EARTH SYSTEMS SCIENCE (GEOL 3923H)

NOTES ON READING ASSIGNMENTS

There is not formal textbook for this course. All required readings have been compiled from resources available across the World-Wide Web and are literally world-wide in distribution - readings come from course outlines at other universities, information outlets of government agencies, published reports of professional organizations and commercial magazines, and personal notes or essays placed online by interested individuals. Materials have been compiled from 4 of the 6 inhabited continents (North America, Europe including the United Kingdom, Africa, and Australia) - a facet of the course which I had not anticipated initially, but which strikes me as most appropriate (and philosophically intriguing) - could it be that the age-old vision of "one world" is being realized via the Internet community?

The assigned readings for this course are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Thus, they can be accessed at any time which is convenient for the student. They can be accessed by individuals remote from the University of Arkansas campus anywhere in the world. I would be most pleased if this course became a prototype for distance learning or life-long learning in the 21st Century. It would even be grand if individuals in remote locations could somehow actively participate in our weekly discussions - perhaps this will be possible soon. For the present, I would invite anyone who stumbles onto this course to communicate their thoughts, ideas, questions, comments or hyperlinks directly to me via e-mail. I will endeavor to include these communiqués in our class discussions and report back to the sender.

This course will work best if students have read the assigned material prior to class. This will require some discipline and a good dose of time management on the part of students. If you endeavor to keep up, I think you will find this course most rewarding.

You will find that many of the readings contain a large level of redundancy - there are several reasons for this. First, I recognize that there are infinite writing styles. Combine this with the artistic attributes of web-design and I think the diversity of approaches to compiling information will be obvious. I think it is interesting to see the various ways different individuals organize and present the same information. In addition, I recognize that different teaching and presentation styles affect individual students differently. Hopefully, by including information in a variety of styles, I will be able to enhance my ability to reach students with different learning styles. In some instances, students may find that information contained in different readings will be contradictory - this may especially be true for those topic areas in which scientists are engaged in active debate. While this can be frustrating for students who want to know "the answer", I think it's important to emphasize that scientists don't know all the answers or that scientists can be divided on "the answer" or that there may be multiple answers. Indeed, in Earth Systems Science, I would contend that there are relatively few answers at present, but a great many questions. Finally, I believe that learning is, to some degree, a redundant process - the more times you are exposed to an idea, the more likely you are to retain that idea as knowledge. Thus, reading the same ideas from different sources may reinforce those ideas for students.

The readings for this course are certainly not the only ones students could find. In fact, many of the linked readings contain links to additional readings which students are welcome to investigate for themselves. It would be easy to list large numbers of journal articles, textbook chapters or magazine publications to bolster the ideas presented in this course. What is difficult is to limit the available information to some reasonable expectation of what students can actually access and assimilate in a single semester. I hope that you will find the resources assembled for this course adequate for the task, interesting and informative, and not technically too demanding for the level of this class. And above all, I hope you will enjoy them. It has been a pleasure for me to collate these resources, and I must admit that I have learned a great deal already!

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