EXERCISES AND IDEAS FOR ACTIVELY INVOLVING UNDERGRADUATES IN ECOLOGY CLASSES

EDITORS

Jim Ebersole (1) and Mike Farris (2)

(1) Department of Biology, Colorado College, Colorado Springs, CO 80903

Email: ebersole@cc.colorado.edu

(2) Department of Biology, Hamline University, 1536 Hewitt Ave., St. Paul, MN 55104-1284

Email: mfarris@hamline.edu

WHAT IS IN THIS FILE

BIOLAB POSTING NOTE

This note has been added to the original file to explain the manner of preparation for posting these files on the BIOLAB WWWeb site. For purposes of making each of these exercises browseable, and so that users may obtain individual exercises, each entry has been extracted as a separate file linked to the Table of Contents that follows. In a few instances, minor changes in format have been made to accommodate hypertext formating. The entire original file of workshop exercises can be obtained as either an ascii file (esawkshp.txt) or the original ZIP file posted on Internet (esawkshp.zip). These may be otained by accessing the file directory. If using Netscape, use your mouse to highlight this file name, hit backspace to erase the file, then hit enter. Select the file from the directory and from your File Menu, select Save. Give a drive\directory path\newfilename (optional); click OK.

A plain text file exists for each hypertext file. To obtain a version without the hypertext tags (to make reformatting on your word processor easier), follow the instructions above. For example, if you are viewing labfile.htm, highlight the file name, hit backspace, then enter. Select labfile.ans from the directory. Save as above. The .ans file type is a plain text file with formating retained (sort of).

J.E.(Joe) Armstrong, BIOLAB WWWeb site moderator

OVERVIEW

This file contains ideas and exercises for actively involving students in undergraduate ecology classes. By active involvement we mean a learning experience that requires students to think originally, to solve problems, to synthesize, to evaluate arguments, or to be creative.

This compilation developed from a workshop in Madison, WI in July 1993 that was led by Jim Ebersole and Mike Farris and sponsored by the Ecological Society of America's Education Section. The bulk of this file consists of ideas and exercises contributed by people after the workshop. In addition, a summary of ideas from group discussions at the workshop is included here. We gratefully acknowledge the ideas of all participants of the workshop and especially those who contributed ideas and exercises to this compilation.

We see this document as a changing, expanding list of ideas and exercises for achieving the goal of actively involving students in their educations. We invite your feedback on its usefulness and how to improve the effectiveness of this compilation. We also invite you to contribute your own exercises and approaches for actively involving students, as we expect to update this file periodically. Send contributions to Jim Ebersole at the above Internet address. Straight ascii files are preferred over encoded BinHex files. If you must send BinHex files, please encode Mac text files rather than word-processing files. In all contributions use simple paragraph formatting rather than hanging indents, etc., avoid special characters, and use 1" margins.

FAIR USE OF THIS MATERIAL

Authors have freely contributed this material to improve teaching of ecology. Please acknowledge the author and source if you use or modify this material for any purpose. This material is for free distribution and should not be used in original or modified form for any commercial purpose.

SHOULD WE INCREASE THE AMOUNT OF ECOLOGICAL TEACHING MATERIALS AVAILABLE OVER INTERNET ? FEEDBACK REQUESTED.

Over the past few months there have been several requests for teaching materials on the listserv run by ESA (Ecolog-l). We would like to determine how much interest there is in making teaching materials available over Internet. Please respond to Jim Ebersole (jebersole@cc.colorado.edu) with your responses to the following questions:

1. Would you contribute material to such a compilation?

2. Would you look at material available over Internet to see if it would be useful to you?

3. What aspects would you like to see covered? Requests on Ecolog-l have been for the following: (please respond yes/no on whether you are interested in having these available)

4. For which courses are you interested?

5. Is the approach of the current compilation useful to you? How could it be improved? E.g. We have a mixture of complete exercises ready to hand to students, exercises with some explanatory material deleted to save space, and brief descriptions of some ideas. Is the mixture OK or should we move toward a particular style of presentation?

BIOLAB Moderator's note: In a cooperative agreement with ESA, all teaching materials compiled at workshops and meetings may be posted on this Internet site. Other societies and groups are welcome to contribute and share in a similar manner.

*****************TABLE OF CONTENTS*****************

  • SUMMARY OF GROUP DISCUSSIONS AT THE MADISON WORKSHOP

    CLASSROOM ACTIVITIES
    LABORATORY ACTIVITIES
    FIELD ACTIVITIES
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