PHYSICS 199
The Internet Experience

Fall Quarter 1995

Prof. Greg Bothun
Office: 417 Willamette
Office Hours: 10:30-12:00 MWF or whenever
email: nuts@moo2.uoregon.edu

Remember Reality Bites

This course is designed to expose incoming students to the Internet and the resources that it contains. Students will be shown how to effectively navigate the Net and more importantly, how to incorporate network resources into their own documents that can then be used to build the course. This will all be done using Mosaic or Netscape as the organizational interface for linking documents and resources that are contained on the World Wide Web. The focus of the course will again be on scientific evidence that supports the idea that humans must be involved in a partnership arrangement with nature in order to insure mutual sustainability. There is now a great deal of environmental information (current documents and graphs on biomass burning, ozone degradation, the greenhouse effect, ocean thermal pollution, etc) readily available on the net. These resources will be used for student designed lecture pages. In this way, the students themselves will actually build a resource dealing with the issues of partnership and sustainability, for the entire world to access. My role in this will be to facilitate, point them in the right direction and get them to ask important questions.

Clearly, one's global view is intimately shaped by one's own view of the relationship between Man and Nature. This course will present the students with only 2 options; namely, a hierarchical view and a connected view. In the hierarchical view, Nature is viewed as a succession of progressively more sophisticated niches (with Man near the top, of course) which maybe somewhat independent of one another. In the connected view, everything which exists is part of everything else; there is no such thing as isolation. The point is then to compare these two opposing views against a body of {\it scientific} data about the Natural World in order to have students develop a line of moral reasoning about the future which is based on science, not prejudice, superstition or ego. It can be argued that mankind's collective callous disregard for Nature stems basically from our sincere belief that we somehow have the right to manipulate the planet in the way we see fit (\ie the hierarchical view). In this course, the aim is to present scientific data which strongly argues such is not the case; that mankind is necessarily drawn into a complex partnership with Nature which each side must maintain to prevent their mutual collapse. To arrive at a postion of understanding how a world view is formulated we first need to arrive at an understanding of how life formed and evolved, how ideas formed and evolved, what the natural states of our planet are, and finally, how equilibrium has been disrupted by the non-equilibrium growth of humans. To expose the students to these ideas, we will discuss astronomy, biological evolution, cosmological model making, plate tectonics and climatology, and global environmental problems such as the greenhouse effect. These areas represent the scientific content of the course.

The crux of the course will then be to get the students to convey these ideas to a mass audience by the construction of electronic web documents that incoporate the scientific evidence that we have been discussing. Students will work together in teams of 4 to prepare extensive electronic documents that incorporates what, in their opinion, is the most relevant scientific data. This differs from my previous exercise in which the students worked in groups to present a live infomercial, of length 20--30 minutes, in which they were supposed to assume historical characters (either real or fictional) and present a set of arguments amongst themselves which were designed to subvert the viewing audience into recognizing that morality-based decision making, as opposed to economic-based decision makin g, is the only sensible thing to do. While these presentations were highly sucessful and certainly caused to students to work together to discuss critical issues, they were transient, ending when the camera stopped rolling. Now we have the means for transforming this excersize into a more permanent form by having the students make their own group electronic documents to now subvert the Internet audience into morality-based decision making.

In sum, I propose to use the contents of my previously approved freshman seminars to fuel a more intense and interactive debate about global views and sustainability and then to translate this debate into electronic documents, prepared by students working together in teams. These documents will then serve as a permanent archive to what the students themselves think about all of this and what they consider to be the most important scientific data that supports the concept of partnership. These documents will then be made available to the world-wide internet audience by means of the World Wide Web. In so doing, the students will have learned how to effectively use the network for finding and then disseminating information.

Method of Instruction

Instruction will consist mostly of Lectures supplemented with lots of slides and graphs of data and observations. These lectures will all be delivered electronically in a manner that will allow the students to immediately comment and change the lecture material.. The lectures will be designed to be highly interactive. I have little interest in standing in front of students and giving them the traditional lecture on the way the world works so that they can absorb it and spit it back to me and thankfully, in the Internet Classroom, I don't have to do this anymore (what a relief!). Rather, I really want to solicit opinions and ideas from the students on the various topics outlined above. I want them to tell me what they think, and, more importantly, why they think that way and then to convey that in an electronic document. In other words, a major emphasis on this course will be to explore the method that people use to arrive at their own personal world view and to ascertain if this method incorporates any science in it. The whole purpose of this course is to then introduce science and scientific data into the equation to see if that is then consistent with the pre-existing world view and then to get the students to use this to electronically challange society to see if their world view has any science in it. How can we ever educate the next generation to become better citizens of the planet if this approach is not taken? Students need to be challenged and informed and then, using that information they can educate others. Achieving these goals will be the major focus of this proposed seminar.

Grading Criteria

I prefer not to give any exams in this course. Instead, I propose the following:

• 50% of the grade to be determined from a few (3--5) in depth homework assignments
• 50% of the grade to be determined from their group electronic documents.