Ooops (There it Is)

So I spent ten days NOT posting and now have a VERY long list of the things that can go wrong with Blackboard. In any case, my class (hi guys) is at the American Museum of Natural History today. All, that is, except Nikki. Where were you, chica?

Here is the assignment I have them doing:

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1: Get Tickets (contribution) and a Map. Study the map for a few minutes to get the gist of where everything is in relation to everything else. Getting your bearings is essential to effective utilization of your time. You may complete the tasks (2 and 3) in any order.

2: Visit the Gottesman Hall of Planet Earth (in the Rose Center for Earth and Space, second floor to the right of the entrance). While there, you should be looking for details, examples, and evidence that support Al Gore’s assertions in An Inconvenient Truth. Be sure to get the documentation for the evidence you find most compelling. Feel free to be creative: note-taking is fine, but you might also take photos of the information plates to post on your blog.

3: Nature as Media: As a group, pick any ONE hall that focuses on living beings such as the Spitzer Hall of Human Origins (i.e. no meteorites). Make a list of presentations/installations that you find most convincing and identify how logos, ethos, and pathos (remember how we did the slides).

4. Blog: For your blog, pick ONE media form to compare ONE Installation (one setting), one exhibit, and the museum as a whole to. For example, I might pick “Film compared to Tyrannosaurus Rex Installation / Saurischian Dinosaurs Exhibit/ The AMNH” and write about how the exhibits embody traits of film or the “cinematic sensibility.”

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I hate brand new assignments because I never know how they are going to work and something innevitably goes wrong on-site. Perhaps I should have hauled them around as a group, but some people are inevitably late and others are early and work faster, so I like to use "do it yourself" assignments that don't require my continual imput. I'll consider a "tour" version for the Met a couple of weeks. I just dread the possiblity of saying things like "would you two hurry up for crying out loud" and "don't touch the Van Gough!" or "put the Ming vase down!"

But, I will think about it (particularly since I would then need zero paper).