CSMN/SUM 

Course Requirements

 

A. Reading and Writing Assignments

 

Here are some important things to know about this course:

 

• It is highly interdisciplinary, which means that no matter where you are coming from in your past education, you will be stretched beyond your current boundaries.

 

• The readings have been chosen to be accessible to a broad audience but will still often be challenging, if only because the ideas require a lot of thought, no matter how elegantly stated.

 

• The volume of reading is quite large, in keeping with an intensive PhD level course.

 

• A considerable amount of time after each lecture is reserved for discussing the lecture and background readings.

For all of these reasons, you are expected to write a short (app. 500 words) commentary for each set of readings that is due at least 24 hours before the lecture. Each commentary should describe what you would most like to cover during the discussion session. This might be the most important points as you see them, points that you found most confusing that you would like to clarify, or points that are most relevant to your particular interests that you would like to see expanded upon.

 

The commentaries serve a number of useful purposes. First, research has shown that writing about what you have read is very helpful for processing the information inside your own head, even if no one else ever reads it. Second, the commentaries will be read by the lecturer and other instructors prior to the lecture, giving them an idea of where you and the other students are “coming from”. Third, the commentaries will help you take part in the discussion after each lecture, because you will already have in mind what you want to say.

 

Your commentary need not take long to write. It will be graded for being submitted on time and for being a good faith effort, but it will not be graded for specific content. We recommend the following procedure.

 

1) Begin reading for the course on a regular schedule, so you can do the readings justice.

2) Write your commentary soon after you have finished the set of readings for each lecture. This is the best time to process the information inside your own head. You might want to take notes while doing the readings, but that is up to you.

3)  Submit the commentaries by emailing them to Katharine Browne at k.n.browne@csmn.uio.no who will distribute them to the lecturers. While the commentaries aren’t due until 24 hours before each lecture, you are welcome to send them earlier, since you should be finishing at least some of them well before the course begins.

 

*Please note that there will usually be two lectures each day, which means that you will be required to submit two commentaries (one commentary corresponding to each lecture) the day prior to those lectures.  Note also that since lectures begin the first day of class, you mush submit a commentary on the readings for the first two lectures scheduled Monday, September 28 no later than 9am on September 27th.

 

B. Student Presentations and Papers

 

The principles taught in this course can be applied to any human-related academic discipline or policy area. The student presentations provide a way for you to relate the principles to a topic that most interests you, which in most cases will be your research area. Thirty minutes are allocated for each student, which should be divided between a 15 minute presentation followed by 15 minutes of discussion. Your presentation should be casual in style and need not require a great deal of preparation. You already know about your topic area from your current disciplinary perspective and the course will introduce you to the evolutionary perspective. In your presentation, you need to put these together for the benefit of the rest of the class. This requires briefly describing your topic area and how what you have learned in the course might add value to your current disciplinary perspective. If you think that the evolutionary perspective doesn’t add much value, you are free to share your skepticism. 

 

Students who elect to write a paper will have a chance to explore their topic area from an evolutionary perspective in greater detail. Papers should be approximately 5000 words and are due 29 October 2015.

 

The best way to prepare for both your presentation and paper is to briefly describe your topic area in an email to Katharine Browne, k.n.browne@csmn.uio.no who will share it with the other instructors. They will point you in the direction of a few key references that are especially relevant to your topic area and might not be included in the core readings for the course. You are welcome to do this as early as you like and need not wait until the beginning of the course.