We will meet today for an orientation to the class at 8:00 a.m.
This is the beginning of the spring semester. Each week of this semester, the This Week's Work page will be linked to the Syllabus calendar. Beginning next week (the day after tomorrow), you will reach the This Week's Work page by clicking on Monday's date. The only exceptions will be the two Monday holidays: January 19, Martin Luther King Day, and February 16, Washington's Day. Because of the holidays those weeks' pages will appear on Tuesday. The This Week's Work page for each week, not the calendar, is the real syllabus for the course. Read it completely, start to finish, each week. If you fail you read this page you may miss vital information that you will need to succeed in the course. Your first weekly e-mail update will be due on Monday, the day after tomorrow. After today, your weekly e-mail update will be due each Monday for the remainder of the semester, with the exception of Monday holidays, when it will be due on Tuesday.
At today's meeting, we will form editorial groups and get to know each other a little bit. This will be the only time we are all scheduled to meet face-to-face, so it is important that we all be there, if possible. We will be collaborating with one another for the rest of the semester, and that will be much easier if we meet first. We will also be covering quite a bit of introductory material about the class. Those of you who are officially registered will post your initial home page on the Pluto server. We will refer to the FTP Instructions to do this. If you cannot attend this orientation session but hope to participate in the class, you need to have contacted me before today (Saturday) and made other arrangements. If you don't show up and have not contacted me previously, you will be dropped from the class.
The following list of assignments tells you what to do to get started. Please complete the following reading and writing by Monday morning. In this case, all of the reading you are assigned to do before Monday is on-line from our class Web page. Just click on each assignment and you will go to the assigned reading. To return to this page, use the Back button in your browser.
Register for your Web page on the Pluto server, if you haven't already done so:
Go to the Pluto page. Click the top link, Pluto Account Request Form, and follow the instructions. If you have questions about Pluto in the future you may want to refer to the Account Information or Technical Information links on this page.
Complete the following reading by Tuesday:
1. Brief Overview of the Course
2. Introduction to All the Rest
3. The Rest of the Introduction
7. Books
9. DIH: 1.1 What Is an Essay?
10. DIH: 1.2 How to Get Started
11. DIH: 1.3 Choosing a Topic
Complete the following writing by Tuesday:
1. The Student Questionnaire and the Learning Inventory. (Notice that those two titles are links. To go to the on-line forms, just click on the links.) If you have questions about either of these forms, please send me e-mail. I think that both are fairly self-explanatory. They are Web forms; you fill in the information and click Submit and that information is automatically sent to me. After you have submitted the form, you should receive a confirmation page that gives you a copy of your responses. If you receive a confirmation page, that means that you have successfully submitted the form. You should have no problem completing the questionnaire at one sitting. The Learning Inventory will take a little longer to complete. Please give some thought to your answers. If you want to save your work and return to it later, you should type your answers in your word processor and save them, then paste them into the form when you are finished. If you close the form without submitting it or click Reset, you will lose your answers. Save the conformation page on your computer or print it out. If you submit the form and do not receive a confirmation page, something is wrong; let me know.
2. E-mail response to the question at the end of Introduction to All the Rest.
3. Your personal introduction. Write a brief introduction to yourself, just to give the rest of us an idea of who you are, how you spend your time, and what your interests are. You will save it in Blackboard. See the Directions for Blackboard for how to do this.
4. Your first Weekly E-mail Update is due by the end of the day next Monday. Read the instructions for the update. It is an e-mail, usually brief, that you will send to me by the end of the day each Monday of the semester. This one will probably be very brief. Keep in mind that you need to send me an e-mail update each week even if you have no questions and are completely caught up.
Looking Ahead: Reading for next week:
Next week (after Saturday's orientation) we will read first section of the Thinking Workshop, Thinking About Being a Student, by Monday. I will post discussion questions on Monday in Blackboard. Feel free to send me e-mail with your questions about this material.
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Discovering Ideas
Palomar College
jtagg@palomar.edu
This page was last edited:
01/14/09