4 different 3 paragraph 15 word discussion posts… after assignment gets graded will send extra money if an A is recieved 🙂
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Read the Introduction from Archaeology of the Southeastern United States: PaleoIndian to World War I, by Judith Bense. |
. Based on thorough reading of the website, you should be able to:
- Name the cultural periods associated with the prehistoric Southeast.
-
Discuss various cultural practices of each cultural period.
-
Discuss how archaeologists know what they do about the different cultural periods.
- Think about some of the reasons why cultural practices change from one cultural period to the next.
Task
- After reading the article by Bensediscuss what archaeologists know about this period – dates of these periods, subsistence activities, shelter, political organization, art, etc. Be aware not all of the mentioned topics will be found in all cultural periods. (one discussion post is needed for each of the 4 given periods.
A discussion task posting should be a minimum of ten full sentences long, which is about two full
paragraphs. In previous semesters, postings which received a grade of ‘A’ were typically over 15
sentences long.
Regarding grading discussion task posts, I’m looking for a couple of different things:
One of the main things that I am looking for is that students display an understanding of what they have
read. So, it doesn’t work to just show me that you have read the assignment (or watched the video or
such) by repeating back to me what the basic gist of the content was; I already know what the article or
video is about. I’m looking for something that shows that you understand the implications and relevance
of what you have read/seen. Connected to this, I am also looking at how well you can tie the lessons of
one task to things you have learned from previous assignments and readings, and how well you can bring
in relevant outside experiences and materials.
paragraphs. In previous semesters, postings which received a grade of ‘A’ were typically over 15
sentences long.
Regarding grading discussion task posts, I’m looking for a couple of different things:
One of the main things that I am looking for is that students display an understanding of what they have
read. So, it doesn’t work to just show me that you have read the assignment (or watched the video or
such) by repeating back to me what the basic gist of the content was; I already know what the article or
video is about. I’m looking for something that shows that you understand the implications and relevance
of what you have read/seen. Connected to this, I am also looking at how well you can tie the lessons of
one task to things you have learned from previous assignments and readings, and how well you can bring
in relevant outside experiences and materials.
I strongly advise against any form of plagiarism. “Plagiarism” is defined as the appropriation of any other
person’s work and the unacknowledged or improper incorporation of that work into one’s own work
offered for credit. All forms of academic dishonesty, including but not limited to cheating on tests,
plagiarism, collusion, and falsification of information, will call for discipline. It is the student’s
responsibility to understand what constitutes dishonesty and the College’s disciplinary policy toward
academic dishonesty.
I also very strongly advise against using AI apps, such as ChatGPT or Google, to write your turn-in for
you. Put simply, AIs don’t think; they collect pre-existing information, run it through pre-set algorithms,
and create a summary. Which means that all they are doing is summarizing previous people’s
information – including outdated and incorrect information. At the level you are now at, in college, you
will quickly discover that AIs such as ChatGPT are very prone to errors – or really just don’t give you
much. Think of it this way: Why use an AI to put together what previous experts had to say on a topic
when, instead, you could do the work yourself towards becoming one of the new, cutting-edge experts on
the topic?
A suggestion: Please write and edit your Discussion and Assignment postings in a word processing
program, using the spelling checker and grammar checker functions. Then copy and paste the finished
product into the D2L editor and make final adjustments to it before posting. Your postings are for a
college-level class, and will be read not only by your professor but also by your peers: it will be to your
benefit to post messages that display an appropriately adequate level of literacy. If you need help with
this, you might want to consider contacting and working with The Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL).
I sincerely mean the above: you will lose points on your turn-in for more than the occasional misspelled
word, punctuation error, or grammatical mistake.
