David W. Brooks
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Dave Brooks is a Professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He came to Lincoln in 1973 and served in the Chemistry Department until 1984. Today he is in the Department of Teaching, Learning, & Teacher Education where he teaches graduate courses in technology.
His research interests are in applications of technology to teaching. He is most interested in applications in chemistry education, and in Web-delivery of instruction. Very recently he started some work in merging notions about learning, and especially attention, from disparate l iteratures.
Brooks was trained as a biochemist at New York University (with Professor Joseph D. Gettler) and Columbia (with Professor Charles R. Dawson). Prior to coming to Nebraska, he taught at Columbia, the University of Alaska, and Texas A&M University. Brooks turned his attention from chemistry to chemistry education before 1970. After nearly two decades of working with college general chemistry students, he changed direction and began to focus on working with high school chemistry teachers.
Early in his career, Brooks began using multimedia strategies for instruction. About half of his 160+ professional publications deal with technology innovations of one sort or another. His book Web-Teaching, first published by Plenum Press early in 1997, is in its second edition. This book describes strategies for designing interactive instruction for the WWW.
Brooks helped to develop widely used training materials for graduate teaching assistants in chemistry (Project TEACH, 1975). He was an early developer of laser videodisks, and co-authored the first chemistry materials ever that linked desktop computers with videodisk resources (Annenberg, 1984). Brooks with Sheldon Schuster and Dwane Wylie were the first American scientists to develop videodisk training materials for biotechnology (1987). He has authored or co-authored over 10 CD-ROMs for use in chemistry education. He also pioneered the use of video resources for training chemistry students with regard to ethics and values issues (1980).
Brooks developed software that accomplishes nearly all of the chemical bookkeeping calculations that a professional synthetic chemist might use (1994). This software is unique. No matter what substances and numbers a user might enter for computations, the user may choose to receive a very detailed tutoring session about the computation. The tutoring will be based upon the substances and numbers entered by the user. In other words, Brooks' software computes tutoring in the same way that it computes answers to cumbersome routine calculations. A revised version of this software is now available in a course, TEAC/CHEM 69Q.
Brooks' current work is in several areas. For the most part he has been focussing on the development of Web courses for chemistry teachers, and online, repeated, automatic testing. Recently he served as the managing author of a book, The Unified Learning Model.
Brooks lives in Lincoln, Nebraska. His son, Gregory Daniel, is a physician living in Omaha, Nebraska with his spouse Jennifer Racine and sons Benjamin and Ethan. Dan specializes in allergy and immunology.
Ethan & Ben, July, 2010
His daughter, Eileen Lizabeth, was an assistant professor of economics at the University of California - Santa Cruz specializing in international trade until her untimely death from cancer in February 2006.
His spouse, Dr. Helen Brooks, has retired from her business creating tools for chemistry teachers. She maintains their home in Lincoln.
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