The syllabus for Biol 4181, Developmental Biology is now online. Start reading! It looks like I'll have you reading 50-100 pages of Wolpert and Carroll or Zimmer a week.
I want you all to know this is something of a miracle—I usually finish my syllabus the night before the class starts, so I'm very proud of myself for getting it done a whole four days ahead of time. Of course, the reason it's early is that I've got a stack of extra-curricular writing that needs to be done in the next couple of days…
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One of those things we professors have to struggle with every year is textbook decisions. Your standard science textbook is a strange thing: it's a heavily distilled reference work that often boils all of the flavor out of a discipline in order to maximize the presentation of the essentials. What…
They say that, in writing, you should steal from the best. Or, failing that, whoever's convenient. Like, say, John Scalzi.
I made a little headway on the book-in-progress over the weekend, which is nice. The problem is, the words I wrote on Saturday were the first new text generated since Tuesday…
'Twas the week before classes and all through the hall,
the students were scurrying to register for fall.
The syllabi were printed on many colored sheets
and the profs were already tired of needing to meet....
The textbooks lined shelves in neat little rows,
just waiting for students to open, read…
Cricket: chirp.
chirp.
Oh... wait... you're still here? I'm sorry... I forgot to mention that I was taking a short vacation from writing. Well, I didn't mention it, because I didn't really plan for it. In that case, I would have scheduled something ahead of time. Instead, I finished my finals,…
"Sorry, that file isn't here."
Jumping the gun, aren't we?
Hmmm...works fine for me.
"I want you all to know this is something of a miracle."
Ooh, I'm going to keep that one for future quote-mining purposes! ;)
The link isn't working for me, either.
Link broken for me... or did you post a link to an intelligent design lab course by mistake? (tee hee)
A graded class blog... I'm not sure whether that's a work of pedagogical genius or of pure sadism.
Zimmer? Since when is he a scientist?
Refer us to some peer reviewed stuff, please, not fluff.
You need to podcast your lectures, then we can all take the class along!
http://development.pharyngula.org/
is enough to see the syllabus.
I'm still getting a 'Sorry, that file's not here'. :(
Never mind!
Hmmm. It's working reliably for me...but then, the server is right across the street.
The grading on the class blog is very, very generous -- all it takes is a couple of short posts a week to get the full marks. It's more a matter of keeping up with it and having a little discipline to succeed, much like showing up for class is fairly easy to do. Or should be.
Oh, and Mr Bastard: this isn't for you, anyway.
Zimmer is a far better scientist than anyone at the Discovery Institute, so I don't see the problem.
To the mysterioius Mr. Bastard: If it's peer-reviewed stuff you actually crave, turn to the back of my book. You'll find a few hundred items to keep you busy. (And while my book is not a peer reviewed scientific paper by any means, it was carefully fact-check with many scientists.)
To PZ: I hope At the Water's Edge is useful for the class. You may also want to point the students to my blog entries that follow up on the newer research on whales and tetrapods. Just to let them know that science keeps growing even after books leave the printer.
Zimmer you lucky bastard. You get to write about science all day long. Me, I get to write perl code so that it can be localized in hindi. I hate you. Follow up question: do you offer apprenticeships?
To PZ: I hope At the Water's Edge is useful for the class.
How could it not be? That book is awesome.
The webserver on http://development.pharyngula.org is doing something weird. When a local browser connects with an "Accept:" header that includes "text/html" to retrieve the link you gave, the server gives the following response:
$ wget -S --header="Accept: text/html" http://development.pharyngula.org/index/db/comments/2006_syllabus/
However, if the "Accept:" header does not include "text/html", (which is true for wget and a very few other web clients) the page is retrieved normally.
Talk to your local Apache guru about configuration files and such.
Hm... this class sounds like fun. It's neat that I own/have read 1/3 of the textbooks already, and plan on 2/3 eventually. Are the posts written by students right there on development.pharyngula.org? I'm assuming so since it appears past students have written there, but just checking.
I found it! You need to replace "db" with "weblog".
This sounds like my dream course. Reading pop. sci. books, writing on the Internet. I wish you, or someone like you, were my professor; but I get some boring old fart instead.
What work is done in the labs???
The labs are basic embryology, no fancy techniques. I'm mainly concerned with drilling basic rules of documentation and image preparation into them, so they get lots of practice with digital photomicrography and time-lapse imaging, and putting together short summaries of developmental processes. We work with chick, fruit flies, nematodes, and zebrafish (of course!).
I am so envious of your students. I've read "Endless Forms" and "Water's Edge," and they are two of the very best science books I've ever read. Zimmer in particular is astoundingly good at explaining biology. I would love to be able to ask some questions about stuff I didn't quite grasp. I might have to put on a Scanner suit and sneak into your class for "Whales!" Pay no attention to the annoying, ambiguous blur.
Looks good (though it would be above my head to do). It seems, however, that grading students as a percentage of the best student in the class is a recipe for collusion, if the class is sufficiently small. I remember a friend long ago having a high school math class with that policy on exams and the students were tempted to all answer two questions they were absolutely sure of. (I guess this is harder to do for the whole course, though.)
Is 65 minutes the ordianry length for a lecture there?
Very boring question here for you PZ.
Do you really hold to giving absolutely no makeup exams? Or is that just a scare statement to keep the groveling for them to a minimum.
I hate makeup exams, but I've never quite had the gumption to hold firm and not offer any at all.
Good on you if you manage it.
All of the exams are take-home -- it's not a problem at all. If they can't get them to me in a week because they're missing that much class, I can't give them a passing grade.
In courses with in-class exams, I do have a make-up policy. There is one opportunity to take a missed exam: the Monday after the exam (I usually give exams on Fridays) at 7AM. That 7AM time is the scare tactic that really keeps them in line.
Ooh, that's downright diabolical. I like it.
Link isn't working for me, either. Do you discriminate against Macs or Firefox?
Ah, cotournix's link works.
"Endless Forms" is not peer reviewed literature.
Neither are most textbooks. So? They use the primary research literature, and my students will also be reading papers from the research literature.
Maybe "Follower of Cocky Bastare" [sic] should worry less about peer review, and more about proofreading.
7 AM makeup? I'm not sure you'd be allowed to do that at the places I've been a student ... and it sounds mean to the instructor, too. Maybe that's the point. :)
It's not mean to me at all -- I'm up and in the office then every day.
From annelids and mollusks,
And bloody great arthropods,
And godforsaken early risers,
Good Lord, deliver us!