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To ECTN Network members:

Will all members of the network please complete the Academic Staff Time form available on the ECTN website at www.ectn.net (click on the button 'ECTN forms'). This is very important for the completion of the final report for the funding period 1st October 2003 to 30 September 2004.

To all EChemTest surfers:

Please update your link to the EChemTest, and use now the following access: http://echemtest.unipg.it
Registration required. Thank you.

ECTN Information and Project

Anthony Smith, ESCPE Lyon, France (E.U.)

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 ECTN Association

Report of the Administrative Council Meeting held in Köln, DE on 8-9 October 2004

A brief report of the Bologna follow up seminar held in Dresden, DE was provided by Terry Mitchell. The full reports from this meeting will be published in book form, and a summary was provided in the last newsletter.

It was reported that the application for funding the Techno TN 2005 Forum  had been successful. A first meeting to organise the forum, at which all science and technology thematic networks are expected to participate, will be held in November 2004. Richard Whewell and Tony Smith will represent the ECTN at this meeting. If any ECTN members have any suggestions concerning topics of general interest that might be discussed at this forum please contact Tony Smith as soon as possible.

1. The Socrates/Tempus Accompanying Measures project - The Chemistry Eurobachelor label has been funded.

An application procedure for a Chemistry Eurobachelor Label is being developed and this is one of the tasks to be carried out in a pilot-project that was submitted by the ECTN Association to the Socrates/Tempus Accompanying Measures call for proposals. The pilot project will also publicise the label widely to HE teachers, administrative staff at HE institutions, political decision-makers and students and make initial awards of the Label to suitably qualified candidate institutions. The pilot-project proposal envisages a minimum of 20 candidate institutions during the project period (18 months). Funding will be available for site visits, and the project will evaluate whether such site visits will be indispensable in the Label procedure.

Terry Mitchell is the coordinator of this pilot-project. The application was successful and will allow the ECTN to progress rapidly towards the establishment of this Label.

The Eurobachelor Label Committee met on 4 September 2004. This meeting produced application guidelines for the Eurobachelor Label and a draft contract between the ECTN Association and an institution applying for the Label. These were approved by the ECTN Association Administrative Council. The Administrative Council also agreed that, during the lifetime of the pilot-project (from September 2004 until September 2005) the costs of site visits to evaluate applications will be funded by the project and not the applicants. It was agreed that the cost of a Label application during this period would be 2000 Euro, but that for a limited period (until 30 April 2005) a special fee of 1000 Euro would be charged in order to encourage early applications.

Publicity for the Label will be produced and disseminated in the near future.

Does your Institution wish to apply for the Chemistry Eurobachelor Label? Contact Terry Mitchell for more information.

2. The EChemTest

It was agreed that the EChemTest Certificate would be launched at the ECTN Plenary Meeting in Thessaloniki (4-8 May 2005).

3. Election Procedures

It was agreed that Tony Ashmore (Royal Society of Chemistry) would draw up election procedures for the ECTN Association, in collaboration with Tony Smith, and that these procedures would be submitted to the next Administrative Council meeting for approval.

4. New Members

The following institutions were admitted as members of the Association:

• University of Maria Curie-Sklodowska, Lublin, Poland
• Slovak University of Technology, Bratislava, Slovakia
• Royal Netherlands Chemical Society

We welcome these institutions to our Association and look forward to working with them in the future.

5. Websites

We are working on a completely revised set of websites for the Association, the ECTN Network, the EChemTest and the Eurobachelor Label. Pascal Mimero presented a first draft of the site to the meeting. There was general approval of this site, and Pascal was congratulated on his work. Members will be informed when the sites are available.

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The next meeting of the Administrative Council will take place on 4-5 February, 2005, in Lyon, FR. Any Association members who have items they wish to be discussed at this meeting should contact Tony Smith or any member of the Administrative Council.

ECTN Network

GOOD NEWS!

The funding for the ECTN Project for the period October 2004 - September 2006 (2 years) will be significantly higher than for previous years. We do not yet have the details - but we should have sufficient funds to carry out all the activities planned in the application. Please participate fully in our activities - see the previous issue of the newsletter for details of the various working groups and contact the group leaders if you wish to participate. With this project and the Eurobachelor Label project mentioned above we really have the funding necessary to advance the cause of chemistry higher education in Europe on many fronts.

Brief report of the ECTN Management Committee Meeting held in Köln, DE on 8-9 October 2004

There will be a 'Variety in Chemistry Education' conference in Krakow, Poland in July 2005. it was agreed that the ECTN would authorise the use of the ECTN logo for this conference subject to representation on the organising committee.

The working groups reported briefly on their activities during the 2003/2004 funding period, and written reports will be provided that will be used for the final report for the European Commission and for the ECTN website.

