unit 3

UNIT 3

Weeks 7, 8, 9. The Geosphere. Assignment 1: Network Montana ESS activities due by end of unit. Assignment 2: begin discussion questions at beginning of unit. Assignment 3: Unit 3 extension due at end of week 9, Midnight Sunday, November 14, 1999.

You will have three weeks to complete this unit. Your first assignment is to evaluate the "Plate Tectonics Paradigm" at the Network Montana Web Site (NMP homepage: http://www.math.montana.edu/~nmp/) and one other geosphere activity of your choice. The reason for asking that you look over the plate tectonic activity is because it has lots of basic information that will help you understand global tectonic systems.

Additional background information, in the links below, include graphics that may load slowly, depending on your system. These can be downloaded during a slack time, saved, and viewed at your convenience.

Volcanoes

Plate Tectonics

Earthquakes

Additional background material can be obtained from any physical geology or physical geography textbook or an advanced book from the library.

You do not need to turn in formal answers to these activities, only a written summary posted to the class discussion area at MSULink. In this summary, evaluate the activity: was it interactive, informative, doable, and fun? Do you have any suggestions for improvement?

Your second assignment is to log on to the appropriate folder at MSULink at the beginning the seventh week, and start the discussion of the questions posted there:

1) Plate Tectonics involves vast scales; so vast, most of us have trouble comprehending them: lengths of time, movement of massive plates, depths of earthquakes, heights of mountains. Discuss your thoughts and impressions on the vastness of scale in the geosphere.

2) Discuss how plate tectonics helps us understand the evolution of the earth.

This discussion question is asking about the earth's endogenetic activities (originating from within, e.g. earthquakes, volcanoes, plate movements). This discussion question suggests follow-up questions: What are these patterns to geosphere processes? Are different patterns related (e.g. Mountains, earthquakes, volcanoes, shapes of continents)? Where does the energy for all this activity come from? At this stage you will be looking for patterns to geosphere processes and formulating hypotheses to explain the patterns.

By the start of the eighth week, you should have some ideas about how you would write an extension activity that would help your students use the internet to investigate some aspect of the geosphere system: earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, and so on. Your third assignment is to write up this extension activity (see Chapter 5, "How to Build and Extension") and submit it by the end of unit three; turn in as an .html document if you can, as a word processing document if you don't yet do html. I will work with you if you would like to explore the possibilities of using html.

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