Writing Assignment is now ready!

Your first writing assignment is now ready to go. It is due next Wednesday evening, Feb. 4.

Look in the "Writing assignments" folder in the Webcourses home page. Look for the red apple icon. The full instructions are there and the link is also there through which you'll turn in your paper.

Please talk to Ashton the TA or to me if you have some questions or would like some coaching. It will be our pleasure to guide you along. You can also use the Discussions are for general questions.

Writing assignment 1 nearly ready.

I will be setting up your Writing Assignment 1 later tonight inside Webcourses. For now you can start looking through the readings, double checking vocabulary terms you do not recognize, diagrams and photos etc.

1. "Climate science: The long summer begins,"
   Quirin Schiermeier, Nature 454, 266-269 (2008) | doi:10.1038/454266a
   This is the overview article.
   


2. "What drove the dramatic retreat of arctic sea ice during summer 2007?"
   Zhang, J., Lindsay, R., Steele, M. & Schweiger, A., Geophysical Research Letters 35, L11505 (2008).
   Go to Fig. 4a-4d and its caption, and eyeball these carefully -- because the guts of the assignment will be centered here. Just the figures for now; skip the bulk of the article.

Full instructions, including the writing tasks, will be in Webcourses tonight. I will announce here when the full assignment is ready.

Learning module is activated!

Sorry for the delay -- Webcourses was off the air all last night, until after midnight!

Anyway, your next learning module is now up and ready. There is a concept guide for chapter 4 and a mini-quiz with which to test yourself.

Discussion area for Writing Assignment 1

Our writing assignment 1 is coming up, and you can get a preliminary peek at the kind of things it will require. Take a look in the Discussions area called "Writing Assignments" and read through the blurbs there that our TA Ashton has made up for you.

The actual assignment will be up soon, and I will announce it here first.

Writing Assignments ahead

In the next week or so, our TAs and I will be setting up our activities and objects for Writing Assignment 1. We will get you up to speed with the how-what-where-when information you'll need.

SO.... Keep an eye on Announcements here for developments: discussion areas, rubrics, online journals and so on, plus, eventually, the actual assignment itself.

Next learning module is UP.

The next learning module, concerning Chapter 3, "Explaining Motion," is now ready in Webcourses. It has

1. the chapter 3 concept guide, the main study tool, and
2. the chapter 3 mini-quiz.

Also, I have updated the gradebook so that most of our main pints-earning events are listed.

Widget for Mac users

If you are a Mac user, you have Dashboard Widgets of all kinds. I made a nice one that you can slip into your dashboard and keep a very rapid watch on announcements here. Here is the logic behind it:

1. Announcements is our eyeball on Webcourses. It is cumbersome to log in to the My UCF portal and Webcourses to check for new assignments etc., and Webcourses, lovely though it is, does have reliability issues. Blogspot is never down and it loads rapidly.
2. The widget is your computer eyeball on Announcements. Flick into your dashboard, and this widget tells you if any news is posted here on Announcements. Takes 2 seconds.
3. Bottom line: extremely efficient communication channel

To get the widget, go into the Wbcourses home page and go down the page to the Widgets folder.

Windows users -- sorry, but I am not an expert of Bill Gates technology, so you might be able to get a good widget, but I can't make one for you. The Widgets area in Webcourses has a link for you, if you want to mess around with Konfabulator.

First full week, look at learning module!

There is a new learning module in Webcourses, "Week 2, main work starts now" which can direct your studies for this week. The concept guide is always the center of organizing your learning. The mini-quiz lets you test your comprehension and prepare for my midterm exams, which are quite similar to mini-quizzes. The chapter mini-quiz is a learning tool, but it does not count for points on your semester grade.

We will be proceeding at roughly one chapter per week, so pace yourself now and stay in synchrony with the plan.

I usually add one or two new items during the week, so keep an eye here, on announcements. It might be a reading or a diagram or a new discussion. As soon as I set up something new, or change something significantly in Webcourses, I always follow immediately with an announcement here on the Blogspot.

Reminder: Textbook ordering online

If you have not already ordered your textbook, there are two web links on the home page in Webcourses:

1. iChapters
2. CourseSmart

The nice thing is that you can get electronic versions of the textbook, even one chapter at a time!

Elvis 101

Your practice writing assignment "Elvis 101" is running, and I have even graded a few, 1 bonus point. They should show up in your My Grades page in Webcourses. It is meant to be an easy test-run on the TurnItIn.com software, so you can make up any screwball theory about Elvis, UFOs, two shooters on the grassy knoll, green jello or any other topic.

First day of classes

Here is an alternate method for getting into Webcourses:
Log directly in to Webcourses, not using the UCF Portal

You can always use the MyUCF portal, but I find it propitious to use this alternate entry. Much faster, more reliable.

There is a "First Week To-Do List" in Webcourses, with a small set of study-related activities and a one Elvis-related task for 1 bonus point.

Note: due to delays in Webcourses administration, I did not get a chance to build up the Webcourse before this morning, so I will be putting in parts of the full syllabus and other activities today and Thursday.