Thursday, December 30, 2010

Welcome

Welcome to the blog for EEMB40 - the Ecology of Disease - for Winter 2011. It will also serve as a class website and you will find links to lectures etc. in a box at the top right imaginatively called 'links'. Lecture slides will be available shortly after each lecture. They are put there for your convenience (you don't need to scribble down details of a graph because you know it will be available later) but please note that they are not designed to be lecture notes. In fact in most cases my slides would make very poor notes! In order to help you take notes I have made a glossary for the class - also linked on the right. All the terminology you will be required to know is listed in the glossary.

You are all welcome, and encouraged to post here. To do that all you need to do is to send me an e-mail saying just that. I will then add your address and google will send you an invitation to be an author. Just follow the simple instructions and away you go.

Postings to the blog should be relevant to the class but the blog is specifically designed to be a place where you don't need to worry about how relevant your post is. (I give you 'Basket full of puppies' as an example). I will be posting lots of things that I read in the news or that I take out of lecture (for time purposes) but that some of you may find interesting. By putting it here you can look at it at your leisure and you know it won't be on the exam.

I try to post every day when the class is running and, where possible, the postings are relevant to the current topics we are covering in class. You can access older postings (there are over 570 of them from the six previous times I have taught this class) either by scrolling down the page and repeatedly hitting the 'Older posts' button at the bottom right or by using the 'Labels' (scroll down and they'll be on the right hand side) to pull up posts on particular topics.

Posts to the blog will be made by myself, by Erin (and possibly past TA's who do drop in occasionally), and by students in the L&S honors program. If you are not an honors student and would like to post here just send me your e-mail and I'll send you an invite.

Everyone is welcome to post comments on any posts and you don't need to be signed up to do that. If you try and add a comment on a post it will look like you need to be signed up because that's the default option but you can change it to anonymous if you wish. You will have to prove you're not a robot though. Also, because I have made commenting open to anyone it means we sometimes get hit by spam. For that reason I have comment moderation turned on. Comments will not appear immediately and will need to be moderated but unless you are trying to sell viagra or promote your nude celebrity website I'm not really vetting comments for content.