how gamma-radiation is detected or what the principles behind the Szilard–Chalmers Reaction is. But it can also be much more comprehensive, e.g. a complete description of a Szilard–Chalmers laboratory exercise, including texts explaing the theory, step-by-step student instructions, instructions for the teaching staff, safety aspects, etc., etc.

NukWik is ment to be much more than just a database of teaching material, though! The purpose of NukWik is not only to let people share material but also to develop it together and continuously improve the material as it is being used! A Wiki is an ideal tool for enabling people at different places, at different times, to work together to collectively produce something which would be hard to produce single-handedly.

Example

For example, assume that teachers at three different universites all use some variations of a 234mPa/234Th radionuclide generator to teach their students the basic principles of mother-daughter relations and measurements determination of radioactive half life. If they work together they can divede the burden of making good illustrations, hand-out material, safety instructions, etc. Maybe one of them are really good at drawing nice and instructive illustrations, another have very good experience in evaluating the safety aspects and the third is really good at explaing the ion-exchange theory. Working together they can produce teaching material much quicker and of better quality than either of them could have done alone - at least without having spent considerable more time preparing it. Promoting such collaboration is the main goal of NukWik!

Later on a teacher at a fourth university might need a device which provides short lived activity for a small laboratory experiment or demonstration. By accessing NukWik she/he finds the mentioned lab exercise and can extract modify it fit her/his need. Maybe she/he then develops a computer tool to analyse the measured 234mPa decay data, this can be uploaded to NukWik and now the original three teachers can "upgrade" their exercise to use the computer tools also.

Got the Point?

You get the point, I hope! By working together we can achieve so much more than we are able to if we keep everything to ourself and never share anything. Mayby you dream about writing the ultimate teaching book in radiochemistry some day, and want to keep all your good stuff for yourself until then? Trust me, it's not going to happend! When you have written your book 10 or 20 years from now, it's all outdated and obsolete... And frankly, most of us never write that book! Much better to work in an open community like NukWik an get immediate benefits right now! You might even find that the satisfaction of developing something together in a team, which immediatly benefits your teaching, provides as much satisfaction as writing your book... 

I hope many of you will share my vision of how we together can enhance the teaching of radiochemistry and contribute to NukWik!

You might even want to consider to let your students input material to NukWik, they are our biggest resource! They can provide data, calculations, simulations, drawings, descriptions and much more - material which you never will have time to provide yourself. It will be revarding for your students - they put much more effort in their work if they know that other people actually will read and use their output - and can be very next year for yourself (and a potentially a lot of other people also).

Look at a few expampels (first entered Autumn 2010) here:

Enjoy!

  Yours Sincerely, Jon Petter Omtvedt (Prof. at Univ. of Oslo)

Further instructions/guides:


 
  1. If you want to use material from NukWik commercially, please contact the original author/artist to agree on the conditions for use.