Nelson 1
Annotated Bibliography
Burnett, Joseph. "Late Nite Labs." Message to Courtney Nelson. 23 Sep. 2011. E-mail.
Joe Burnett sent a link to Late Nite Labs which is a simulator for online labs such as chemistry
and biology labs. I was able to do the demo to get my own experience of how a virtual lab
operates.
Burnett, Joseph. Personal Interview by Courtney Nelson. 23 Sep 2011.
Joe Burnett is an instructor and undergraduate laboratory associate in the areas of instrumental
analysis, quantitative analysis, and physical chemistry at Iowa State University. In this interview,
I asked Dr. Burnett for his opinion on the use of virtual science labs. Dr. Burnett believes that it
“doesn’t give important experience…like spillage or mistakes. You lose understanding of
importance of laboratory safety and sthe uncertainty in measurements.”
Dalgarno, Barney, Andrea G. Bishop, William Adlong, and Danny R. Bedgood Jr.
"Effectiveness of a Virtual Laboratory as a preparatory resource for Distance
Education chemistry students." 53.3 Nov 2009. 853-865. SciVerse: ScienceDirect.
Web. 15 Sep 2011.
<http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036013150900116X>.
In this study, there was an experiment about the effectiveness of a Virtual Laboratory. It gives
“two studies designed to evaluate a three-dimensional (3D) simulated virtual environment called
the Virtual Chemistry Laboratory as a tool to prepare distance university chemistry students for
their on-campus laboratory sessions.”
Dillon, Sam. "No Test Tubes? Debate on Virtual Science Classes." New York Times20
Oct 2006. n. pag. Web. 15 Sep. 2011.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/20/education/20online.html>.
In this article from the New York Times, the writer Sam Dillon talks about the debate on virtual
science classes. It starts by telling how a chemistry professor took pictures of test tubes
containing different solutions and then “created a simulated laboratory that allowed students to
mix chemicals in virtual beakers and watch the reactions.” It also talks about other points of
views about the use of the virtual labs.
"Examples of Online Activities that Achieve America's Lab Report Science
Goals." Smart Science Education. Paracomp, Inc., 2005. Web. 25 Sep 2011.
<http://www.smartscience.net/SmartScience/SmartScienceGoals.html>.
This article is from the Smart Science Education website. Smart Science Education is one of the
top most used virtual lab software companies. According to the website, “The Smart Science
inventors are the first to achieve this goal with a scalable, inexpensive solution that dramatically
improves test scores: Smart Science online lab units.”