Course Outline
This is a dynamic document. Any printed copy may be obsolete. Check the online version regularly.
Webfolio
This is ultimate product of the course and the arena for you to demonstrate your mastery of the material. Assume that you are writing a book ( for lack of a better term) with eight chapters with an Introduction and Concluding chapter. Your goal is to infuse that book with the knowledge you acquired while traveling through cyberspace. Since we are using the web as our publishing medium, you have infinite access to the revision and the restructuring process. Thus, your book (Webfolio) is never final until the last day of class (December 19, 2003). It is a project in process throughout the semester. This allows you ample opportunity to fall flat on your face and pick yourself back up again. Your goal is to make sure the book (Webfolio) reflects what you have learned about survival, technology, web page design, research, collaboration, process and the connections you have made. Let's call it learning through experience.
The final chapter, Connections, pulls it all together. By this juncture, you've connected all the dots on the page; you tie it all together with your conclusions. The structure, sequence and content of the individual chapters are determined by you and should reflect a point of view uniquely yours.
While the chapter content is yours to determine, I will insist on quality. Superficial schlock will simply not fly.
A Community
In order to compensate for our lack of face-to-face meetings and to improve our sense of community, every registered student will submit to me, via e-mail, a brief introduction or bio prior to the first day of class. In the intro or short bio you can: tell us about yourself, explain why you are taking this course, detail your interests- anything that gives us a picture of you. Speaking of pictures, if you have one, send that along as well, either digitally as an attachment to e-mail or by snail mail ( Gerry O'Connor, English, Suffoflk County Community College, Selden, N.Y. 11784.) If it is an actual picture, I can scan it. I will then post this brief bio and picture to the roster page for everyone to see. This process enables us to get a visual / textual picture of our classmates. It improves our sense of community and hopefully reduces some of the isolation often associated with on-line courses.
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is a serious issue that needs addressing, especially in an online course where so much information is available. A rather extensive discussion (Policy Statement) with illustrations re: plagiarism can be found at Augustana College English Department. Another illustration of the problem is laid out in a statement on Plagiarism After reading both of these statements one can no longer plead ignorance.
Final Words - well, never really final
If you put time and energy into this course, it should be very rewarding. Survival Literature represents a blending of several disciplines: critical thinking as expressed in writing and e-mail discussion, rigorous and scientific investigation into the revolutionary impact of survival strategies on mankind.