The following seven posts on this site will be written by students in Grinnell's BIO 305 course ("Evolution of the Iowa Flora.") My assignment prompt follows.
"Blog posts, podcasts (and presumably other two-syllable, internet-facilitated
neologisms) are increasingly common ways to communicate science to the public.
The creators of such pieces sometimes highlight the findings of a particular
article, explaining the research and its relevance in terms that interested
on-specialists can understand. That’s what I’m asking you to do.
Assignment. Compose
a 3-4 page (double-spaced) essay that informs a scientifically literate lay
audience about a research article on the
history of the Iowa flora. You may use a conventional word processor like
Word to prepare your post, but we will eventually edit it and convert it for
web-delivery.
In this 'history' unit of the course we will read and
discuss a series of articles that provide entry points into the literature on
historical studies of the Iowa flora. In your blog posts, you will communicate
other articles—selected from a set I’ve assembled, or discovered on your own."
My students (see their smiling faces above, as they pose with Opuntia humifusa at the Eddyville Dunes; from left they are Meg Schmitt, Elena Jaffer, Adele Crane, Carissa Shoemaker, Anthony Wenndt, John Seng, and Dan Connelly) selected seven articles about paleoecology or restoration ecology. Some of the articles are recent; some aren't so recent. All of them reveal something worth sharing about Iowa's natural (or unnatural, or used-to-be-natural-or-is-now-extinct-or-somewhere-in-Canada) vegetation.
No comments:
Post a Comment