Wikipedia:Canada Education Program/Courses/Controversies in Science Fall 2012 (Andrew Reil)/Course description

Course description
Welcome to Controversies in Science. You may have heard that some instructors won’t let you use Wikipedia as a source for term papers. Well in this class we won’t be citing Wikipedia, we’ll be contributing to it. What we’ll be citing is scientific journals.

We’ll be studying many different controversies, from water fluoridation to vaccinations. Ward Cunningham, who invented wikis, also invented “extreme programming”. Instead of checking someone’s work afterward, extreme programming has two people working together on writing. It’s quicker and produces better quality. That’s what we’ll be doing in our class. After a brief introduction of the controversy of the day by me, you’ll team up with someone else and be assigned a side to study. After briefly finding a scientific paper, one will write up its main point and method, while explaining what they’re reading and writing to their partner. The partner acts as a sounding board and will ask for clarification or corrections. Then the roles reverse and your partner will write about the results and you will coach them.

After that, you’ll team up with another partnership who studied the other side of the controversy, and all together you will prepare a brief presentation that you will give to the class about what you learned. You will also prepare a self-marking quiz question based on your presentation. After all the groups will present to the class, each group will take a group quiz based on the questions submitted by each group. There are three “cases” that we will study during the semester: astrophysics; climate change; and the origin of life. Each case contains three related controversies. After each case you will select one of the controversies covered in that case and write an argument defense for one of the sides. You will also choose your own controversy to write a term paper on. To help you, the term paper is split up into two graduated assignments: term paper questions, and the final term paper. Feedback on the first assignment will help you succeed even more on the second.

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