From the Desk of the Editor:
The Results Are In!

Mariëlle Hoefnagels, Labstracts Editor
University of Oklahoma
hoefnagels@ou.edu

If this seems like an extra-long Labstracts, you are correct. The seeds we scattered during the 2004 meeting in June yielded a rich harvest of authors by fall -- thanks to all of you who contributed. And we have even more new authors lined up for the Winter 2005 edition!

For those of you who missed the annual meeting, we conducted a very brief survey about Labstracts readership and what you all, as ABLE members, want from this newsletter. Here are a few of the results:

Question: Do you receive the email announcing the availability of each issue of Labstracts?

Responses:

Question: If you answered yes (to receiving email), do you go and view the latest issue of Labstracts?

Responses:

Question: How satisfied are you with the current features of Labstracts?

Responses:

Question: What improvements would make Labstracts more useful to you?

Selected Responses:

• About the format
  • I still like the hard copy to read at my leisure.
  • pdf format. I find html format difficult.
• About the content
  • Shorten the articles, font size. Articles are too long, sometimes boring.
  • Keep it short.
  • Make it longer! Encourage more people to submit, since this "give and take" is one of the best features of ABLE.
  • More informative articles rather than ABLE business.
  • More teaching tips & ideas.
• Specific ideas for new features
  • More mini-proceedings type articles. Short presentations of a useful technique or activity.
  • I like featured labs, reviewed websites (maybe highlight 3-5 sites per issue -- "reviewed" & annotated links from ABLE site-- e.g. annotated list, sci. ed. grants info.)
  • What would be highly useful is one article per issue on assessment method for a particular lab, course, or program, with precise details on how it is done, implemented, and what the author learned from doing it and any changes made in lab, course, program as a result.
  • Can we make a question column? Issues come up during the year that we do not want to wait to the meetings to get feedback on. People could send in questions and get feedback via email.
  • A swap/request column. If someone needs a lab method or item, or is wanting feedback about a question or problem, they can post a request to the general membership before the annual meeting.
  • What about including the poster sessions in Labstracts?

I also received several offers to write articles. Thank you so much to Carol Budd, Miriam Ferzli, Dan Johnson, Ann Lumsden, Jean Hancock, Charlotte Omoto, Ruthanne Pitkin, and Kathy Winnett-Murray for your contributions to this issue. They wrote articles in response to many of the specific ideas you can see above, including a review of a mini-workshop, a book review, and a website review. You will also find articles about two tools students can use in writing lab reports (Turnitin.com and LabWrite), an article on student lab notebooks, and a tip for using the time-honored "unknown" in lab. You can expect to see more new authors in the Winter 2005 issue.

To address two of the other specific ideas listed above, I am all in favor of a "questions" and "swap" column. But I can't implement those by myself! If you send me your questions and requests, though, I'll see what I can do about matching questions with answers.

So, what's next? I need your feedback. Do the ideas listed above strike you as good? Bad? Did you come up with any ideas of your own for articles you'd like to see or write? I'm all ears! (On second thought, in this email era, perhaps I'm "all eyes.") Please drop me a line at hoefnagels@ou.edu.

Enjoy the fall!