About NucWik
Everybody is welcome to use this wiki, but it's primarily aimed at teaching at Universities. At NucWik you will find ready made texts, explanations, illustrations, calculation exercises, laboratory exercises, etc. to help you in teaching Nuclear and Radiochemistry (NRC). As it is a wiki, we also hope that you will help us to develop even more and better material!
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 contribute, the usefulness and quality of NucWik depend on as many people as possible contribute - help yourself and us to enhance the quality of our teaching!
NucWik was created as part of the CINCH EU-project for evaluating and planing nuclear and radiochemistry teaching in Europe. Please refer to the CINCH web-pages at: http://cinch-project.eu/index.php for details about this project.
NucWik was created at the University of Oslo (UiO) by Jon Petter Omtvedt as part of the CINCH EU-project to enhance teaching and training in Nuclear and Radiochemistry. It started as a prototype on the UiO wiki-server but was later moved to a commercial wiki server targeting teaching: wikispace.com. Unfortunatly this site is shutting down on 31st July 2018.
How to use NucWik
NucWik 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 video-snippets can be put on NucWik - provided there is no copyright restrictions. It should be clearly understood that by entering material on NucWik you agree to let other people use your material - for non commercial/no profit purposes1. 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 NucWik and the rightful owners notified about the violation.
Material on NucWik is not restricted to just single files. On the contrary, one of the ideas behind NucWik 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 explaining the theory, step-by-step student instructions, instructions for the teaching staff, safety aspects, etc., etc.
NucWik is meant to be much more than just a database of teaching material, though! The purpose of NucWik 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.
We provide courses on suggested ways to use NucWik. You can find the course content and assosiated teaching material on our NucWik Training Course for Teachers page.
Example
For example, assume that teachers at three different universities 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 divide 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 explaining 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 NucWik!
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 NucWik 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 NucWik 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. Maybe 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 happen! 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 NucWik an get immediate benefits right now! You might even find that the satisfaction of developing something together in a team, which immediately 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 NucWik!
You might even want to consider to let your students input material to NucWik, 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 rewarding 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).
We have a FAQ page that provide additional help and explanations.
Enjoy!
Yours Sincerely,
Jon Petter Omtvedt (Prof. at Univ. of Oslo)
1 If you want to use material from NukWik commercially, please contact the original author/artist to agree on the conditions for use.