What is this course about? 

How does the course work?  

Citing your sources

Exams and grading

Online syllabus

Each week you will be responsible for assigned readings in the textbook as indicated in the syllabus. You can also use links from the online web version of the syllabus to go to the home page for the course textbook, where chapter-specific study materials (including a variety of sample test questions with automatic grading) are available. Each week I will also post a brief set of notes or a study guide to indicate both what major topics are covered in the assigned readings and what subject matter I want you to emphasize. This can be accessed from the online syllabus, along with a list of links or bookmarks that will take you to sites with information pertinent to the topic being covered in class that week. 

Wednesday class meetings are in our department's cartography lab (SS 001) which has more than enough networked computers for everyone in the class. Although you will be expected to do the research for your assignments outside of class hours, we will use part of our time in class to investigate some of the information available on selected Web sites pertinent to our discussions. Much of the time will involve oral presentations by students working individually or in teams. Your written responses to class assignments should be posted to the class discussion group. [A word to the wise: if you have a lengthy set of comments to post, type it and save it in a separate file BEFORE you try sending it to the discussion group. That way you can avoid kicking yourself when something goes wrong as you are sending the message and all your work is lost.] You are also welcome to make use of other resources in the library rather than relying entirely on the Web. Not everything worth knowing is available in electronic form!

The guidelines on assignments will vary from one week to another. In some cases I will ask you to perform a very specific type of analysis. In other cases I may give you an open-ended assignment by defining the range of topics and asking you to pick a question that interests you, then investigate it and report on your findings. There will be several opportunities to prepare mini-research papers, and in these cases you will be expected both to turn in a finished product and to make an oral presentation to the rest of the class. Your work on assignments and your participation in class will account for 40% of your class grade.

If you are registered for the class then you are already registered in the Blackboard course:

                            GEOG110H_0101_FA2002:  GEOG 110H Physical Geography - Honors 

In order to get to the course homepage, do either of the following:

1.  Go to blackboard.umbc.edu and login using your UMBC username and password; then, when the Blackboard page comes up, click on the "Courses" tab and click on GEOG 110H Physical Geography - Honors 

or

2. Login to myUMBC using your UMBC username and password. Then click on the Blackboard tab (one of the red tabs at the top of the screen). When the Blackboard login page comes up, login again and follow the rest of the instructions above.

All course documents, assignments, and links will be accessible from the Blackboard page. 

In order to avoid confusion, please note that students in the regular GEOG 110 section will have access to some of these materials in a separate version of the Blackboard course. Although I will explain this in lecture, you should stick to the version described here.