Week 1 -- Childhood Memory Assignment Course home | Weekly schedule | Announcements | Instructor Info | Desire2Learn | Honor Code | FAQs | HELP!

Instructions:

For this assignment, write a brief (~250 word) story about any biology-related childhood memory you have about an interaction with any non-human species. The experience may have been positive (swimming with dolphins! new kitten!), negative (poison ivy! dog bite!), or neutral (big trees!).

Use Desire2Learn's built-in spell checker (or one in your word processing software if you're drafting your post there) to spell check your paragraph and do a word count. Proofread it yourself too, because spell checkers don't catch everything.

Click here to see a sample story.

Part 1:

Post your story titled "(your name)'s Childhood Memory" at your blog in Desire2Learn.

To post a blog, login to D2L, click on our course, then click on the "Blog" link at the top navigation bar. You can then click on the "Add Entry" icon/text to receive your title and body input boxes.

Once done with your work, click the "Save" button. ***Be sure the default options of "Make entry public" and "Allow Comments" remain checked.***

If you need to edit your blog post (to fix an error, add something you forgot, or change the settings), click on the little pencil icon next to the title of your blog post.

Part 2:

Respond to the Childhood Memory blog posts of at least two other students. (If you are the first or second person to post, you will have to check back later to complete this part of the assignment).

• To respond to a post, login to D2L, click on our course, then click on the "Blog" link at the top. Click on the "Blog List" icon/text, then search for other students in class using Firstname Lastname (check our D2L Roster to get these). Once you've selected their Childhood Memory blog post, you can click on "Add Comment" to type your response.
• [Now might be a good time to setup your "Blog Watch" (one of the options after clicking on the "Blog" link)--search for each member of the class, click on the box beside his/her name, then click the plus icon. There are lots of "John Smiths" in the system, so you'll pick the one with the most recent post, probably (that is called "Childhood Memory")! This will make it easier to respond to them later in the semester for other blog assignments.]
• Please respond to posts with 0 responses first; once every post has at least one response, you are free to choose any post to respond to. (Since this is week 1, this gives you a chance to browse through your classmates; kind of like seeing everyone the first day of a lecture class.)
• When you respond, please use the name of the student. That is, say "Hi Jessica" or "Hi Paul" so that you can get used to the names of the people in class.
• What constitutes a substantive response? This means that you have read and thought about the original post and that after some reflection you are extending one or more of the thoughts in the original post or offering an additional perspective as you might in a good conversation. It is not enough to say simply "nice job," "I liked that," "I feel the same," "I disagree," etc.
  • It is OK to disagree or agree, but the goal is to thoughtfully add something else interesting and new related to the content of the original post. At a minimum this should be at least 50 words and 50-100 is preferable. Check out this page for more on the topic of good and bad responses.

After you have posted your blog and responded to two other students, declare your work by taking the gradebook declaration Quiz for this assignment in the "Quizzes" section of Desire2Learn. Note that you can declare just your posting, just your two responses, or any combination therein if that's all you've done. You get unlimited chances on these declaration quizzes.

(Your Desire2Learn gradebook declaration is governed by the Honor Code).

Contemporary Issues in Biology -- BIOL 1003 Mariëlle H. Hoefnagels, Ph.D. © 2004-2012. biology1003 at OU dot edu (at = @, dot =.) Last Updated February 28, 2012 2:51 PM