Week 1 -- Childhood Memory Assignment Course home | Weekly schedule | Announcements | Instructor Info | Desire2Learn | MasteringBiology® | 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!). In your post, you must include at least two active hyperlinks, and please set them to open in new windows/tabs.

To insert a link in a D2L discussion forum, follow these instructions:

• Click on the "Start a New Thread" button in the upper left corner; a window will appear with two tabs.
• Click on the right "advanced" tab.
• Insert a link by clicking on the button in the toolbar that has a chain link on it
• This button opens a new window (see the screenshots below) where you should click "Url."
• Insert the web address in the Url field, and the word you want hyperlinked in the "Title" field.
• For the "Target" option, select "New Window." This will launch a brand-new browser tab or window when your reader clicks on your link, so they can get back to the discussion board easier.

It may be easier to do all of this if you keep D2L open in one web browser window, and open another browser tab (or window) where you go to the website you want to link to, so you have the address handy. Make sure you check your links after you publish your post so that you can be sure your links are functioning! If you need to correct a mistake, just click on the "Edit" link above your post.

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 the Discussion board in Desire2Learn.

Part 2:

Substantively respond to the Childhood Memory 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 "Discussions" link at the top. Read your classmate's post, then click on "Reply" to type your response.
• 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 memory and responded to two other students, declare your work by taking the gradebook Declaration quiz for this assignment in the "Declarations" 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. © 2004-2015. biology1003 at OU dot edu (at = @, dot =.) Last Updated August 5, 2014 11:02 PM