As to how I grade the assignments, no, I don’t just do it subjectively or arbitrarily, along the lines of “Oh,
that feels somewhere around an ‘A’”, or, “Oh, I guess I’ll give that one a ‘B’”. There is a straightforward
percentage point system. I (consistently) start with a base grade of 75%. You then gain points for
noticing things mentioned in the article or video, and for putting things together. Thus, for example, “Ah,
you caught that Selam predates Lucy; that gains you 7%.” Or, “Nice! You noticed and brought in
reference to the new archeological findings in Uzbekistan reported in the newspapers yesterday, and tied
that in. That gains you 10%.” Or, “No. As the assigned reading in the textbook points out, apes are not
indigenous to the Americas. You lose 3% for that.” Likewise, as previously mentioned, if I trip over
your grammar, punctuation and/or spelling and have to go back and re-read a sentence you wrote to get
what you are trying to say, you will lose one or two percentage points. (So, individual writing mistakes
do not count for much; but, yes, the deductions they create can build up if you are not careful.)
Simply summarizing and repeating back to me what the article or video says typically gains you nothing
(but, likewise, also typically does not reduce your grade). Put simple, I am not interested in what others
have to say about the topic. I’m interested in what you have to say about what others have to say about
the topic, as a demonstration of your comprehension of things. Of course, in order to talk about what
others say, you need to tell me what they said. But that’s not the point: the point is what you can then
make of what they said.
person’s work and the unacknowledged or improper incorporation of that work into one’s own work
offered for credit. All forms of academic dishonesty, including but not limited to cheating on tests,
plagiarism, collusion, and falsification of information, will call for discipline. It is the student’s
responsibility to understand what constitutes dishonesty and the College’s disciplinary policy toward
academic dishonesty.
I also very strongly advise against using AI apps, such as ChatGPT or Google, to write your turn-in for
you. Put simply, AIs don’t think; they collect pre-existing information, run it through pre-set algorithms,
and create a summary. Which means that all they are doing is summarizing previous people’s
information – including outdated and incorrect information. At the level you are now at, in college, you
will quickly discover that AIs such as ChatGPT are very prone to errors – or really just don’t give you
much. Think of it this way: Why use an AI to put together what previous experts had to say on a topic
when, instead, you could do the work yourself towards becoming one of the new, cutting-edge experts on
the topic?
A suggestion: Please write and edit your Discussion and Assignment postings in a word processing
program, using the spelling checker and grammar checker functions. Then copy and paste the finished
product into the D2L editor and make final adjustments to it before posting. Your postings are for a
college-level class, and will be read not only by your professor but also by your peers: it will be to your
benefit to post messages that display an appropriately adequate level of literacy. If you need help with
this, you might want to consider contacting and working with The Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL).
I sincerely mean the above: you will lose points on your turn-in for more than the occasional misspelled
word, punctuation error, or grammatical mistake.
As to how I grade the assignments, no, I don’t just do it subjectively or arbitrarily, along the lines of “Oh,
that feels somewhere around an ‘A’”, or, “Oh, I guess I’ll give that one a ‘B’”. There is a straightforward
percentage point system. I (consistently) start with a base grade of 75%. You then gain points for
noticing things mentioned in the article or video, and for putting things together. Thus, for example, “Ah,
you caught that Selam predates Lucy; that gains you 7%.” Or, “Nice! You noticed and brought in
reference to the new archeological findings in Uzbekistan reported in the newspapers yesterday, and tied
that in. That gains you 10%.” Or, “No. As the assigned reading in the textbook points out, apes are not
indigenous to the Americas. You lose 3% for that.” Likewise, as previously mentioned, if I trip over
your grammar, punctuation and/or spelling and have to go back and re-read a sentence you wrote to get
what you are trying to say, you will lose one or two percentage points. (So, individual writing mistakes
do not count for much; but, yes, the deductions they create can build up if you are not careful.)
Simply summarizing and repeating back to me what the article or video says typically gains you nothing
(but, likewise, also typically does not reduce your grade). Put simple, I am not interested in what others
have to say about the topic. I’m interested in what you have to say about what others have to say about
the topic, as a demonstration of your comprehension of things. Of course, in order to talk about what
others say, you need to tell me what they said. But that’s not the point: the point is what you can then
make of what they said.