I always make sure there are some ways for students to get "extra credit" - I know how things go. In past years this opportunity has been posted about halfway through the semester once folks start to add up their points, but heck I don't care when you do extra work to learn more cool biology. And the exercise I've used in the past has had problems ranging from technical problems with the interface to not having enough educational merit. So, the new opportunities are listed below with the points available. They are graded, the maximum value is shown but if you do a halfway job ... you get halfway points.
Most of you want to know the BIG possibilities. Well, last year I included book discussions as an opportunity, meaning you read the book and then have a conversation with Dr. Wares about that book. We included a wonderful book by Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Potawotami botanist, as well as one by Dr. Drew Lanham, a Black ornithologist and writer. Both are fantastic books and if you are interested I can share the titles, but this year I want you to put your extra effort into understanding this changing planet and your ability to lead changes for the better.
If you read:
The World of the Salt Marsh by Charles Seabrook, or
Saving Us, by Dr. Katherine Hayhoe,
these are the books that I'll work with for extra credit reading this semester. There are many other worthy books that tie biology and our personal experience together, of course.
That sounds like a lot of work eh? Well there are other options for extra credit. They involve you making something useful for Dr. Wares. You get to teach me.
A podcast, Ologies with Alie Ward on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ologies-with-alie-ward/id1278815517?i=1000480306263 (there are likely other ways to get this podcast if you aren't using MacOS/iOS) is kind of amazing and fun way to learn more about biology and the people who explore this field. Choose a subject (an "-ology") to gain background in a particular type of organisms that can be found in the southeastern U.S., and using the skills you develop with iNaturalist and GBIF in our class you can write a "field guide" on 5 common species of that type of organism - with pictures/photos (with credit to where the photo came from!) or diagrams of how to tell them apart, and any statements made that are not common knowledge must be cited properly (at least 3 references). As an example, last year many students listened to Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer talk about mosses (the "bryology" episode) and made me great field guides on local mosses. You can still do mosses... but please remember I now have about 10 field guides to mosses in north Georgia. Salamanders? Fireflies? Edible berries? Jellyfish? Edible roots?
10 points.
Social and public media as an assignment: You will send me a digital assignment that somehow unpacks a social media video or thread (screen shots, tweets, or whatever) that relates to our class CLEARLY, with each segment (tweet, paragraph, etc.) annotated with a QUICK 1-2 sentence explainer of the process. Should be at least 5 annotations IN YOUR OWN WORDS. Examples include threads on urban trees and why that species/sex/location (a bit PG-13), fossils in the Appalachians, or recovery efforts in sea stars. If you don't mind a foul mouth, you may enjoy learning about plant diversity from this guy. If you want to learn more about how RNA vaccines work you might look at some posts from @SciTimeTracy on Twitter. So, to be clear, you are reading this series of informational posts or paragraphs, interpreting using YOUR OWN WORDS and citing info that comes from specific literature, and learning how to teach that topic back to me. Each of the topics listed above ends up being a huge diversity of possible topics, but I'll take similar examples as your starting point. Should be a PDF document submitted via email, as with the podcast/field guide assignment above. To think about this a different way, use other ways of teaching people about biology, learn for yourself, so that you can teach it.
10 points.
All of these extra credit assignments, I have the right to request revision or additional information for full credit; no revision, only half credit.