Mclure Hall 307A; 885-6491; dgeist@uidaho.edu

Office Hours: Wed. 8:30-11:30 or by appointment (email or phone)

Course materials will be placed on www.uidaho.edu/~dgeist, which will also have various links to supplemental materials and our course bulletin board.

The best way to get ahold of me is by email or phone. If you don’t have an email account and know how to use it (especially sending and receiving attachments) get one and figure it out right away, because you will be submitting papers electronically, and we will communicate as a class by email and on a web bulletin board. This will include essential logistic information and discussions, so you need to be familiar with the system right away and check your email regularly.

Ocean islands make up a very small part of the earth’s surface, but they are incredibly important natural laboratories for geology and biology. Also, islands have captured the interest of explorers throughout history, and authors have repeatedly used them as metaphors for humans’ isolation (think Robinson Crusoe here). The Nature of Islands is an interdisciplinary course that uses ocean islands to examine basic concepts in volcanology, tectonics, biogeography, and the history of exploration. It is my intention to make the class really participatory, so roll up your sleeves and get ready to ask, discuss, reason, and argue at all levels.

Required readings will come from Volcanoes (Decker and Decker) and The Song of the Dodo (Quammen) and some supplementary stuff. Buy both — they are great books that you would want to read even if you weren’t in this class. I will also be putting some photocopies (writings of Darwin and Wallace; an out of print book by Menard) on reserve at the library.

Everyone needs to buy a copy of the National Geographic map of the world and bring it to class every day unless you won your state’s geography bee.

You are expected to attend and participate in each class. Unexcused absences will be penalized by lowering your grade (see below), as will gross inattention. Email or visit me with a good excuse if you are going to miss class.

My goals for this class are to help you develop skills in:

• Reading and writing skills
• Critical thinking
• Presentation and organization
• Working both individually and in teams

So I have designed a bunch of different means of helping you meet these goals:

I will do my best to keep you informed of your progress throughout the term. My basic scheme is that I consider a C as meaning your work is adequate. An A means your work is exceptional. Don’t be distressed if you are earning a C: if your goal is a higher grade, come and see me to discuss how you can improve your work and crank up the effort. I have no pre-ordained grade distribution planned: I have no problem giving the whole class A’s; in fact, that is my goal. Alternative scenarios are possible, too.

Exams are designed to test your understanding of the course’s content and the issues we have discussed. I’ll design the exams so they emphasize the stuff we cover in class, but I expect basic familiarity of the readings, too.

Every week, we will be doing an activity in class. Some of these will require some ahead-of-time preparation or follow-up, but most will begin and end in class.

In addition, we will be doing one longer-term experiment that simulates island dispersal and colonization using a bag of mixed seeds, flower pots as analogues of islands, and a lot of your ingenuity. We will work as a group to design this experiment. All aspects of design, measurement, and synthesis will be done in your island groups.

We will be using the internet for running discussions about important topics throughout the class. This will permit all of us to air opinions and questions. You are expected to participate in these discussion groups, and your participation (quality and quantity) will constitute 10% of your grade. There will be a link on my web site (URL is above).

One important note involving respect and courtesy: for some reason, a keyboard seems to encourage disrespect and rudeness. In the past few years, I have received email from both students and colleagues that contains thoughtless stuff that no one would dream of saying or writing by hand. So there’s just a few simple rules here:

1. Be civil.
2. Any discussion of a classroom personality is strictly out of bounds.
3. Limit the use of the words "sucks" and "boring" to one per email.

The atmosphere and morale of a class like this are strongly affected by your attendance and attention. Your grade will be adversely affected if you are habitually absent, late or inattentive:

• Students with three unexcused absences will have their grade lowered by one letter.
• Students with more than four unexcused absences will receive an F.

Your absence will be excused if you contact me by phone or email before class, and your excuse is a good one and cleared through Student Health (for illness), the Dean of Students (personal calamity), or me (university activities).

I expect you to be prepared for class each session, which means that you need to do the assigned readings for that week carefully. Occasionally, I will ask people to summarize the readings and their reactions to them for the class, and some of the web-based discussion will include topics from the readings. But you don’t need to run screaming from the room right now; my main goal with the reading is not so much the details as it is the big picture. One thing that will help is if you bring questions from the reading to class for us to discuss.

This is really easy: I expect 100% honesty from each of you. Don’t cheat, don’t make up information or sources, don’t plagiarize, and don’t help anyone do any of those. Some new college students are unclear on the rigor we apply to these principles. If an idea comes from a book, a paper, or the web, then you have to cite the source.

It is helpful to include at the end of a paper an "Acknowledgements" section, where you can cite people who have helped you with proofreading or seeded you with ideas.

Many of the activities will be in 5-person teams that will explore aspects of individual island chains. After the first day of class, email me your 1st, 2nd and 3rd choices. Keep up on any news about natural history events in your archipelago: each week we’ll take some time for teams to report news. Probably the best way to do this is do a thorough web search weekly. The teams will be:

1. Lesser Antilles
2. Canaries
3. Galapagos
4. Indonesia west of Bali
5. Indonesia east of Lombok
6. Seychelles
7. Society Islands