During the current funding period, October 2004 - September 2006, the following activities are expected:

• The Working Group "Newly-Appointed University Teachers": this group will meet at the plenary meeting in Thessaloniki in order to finalise plans for a summer school that will be held in June/July 2005.
• The Working Groups "Links with Schools", "Teacher/Teaching Evaluation", and "Image of Chemistry" will have short meetings in Thessaloniki.
• The Working Group "EChemTest" - there will be a meeting of group leaders in February 2005 to prepare for the launch of the EChemTest certificate, and a launch meeting in Thessaloniki.
• The Working Groups "Biological Chemistry", "Chemistry and Cultural Heritage" and "Multimedia" will have half-day meetings in Thessaloniki.

The new working groups will hold meetings as follows:

• 2nd and 3rd Cycle Studies: In the coming year the group will deal with the second-cycle, and next year the third cycle will be considered. Participants are asked to provide their vision of the Master in Chemistry. A meeting will be held before the Thessaloniki meeting and at the Thessaloniki meeting. Anna Kolasa, Krakow, PL is the group leader.
• 2nd and 3rd Cycle EChemTest - this group will develop a test in an area of Organic Chemistry, and will cooperate with both the EChemTest group and the 2nd and 3rd Cycle Studies group.
• The Bologna Process for the Practice-Oriented HE Sector in Chemistry  - this group will hold meetings before and at Thessaloniki - interested participants should contact Ray Wallace, Nottingham Trent University, UK for further information.
• The Rare Knowledge in Chemistry group proposes to send a message to all ECTN members asking for definitions and examples of Rare Knowledge in Chemistry. the group will then hold a meeting to discuss the replies received. This group will also collaborate with the Chemistry and Cultural Heritage and the Newly-Appointed University Teachers groups.
• Tuning Educational Structures in Europe - this project has successfully submitted an application for a third (dissemination) project - Tuning3. the chemistry Tuning group will be funded under this project which runs from January 2005 to

The ECTN has been asked to comment on the document produced by CEFIC for the European Technology Platform for Sustainable Chemistry. It was agreed that Juan-Antonio Renuncio (Complutense Madrid, ES) would be responsible for this. Juan-Antonio is the coordinator of a doctoral programme on sustainable chemistry for 8 Spanish universities.

Members of the ECTN are asked to propose the form of feedback that working groups should provide at the plenary meeting in Thessaloniki. Some ideas proposed, to avoid long sessions of presentations (we will have 12 groups reporting) are: poster presentations; one transparency - one minute oral presentations followed by a poster session; written reports to be distributed before the meeting. Please send your suggestions to Tony Smith and/or to the working group leaders.

ECTN members are also invited to suggest speakers/topics for plenary presentations at the Thessaloniki meeting.

After much discussion, it was decided that the 2006 plenary meeting will take place in Vienna, Austria. The provisional dates are 19-23 April 2006. Johannes Fröhlich will be the local organiser.

We thank Anja Bitners and Hagga Schmalz and their team for their hard work and exceptionally good organisation for this meeting.

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The next meeting of the Management Committee will take place on 4-5 February 2005 in Lyon, France. Any member of the network who has any item he/she wishes to be discussed at this meeting should contact Tony Smith or any member of the Management Committee.

ECTN Plenary Meeting, Thessaloniki, GR 4 - 8th May 2005

The next ECTN plenary meeting will be held in Thessaloniki, GR on 4-8 May, 2005. The meeting will start on the morning of 4 May and finish on the evening of 7 May. Reserve these dates in your diary now.

Eurobachelor

Terry Mitchell, Dortmund, Germany (E.U.)

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Report on Eurobachelor Activities

Received: October 28, 2004

We had known unofficially for a while that our SOCRATES application would be funded, and in September we received a letter from the Commission telling us that this was the case. But we still have no contract (and thus of course no money yet…).

Nevertheless, work is well in progress. Thanks to Raffaella Pagani, the Label Committee was able to meet on September 3^rd in the ACAP office in Madrid. We were very productive, and went through the key documents (Eurobachelor, Guidelines for Applications, Contract) in order to have them ready for the Administrative Council (AC) meeting in Köln at the beginning of October.

The AC gave the Label Committee the green light to "open for business", so applications are now possible!

The SOCRATES project runs until December 2005, so in order to take advantage of the financing of site visits which the project offers applications need to be in by 30th September 2005 AT THE VERY LATEST. And applications received before April 1^st will be subject to a reduced fee.

The website www.eurobachelor.net is up and running, though it may still need a little modification. Please visit it and tell Pascal and me what we still need to do!

And most important: please publicise the label in your countries so that we get plenty of applications. Paolo Todesco gave me the opportunity to do this, together with Gino Paolucci and Antonio Laganà, at a meeting of chemistry heads of departments, which he organised in Bologna in mid-October.

