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The purpose of this assignment is to help you reflect on what you learned over the past week.

You'll need to wait until the other students have had a chance to post their responses before you can do this assignment, which includes responding to your peers' responses to your post. So, the gradebook declaration for Final Thoughts is available between noon on the due date for Freelance Writer assignments and 11:00 p.m. the following day (this deadline is slightly extended for Adopt-a-Species weeks and holidays).

Please do not post any Final Thoughts until well after your classmates and I have had a chance to respond. For Starting Assumptions and Digging Deeper assignments, you must wait until 24 hours after the response deadline has passed to post your Final Thoughts. For Freelance Writer or Adopt-a-Species, it's best if you wait at least until you have two responses to your assignment, if possible.

NOTE: To get full credit for the Final Thoughts assignment, there must be at least one reply to your Starting Assumptions, Digging Deeper, and Freelance Writer/Adopt-a-Species assignments. If you posted your assignment at the last minute, you might not receive a response from a student. You will have to wait until you receive a response from the instructor before you can do that part of the Final Thoughts assignment (feel free to contact your instructor to request this response).

NOTE 2: If you did not complete the Starting Assumptions, Digging Deeper, and/or Freelance Writer/Adopt-a-Species assignments, you may still receive points for Final Thoughts by doing the following: Read through all the posts of other students for the missing assignment(s) and post a substantive summary about what you learned. Obviously you will not be able to summarize all of the posts, but try to identify a common thread that ties the posts together (and perhaps integrates the posts with other ideas you have learned this week).

Instructions:

Respond to the comments other students posted about your Starting Assumptions, Digging Deeper, and Freelance Writer/Adopt-a-Species assignments. In each case, please describe how the comments of other students contributed to your learning experience.

In your answers, please make it clear that you have read the replies that other people have left for you. (I do read the Final Thoughts that people post, and if it seems like you are not reading the replies left by the other students, you will hear from me...). At a minimum this response should be at least 50 words and 50-100 is preferable, and as always, you should spell check and proofread it before you finalize your post.

Here is an excellent example of a Final Thoughts posting:

"Sarah, thank you! I visited New Orleans for my first time this summer and after looking at some of the links we were provided, I decided that I'd focus on this city for our assignment. Katrina could have been a result of Global Warming or a list of other factors. The life lost however, is more a state and local government issue than one of the storm itself. I made the comparison because people always equate that a sinking city is only Venice and that it's worse than any place in the world. I totally agree on not living there permanently! Oceanography really taught me a lot about the Gulf and it really helped me when writing this post. Thank you for reading!" (Courtesy of Nichole, student in fall 2013).

If you are trying to respond to comments from your peers that were not substantive, this is not a get out of jail free pass. Your final thoughts should address any comments your peers made AND reflect what you learned from doing the assignment--they should not simply continue the trend of filler and fluff.

Please post your final thoughts in the same thread as the rest of your post, with the subject line "Final Thoughts."

• Post a final response to your own Starting Assumptions in D2L.
• Post a final response to your own Digging Deeper assignment in D2L.
• Post a final response to your own Freelance Writer assignment in D2L, OR ...
  • If the week included an Adopt-a-Species assignment, post a final response to your own assignment on your D2L forum.
• After you have posted your responses, complete the Gradebook Declaration in D2L. (Your Gradebook Declaration is subject to the Honor Code.)

Contemporary Issues in Biology -- BIOL 1003 Mariëlle H. Hoefnagels, Ph.D. © 2004-2015. biology1003 at OU dot edu (at = @, dot =.) Last Updated August 5, 2014 11:02 PM