Welcome to Philosophy!

This was sent via Blackboard to the students taking Introduction to Philosophy via the web starting Monday. Some email addresses bounced the message back: Welcome to Introduction to Philosophy! Please have a look at the syllabus posted here: http://wsjamison.uaa.alaska.edu/201501.htm and let me know if you have any questions. This is the correct link for both sections 503 and 591. Everything can be accomplished using the Internet and the text books. Thank you in advance for sending an email message to me verifying your enrolment and making sure we are “connected”. If you do not have your email address updated on Blackboard please do that since I use the email function in Blackboard to email the whole class at least occasionally. You should send in materials on a regular basis following the schedule posted in the syllabus with the first set due May 27. If it takes a bit longer for you to get started because you haven’t received the book or you have been lying out in the sun too long and your arms are sunburned just let me know. Lots of folks take a bit to get started. But as we go further in to the course late work will lose points. I will send replies with comments and the comments are only helpful if you get them before you go on to do more work, so please do not send in everything all at once! You can send work in early if you like but please remember that I have to read everything and think about my replies to you. If your initial efforts are wonderful I will say so, if not I will say so and you have the opportunity to add to your work in response to my comments. All work must be complete by the end of the session – August 2 - to count towards the course grade. Incompletes will not be given except under circumstances that meet UAA policy. Some of the questions you may have for me: If the link from Blackboard does not work you can go directly to the syllabus from my web page at http://wsjamison.uaa.alaska.edu How to answer the short essay papers? I suppose the best way to answer this is to say: These are not meant to be difficult research papers! I am looking for your own views on the topics covered by the readings as well as an indication that you read the materials and understood them. All in all I should be getting 26 separate 150 word papers sent in, as sets of two, over the course for this requirement. Please title each essay with the number of the assignment, for example set 1 is 101 and 102. I would expect that your views would reflect thoughts you had from reading the materials. The topics blend into one another and each includes a lot of ideas on the topic. I am sure you may feel overwhelmed with the possibilities of things you could say. Do not worry! Say what you think is most interesting about the topics. Just go for it. Try not to think too hard about what I might be looking for as the right answer, but instead say what you are really thinking about the topics. Dialogue: To participate in the dialogue: log in to Blackboard and go to the course 201 section 501 or 591 as your case might be and then go to the discussion board that should be under Communications or Tools – for me it is under Tools. This way everyone can respond when they have a chance and you can even start a new threaded conversation. The main reason for this dialogue is so everyone in the class may interact with the other students. Since this is a distance course and there is no time set aside anyplace for us to meet, if you would like to get to know the other students and hear some of their views about the topics this seems to be the most productive way. Because there are two sections this summer and you will only see the dialog in your section I am suggesting in addition you might want to log into my blog and also engage everyone with your thoughts there. But remember that is a freebee and I will basically have no way of keeping track of who is who there (unless you use your real names) so the Blackboard dialog is what I can use for grading purposes. But it should be interesting to see what opportunity this might provide. The blog is a public forum and not just for those registered in classes as is Blackboard. The dialogue questions are posted at http://wsjamison.uaa.alaska.edu/dia.htm and there are links to the topics there that you should check out before typing your response on Blackboard and my blog. To begin with everyone may want to give a brief description of who they are. If you are interested in my BRIEF description of myself I have it posted at http://wsjamison.uaa.alaska.edu/myhist.htm ; but if everyone is so brief no one will be able to read all of them! You should also begin thinking about your term paper since ten weeks (or five!) is not very much time to do a term paper along with everything else you must be doing during a summer in Alaska! Don’t forget the term paper is worth 25% of the grade! You can also go to this page for frequently asked questions: http://wsjamison.uaa.alaska.edu/faq2.htm.