research paper

IDS 2891 section 05846–Connections

Hillsborough Community College

Spring 2018

Instructors’ Names: Kara Lawson Williamson

Office: PADM148

Email: klawson@hccfl.edu

Office Hours

9:00-9:30 am M, W; 10:45 am -1 pm M, W 9:00-11:00 am T, TH; 12:15-12:30 T, TH or by appointment

Most of our conversations will take place using email. This does not mean that you cannot come to my office hours or use the telephone to communicate with me, but it is easier to communicate using electronic sources. Please feel free to email. I can be reached by telephone only during office hours.

Class Schedule: February 13-March 26

Course assignments are due on Sundays by 11:59 pm.

Most of our conversations will take place using email. This does not mean that you cannot contact me by telephone or meet with me in person to communicate with me, but it is easier to communicate using electronic sources. Please feel free to email me through the Canvas email system.

Outside of the instructor’s campus office hours, she also will call students for telephone conferences. Students can email the instructor with a good time and number to reach them. For privacy reasons, the instructor will call from a blocked number (but only during designated time periods given by the student.)

Course Format:

The content of this class will all be on line. There is an important difference between an on-campus course and an online course. An online course demands that the student be highly disciplined and motivated. This course is NOT SELF-PACED. There are fixed deadlines that must be met if you are to be successful in this course.

Course Description:

This is a selected topics capstone interdisciplinary experience course for the AA degree curriculum. It summarizes (in an applied manner) major points in the bodies of knowledge acquired while participating in the general education experience. This course will involve research, application of theoretical models and utilization of learned skills.

The theme of this course is presidential scandals, which will be the focus of most class assignments.

Course Objectives:

The assignments for this course have been designed to allow students the opportunity to demonstrate their ability in the following areas:

1. Think and read critically

2. Express themselves clearly in written and oral communication

3. Use technology to access, retrieve, and communicate information

4. Understanding of global, political, social, economic and historical perspectives

5. Evaluate the causes of past events and relate them to problems and issues of today.

6. Research an historical event and gather information that helps evaluate a question and explanation about that event.

Grading Policy:

 The grades in this course are “satisfactory” and “unsatisfactory,” S and U.  To achieve an S grade, you will need to demonstrate proficiency on all assigned tasks.  Students must satisfactorily complete ALL course requirements to receive a passing grade.

Grades:

Assignments normally will be graded within five days after the deadline. Grades and brief comments will be placed in the grade book in Canvas. Please do not ask the instructors through the comment section in the grade book. Please use email, telephone calls, or in office conferences for questions.

Academic Honesty:

Cheating and plagiarism on research and your presentation will result in a grade of U for the course.  Cheating is turning in work that you did not research or write or making oral presentations of material that you did not research.  Plagiarism is using information without citing its source; it includes direct copying, copying with minor changes, and paraphrasing.  It is OK—in fact, recommended, to have another person read and criticize your coursework and for you to edit them in response, but not to have another person write them for you.

 

Attendance:

In an online course, you are expected to show up online. This course is designed to be interactive in which you contribute to weekly assignments and a group assignment. You should plan to log in at least twice a week to stay current with your assignments, read any announcements and/or your course email.

Important Technical Points Please do not wait until the last minute to complete assignments.  Submitting assignments close to the deadline may result in last minute problems.  Students should not wait until the last minutes before the deadline to submit their work.  The instructor will not be available until the next day.

Unfortunately, last minute internet problems occur.  When students have difficulty at the last minute, please email the instructor before the deadline to prove their work was attempted within a reasonable time before a deadline. 

Students who utilize Mac computers must convert their work to word documents for the instructor to view it.

When students experience access problems with the internet, please consider clearing your cache or updating your browsers.  Safari, Google Chrome, or Mozilla Firefox are the best browsers to utilize for Canvas.

Course Requirements:

Students are expected to watch videos, read articles, answer questions, write a brief press release, research and complete a presentation, evaluate your peers, and write a general education essay.

Course Assignments

Questions for the film Watergate Video Assignment

Students are expected to watch a video on the Watergate scandal, answer questions about them, and submit them as attachment files to the instructor in the designated area.

Watergate Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vC9PE2CiSGA

a. Please answer the questions listed below that are based on what you learned from the video on the Watergate scandal. Students are expected to watch the video and answer questions listed below about the video by Sunday, 2/18/18, by 11:59 pm Please type up your answers, save your assignment, and submit your responses as an attachment file under the submissions tab (for the assignment). Each question is worth 8 apiece.

