General Information:
English courses at Gustavus Adolphus College used to meet four times a week. (Note, First Term Seminars taught by members of the English Department still do!) That policy was in line with the Faculty's decision to substitute a shorter semester of fourteeen for the traditional term of seventeen weeks. When the English Department voted to reduce the number of weekly meetings to three, a significant amount of discussion time was sacrificed each week. In order to re-expand in scope the discussion component of my courses, while at the same time making it more student-initiated, I have instituted a Required Question/Observation Component, which will exploit the facts that (a) all members of the Gustavus community have free e-mail privileges on our "wired" Campus, and that (b) Academic Computing is once again setting up e-mail group addresses for all Gustavus classes. By using the appropriate class list e-mail group address, you should be able to sent a message to every member of your class. Since instructors are not automatically included, I have asked to have my e-mail address added to the list for each of my classes. The system is quite straightforward: "f-english-15" (ignore quotation marks) will address a message to all members enrolled in English 15for fall semester, while "f-english-82" does the trick for English 82. Hence, you would be correct in assuming that the group addresses for all courses in the spring start with an "s": e.g., "s-english-05b" for my section b of Masterworks. J-Term course group names begin with "jt", to be sure. FYI: the "f-" always distinguishes fall semester courses from spring semester offerings, etc.; the rest should require no explanation, except for the lower-case "e", which reflects the egalitarian values of Unix, of course.. Since all First Term Seminars share that designation, group e-mail addresses have to utilize a different pattern; e.g., my FTS class requires "f-first-term-sem-claus-buechmann" (sans quotation marks)
Specific Requirements & Significance for Your Semester Grade:
My expectation is that every member of a class will post at least one--but not more than three--comments or questions dealing with the day's reading assignment(s) at least two hours before that day's meeting time. To make that possible, my first class of the day meets at 10:30 AM, except for JT, when Heraldry starts at 9:00. That way I and your peers will be able to come to class aware of what others are struggling with, have found especially important or wish to contextualize for some explained reason, or--simply--want to praise or reject on specified grounds. In other words, I expect to find our attention drawn to a difficult passage somebody wishes to focus on in class; or to an issue of setting and times not taken care of by the introductions, where we might jointly establish the relevant "context"; or offer observations aimed at making us understand the material better. Of course, all of this will require time, thought, and discipline on everybody's part. A "forum" is a public space: remember everybody who is a member of a given class will be able to see your posts. Private/personal matters should be brought to my attention in a conference in my office, if you want to receive my sympathy and/or advice.
In addition, you are expected to collect and store all postings, using them as additional material to rely on when tackling subsequent assignments or studying for an examination. I shall review your posts for inclusion in examination questions. Your Mac Internet Disk, I understand, has plenty of free storage capacity. (--Telnet services are not adequate to meet my expectations.--) However, I think creating a special E-Forum disk is even better: simply copy the Internet Disk Application Aliases (for Eudora, etc) to the new floppy and use it exclusively for E-Forum work, instead. Also, you may possibly wish to transfer all postings to text files. The Mac's "Copy (to Clipboard)," before "Pasting" (the stuff into an open Text File), [using Simple Text may be the optimal solution: you can copy that tiny text editor to your floppy, if you wish); if you do e-mail from a different platform, resort to a corresponding strategy. Considerate internet users will also want to compose their more substantial postings in a text editor before pasting them into a Eudora e-mail message window!
Please realize, this approach, which has become possible due to the electronic revolution that is transforming education and has already redefined our future beyond the groves of academe, empowers you, the students, in a novel and exciting way: you will be able to define what goes on in class in an unprecedented manner. So, let's take advantage of this novel approach to collaborative learning, especially, since this venture is bound to prepare you better for the future as well .
The quality of your participation in the required E-Forum Component will be reflected in Ten Percent of Your Semester Grade which have been set aside for this venture: you may earn anywhere from 0 to 10 points for your participation in E-Forum; the other 90% come from other components of the course. You can check out the detrail by clicking for English courses here , or my FTS here
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