By Nikolas Stasulli of the University of New Haven
Description #
This is an assignment that is part of an Environmental Microbiology course. It aims to engage students in reading primary scientific literature by discussing perspectives from across disciplines. The idea is then to use these smaller annotations from Hypothesis to stimulate classroom conversation.
Purpose #
Group annotations of scientific research in environmental microbiology are designed to take advantage of each student’s background that they bring to this course. Some of us have more molecular biology or microbiology background, while others have more ecology or environmental backgrounds. All of these subjects are part of this course, and hearing each person’s perspective on a research article is bound to bring up ideas you hadn’t considered when reading yourself. These assignments also aim at having us consider how these research manuscripts have applications outside of the classroom and encourage us to use knowledge from various past courses we’ve taken to inform our annotated opinions, questions, and discussion points around these manuscripts.
Assignment #
This annotation assignment is meant to spur discussions with your peers that we will continue in class, and I ask that you contribute thoughtful and meaningful posts and comments.
As part of this assignment, you are required to post, at minimum
- (2 points) 1 original post commenting about the reading (this could be about questions that the article raised for you, linking what you learned from the article to something from this or another course, discussions about the quality of the work done in the paper, etc.)
- (4 points) 2 other posts commenting on, and discussing, posts from others in a way that contributes to a discussion around their post (this can include external links or images if applicable).
Please make sure that you all don’t wait until the last minute to discuss!
