By Peter v. Sengbusch and Alice Bergfeld

About a year ago, we produced a CD-ROM for the members of the XVI International Botanical Congress.. For this purpose we invited a number of authors of outstanding scientific web-projects to allow us to present their projects together with our own project Botany-online, a large web-project on General Botany, under the title 'Teaching goes Internet' on CD-ROM (see: (http://www.rrz.uni-hamburg.de/biologie/b_online/ibc99/welcome.htm). This year, we have ourselves been invited by PKAL present a workshop on the Internet as a means of teaching natural sciences, especially plant biology and biochemistry.

During preparation, we began to build the 'Internet Library - Teaching Botany and Related Topics'. (http://www.rrz.uni-hamburg.de/biologie/b_online/library/catalog.htm) It will hopefully evolve to a permanent and ever growing source of knowledge providing students and teachers with useful information on plant biology. Just like books in a conventional library the projects are placed on 'bookshelves' according to their topic. They cover not only almost every topic of plant biology, but do also present a wide array of techniques for the presentation of botanical knowledge. Besides, we have started to collect reports of teachers working with the Internet. Please, contact us ( b-online@botanik.uni-hamburg.de or alice.bergfeld@berlin.de ), if you are either the author of a web-project you consider suitable for this workshop, and / or have experiences with the Internet as a medium for teaching. We, too, are glad to receive your recommendation of somebody else’s project(s).