Perhaps you can organise such a meeting in your country and ask someone from the Label Committee to come and give a talk. Or of course give the talk yourselves.

EChemTest

Pascal Mimero, ESCPE Lyon, France (E.U.)

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General information

The EChemTest Management Committee meeting held in Köln on October 8th was successfull - thank you to all attendees, thank you to Hagga for hosting the meeting and thank you to Anja for the organization.

The first part of the meeting (with Group Leaders and IT's), was dedicated to the progress status, the second phase of the beta test, the official launch in Thessaloniki and actions to be undertaken till May 2005. The second part of the meeting  (IT experts) was oriented to the technical aspects of the tests.

Things are moving ahead since the decisions made in Toulouse. EChemTest is developing the different products and the online services. After a peak of activity in May-June following Toulouse, of course the number of hits was rather low in July and August, except a special mention to Juan Renuncio who has cumulated the highest number of hits in the same period while checking the Physical Chemistry database. All demos or training tests are available online after free registration. And we are still running the beta testing on the certification databases, tracking bugs, mispellings, etc ... the technical review is in progress. The translation process is slowing-down mainly due to technical adjustment procedure related to the translation and the encoding phase for the Internet delivery.

Read the full report here.

INFO: We are still seeking volunteers in each field of the EChemTest to join our working groups. If you are interested in joining us, please contact directly the group leaders via the EChemTest website at www.echemtest.net.

To all EChemTest surfers:
After registering, please update your link and use now the following access: http://echemtest.unipg.it . Thank you.

EChemTest open sessions and conferences

At 4 international conferences:

• 17th BCCE (Ames IA, USA),
• 17th ICCE (Istanbul, TR),
• 7th ECRICE (Ljubljana, SLO) and
• 13th EuroAnalysis (Salamanca, ES).

and for a limited period of time – 15 days in general – we freely opened all English demo/training tests, as well as GeneChem 1&2 in German, OrgaChem3 in French and PhysChem3 in Italian.

Special: As I couldn't attend the BCCE conference, I also would like to thank you very much Bill who kindly accepted to disseminate to the audience in which my paper was scheduled, the information related to the Test online access : thanks to him we reached 54 hits!

The global results are shown here.

EChemTest Developement

EChemTest translations and released version online: Synthetic update on current EChemTest translations and services online since Köln:

Tests	Demo / Training		Certification Databases
	online (free access)	currently in progress	online (Beta testing)	currently in progress
General Ch. 1
General Ch. 2
Analytical Ch. 3
Inorganic Ch. 3
Organic Ch. 3
Physical Ch. 3

 

ECTN Working Group Reports

Contributions

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 Newly Appointed University Chemistry Teaching Staff

Received from: Paul Yates, Keele UK (E.U.) - October 29, 2004

The working group has now met twice. We were asked initially to look at the feasibility of holding a European summer school for newly appointed chemistry teaching staff. We concluded that it was feasible as long as funding was available, and that much of the expertise required for its successful delivery was available within the ECTN working groups.

Subsequently we have drawn up more detailed plans for the summer school. The working group recommends that it should include sessions on:

• Laboratory courses
• European developments in chemical education
• Portfolios and accreditation
• Context and problem based learning
• Diversity issues
• The role of the teacher
• European bodies and funding opportunities
• Presentation skills
• Assessment and evaluation
• Online resources
• Industrial placements
• Employability
• The image of chemistry
• Networking

It was felt that the ideal time for the meeting would be June 2005, with approximately thirty participants and ten contributors. It will last for 6 days.

The latest development is that the summer school has been funded as part of the ECTN activities for 2004-2005. We are now looking for volunteers to contribute to one (or preferably more!) of the above sessions.
Please e-mail if you would like more information.

We are also currently considering venues for the summer school. If you would be interesting in hosting the event please contact me on that e-mail address.

Papers & News

Contributions

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Practical Laboratory Chemistry

Received from: Ad Oskam, Anwerpen NL (E.U.) - Augst 19, 2004

In Amsterdam we produced the Dutch translation for one of the CD-ROM, of Tony Rest from Southampton. In cooperation with Daniel Cabrol-Bass from Nice who produced the French version we made this CD-ROM sponsored by ICI. This CD-ROM will be sent to all the schools in the Netherlands where CHEMISTRY is in the curriculum: all secundary and teriary schools in chemistry. As an attachment you will find the flyer in English. As soon as possible I also will send you the flyer of the Dutch version.

Download the Flyer (Acrobat PDF / 223 Kb)

European Award for Languages

Received from: Lida Schoen, IUPAC Delegates, Amsterdam NL (E.U.) - September 28, 2004

Dear colleagues,
Attached you will find the official press release about Science across the World receiving the European Award for languages.
We are thrilled!

