Dar/discussion

Welcome to the Darwinius Project; A Teacher Collaboration on WikiEducator

Biologists openly sharing content, practices, and developing resources based loosely on the recently-described early primate fossil Darwinius masillae. Join this collaboration and make a difference! dmccabe 14:00, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

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Discussion moved from the home pagedmccabe 03:15, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Hi folks,

I have established this little page as a place holder for development of tertiary teaching materials based on this exciting paper describing an extremely complete early primate fossil

Potential guidelines

I suggest the following:

• We should adapt the Teacher_Collaboration model and capitalize on the work done by others in the community.
• Let's use a directory 'Dar' for all of the materials we upload thus keeping them out of the root directory to avoid being overwritten. So file names should be thus: Dar/introduction, or Dar/image:jawbone.jpg for example.
• I'm new to collaborating in this way (usually I'm in charge of several student collaborators who develop the content). I would welcome other biologists as equal contributors of content, and I would contribute content. I can't be in charge and I'm not as effective with the wiki magic as others; so I would very much welcome more adept tech folks also.

Content

In terms of content I see the need for:

• A case study approach posing questions and leaving room for students to branch off into the many areas of biology touched upon by the paper.
• Some Open Office setup slides to provide the needed background to introduce the topic. These slides may in turn serve as the basis for a stand-alone lecture on this topic for teachers not interested in pursuing the case study approach.
• Connection lectures branching off into some areas like: Paleontology, cladistics, cranial morphology, ......fill in the blank as suites your interest.
• Laboratory exercises (perhaps using cladogram software for example) based loosely on some of the topics.
• Other approaches that will occur to the collaborators

Feedback

Given that nobody died and crowned me king, I would love some constructive feedback to get this project off to a great start. There are many wikieducators with more experience than I, and I'd love for this little project to be not only useful, but also serve as a prime example of what a bunch of far-flung biologists can do when the mood strikes.

This page

I have found that LQ discussions are hard to track. The Google group is great, but messages fall to the bottom and are replaced by newer messages. I thought a stable, central discussion place might be useful and efficient.

Moving forward

I have not had time to move this forward as I would have liked. However, I need the material fairly soon and I will either move it very soon or abandon the idea. My point of view at this point is that this paper will make a better case study of the controversies and spin that sometimes circle around discovery science. More important, positive, and valuable, will be the scientific consensus builds. The Darwinius discovery will have legs of some sort long after I'm finished writing about it. So, I'm hoping to move forward shortly; let me know if there is still interest!dmccabe 14:05, 11 November 2009 (UTC)