Download the Press Release (Acrobat PDF / 154 Kb)

Web and Grid Services for/from MetaLaboratories

Received from: Antonio Lagana, Perugia IT (E.U.) - October 19, 2004

The development of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) has made it possible to offer services that can be produced only by gathering together in a virtual organization the necessary infrastructures and competences. This is already a reality for the production of a wide range of commodities and services. In Europe, such a trend has been channelled into ...

Download the full Article (Acrobat PDF / 71 Kb)

Conferences Announcements

Contributions and NewsLetter Editor

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European Variety in Chemistry Education 2005

Received from: Iwona Maciejowska, Cracow PL (E.U.) - October 28, 2004

Invitation to the conference European Variety in Chemistry Education

Dear Sirs,

The Scientific Committee, Faculty of Chemistry Jagiellonian University, Polish Chemical Society, Royal Society of Chemistry, Eurpean Chemistry Thematic Network have the pleasure of inviting you to participate to the conference European Variety in Chemistry Education. The Conference will be held in Krakow, Poland from July 5 to July 7, 2005.

The conference, which is a European counterpart of the UK conference "Variety in Chemistry Education", is devoted to practical aspects of chemical education at tertiary (university) level. It provides a forum for the exchange of ideas related to teaching and learning chemistry at degree level, the sharing of good practice and innovation, and the dissemination of outcomes of pedagogic research as it relates to chemistry at university level in Europe.

As an attachment please find 1st circular (Acrobat PDF / 118 Kb) and a Poster (JPG / 782 Kb).

For more details on The European Variety in Chemistry Education conference contact:

Dr. Iwona Maciejowska
Faculty of Chemistry JU, 30-060 Krakow, Ingardena 3,
tel. +48/12/6632066, fax +48/12/6340515, e-mail:

or look at the conference website: www.chemia.uj.edu.pl/eurovariety

With my best regards,

Iwona Maciejowska

IUPAC 2005, Innovation in Chemistry

• When: August 14-19, 2005
• Where: Beijing, China
• Online: http://www.ccs.ac.cn/IUPAC2005.htm 
• Download: 1st Circular (Acrobat PDF / 311 Kb)

EuroChem2005, the SFC Congress

• When: August 28 - September 1, 2005
• Where: Nancy, France
• Online: http://www.sfc.fr

AC&CA 2005 - Analytical Chemistry & Chemical Analysis

• When: September 12-18, 2005
• Where: Kiev, Ukraina
• Contact: e-mail (registration) Mrs. Lyudmila Kostenko 
• Online: http://www.achem.unv.kiev.ua/conference/babko/index.htm
• Download: 1st Circular (Acrobat PDF / 334 Kb)

In brief ...

Contributions

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Articles recently published or in press

Europe Goes Bachelor !
Terry Mitchell, Chemistry International, 2004, 26(5)

Europe Seeks to Standardize Degrees - Universities Introduce Eurobachelor to Promote Compatibility Between Chemistry Programs.
Celia M. Henry, Chemistry & Engineering News, 2004, 82(38), 66-67

European Chemistry in the European Higher Education Area
Proceedings of the EuroCurriculum Second Edition Symposium of the 13th EuroAnalysis held in Salamanca, Spain, September 5-10, 2004
Reiner Salzer, Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry, in press
Containing the following 4 contributions:

• Tunning Educational Structures in Europe, Terry Mitchell

• EChemTest: The European Solution for Electronic Testing in Chemistry, Pascal Mimero

• Quality Assurance is the Goal, Report of the Bologna Seminar "Chemistry Studies in the European Higher Education Area", Dresden, June 4-45, 2004

• The Teaching-Learning Process in the New European Area of Higher Education, M. Valcarcel

What's coming next ?

NewsLetter Editor

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December 2004

Reports of the Working Groups:

• "Biological Chemistry", Arne van der Gen (Leiden, NL)
• "Image of Chemistry", Hans-Guenther Schmalz (Köln, DE)
• "Links with School", Ingo Eilks (Dortmund, DE)
• "Rare Knowledge in Chemistry", Juan Renuncio (Madrid, ES)

February 2005

Reports of the Working Groups:

• "Chemistry and Cultural Heritage", Evangelia Varella (Thessaloniki, GR)
• "Links with School", Ingo Eilks (Dortmund, DE)
• "Multimedia", Antonio Lagana (Perugia, FR)
• "Newly Appointed teaching staff", Paul Yates (Keele, UK)
• "Tuning II / III", Terry Mitchell (Dortmund, DE)

... and you permanent bimonthly reports on "Eurobachelor" and "EChemTest"