1. How many men were involved in the Watergate burglary?

2. What group had headquarters at the Watergate?

3. Who discovered tape on the door?

4. What were the names of the documents that revealed US policy in Vietnam?

5. Who were the reporters researching the Watergate case?

6. Who was Deep Throat?

7. What did the Watergate investigation reveal that President Nixon have at the White House?

8. Who was the first president to establish it?

9. When did President Nixon leave office?

10. What were the crimes that President Nixon was accused of committing?

11. Would President Nixon have been impeached?

12. Should President Nixon have been impeached? Explain your answer.

13. Do you think that President Nixon undermined confidence in the government?

Questions for the film “Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQ7j7Gv-s5g

Students are expected to watch the video and answer questions listed below about the video by Sunday, February 18, by 11:59 pm. Please type up your answers, save your assignment, and submit your responses as an attachment file under the submissions tab (for the assignment). Each question is worth 9 points apiece.

1. How many more blacks voted in 2000?

2. Who created the Felon Purge List?

3. Which county used the butterfly ballot?

4. How many ex-offenders were wrongfully purged?

5. Where did the Gore campaign request manual recounts?

6. Was there a true recount of votes in Florida?

7. What was the deadline for certifying the votes?

8. How many overseas absentee votes were counted for Bush?

9. Who led the demonstrations in Miami?

10. What happened on November 26?  What did      the Florida Supreme Court rule?

11. What was discovered in November 2001 about the ballots?  

Press Release Each student will create a brief statement (that will be given to media outlets) as if he/she were President of the United States. The assignment is due by Sunday, February 25, by 11:59 pm.

You are president and allegations as well as a special investigation has determined your involvement in one of the following-affair, accepting bribes from companies supporting deregulation (specify an industry), secret weapons and financial support of a dictatorial government (specify a country), or abuse of power involving members of your administration. You must address the American public now that the truth has been revealed (and cannot be disputed). Do not include the questions in your final release which is an explanation to the American public and world.

Please address the following points in your statement to the American public.

1. Explain the incident.

2. How will you explain your guilt to the American public?

3. What steps will you take to address the matter?

4. Will you accept blame?

5. Will you apologize?

6. Does this incident undermine your authority to lead?

7. What does this do to the credibility of your administration?

8. What message are you sending to the youth of the nation?

9. What message does this send to the international world (and critics or allies of the United States)?

10. How has your family dealt with the scandal?

11. Will you resign?

Presidential Scandals Articles and Questions The instructor will provide students with articles to read and answer questions about that are related to presidential scandals. The assignment is due by Sunday, March 4, by 11:59 pm. Each question is worth 8 points apiece.

Research Presentation

a. During the first week of class, please sign up for a presidential presentation on the discussion board provided during the first week of class. Please type out the name of your choice, so that others know that they cannot sign up for that president. No two students can research the same president. Please double check to make sure that you are not choosing the same topic as another student.

b. Here are the specific presidents for students to chose from.

1. Thomas Jefferson

2. John Quincy Adams

3. Andrew Jackson

4. James Buchanan

5. Abraham Lincoln

6. Andrew Johnson

7. Ulysses S. Grant

8. James Garfield

9. Grover Cleveland

10. Theodore Roosevelt

11. William Howard Taft

12. Woodrow Wilson

13. Warren G. Harding

14. Herbert Hoover

15. Franklin Roosevelt

16. Harry Truman

17. John F. Kennedy

18. Lyndon B. Johnson

19. Richard Nixon

20. George H.W. Bush

21. Ronald Reagan

22. William Clinton

23. George W. Bush

24. Barack Obama

25. Donald Trump

26. Franklin Pierce

c. The project should include biographical information on the president. Please address if the president's background influenced the scandals tied to him.

d. The project should include a brief overview of important events, legislation, or changes tied to the president's administration.

e. The project should include a detailed account of a minimum of two scandals that occurred with this president. The scandals must be both personal and professional. The scandals must be clearly explained. The scandal details should include the pertinent dates, people involved, location, where, and why events occurred.

f. Please discuss how events were concluded and the costs. Was anyone prosecuted, did the president leave office, and what effect did the scandal have on the country, if any? Discuss if the public was aware of the scandal, was there press coverage, did the president's approval ratings decline, and if there was a loss in national confidence in the president.

g. The final projects are due by Sunday, March 18, by 11:59 pm.

h. Lastly, the student must create a final works cited page to be included at the end of the presentation. Students should use a minimum of 4 sources.

1. Works cited-Students can use MLA or Chicago Style. 

2. Wikipedia, textbooks, Boundless textbooks, or encyclopedias cannot be used as sources- Use of any of these types of sources will result in a FAILING GRADE on the assignment. Students may use books, journals, and websites. Websites and web pages such as the Miller Center, PBS American Presidents, the History Channel, and the White House presidential biographies are highly recommended sources. Do not use gossip websites, Radar online, EOnline and questionable sites that lack academic contributors. Legitimate sites end with .org or .edu.

Students must be mindful of not utilizing information taken from sources that are not based on research but upon personal opinions.

When using websites, students must provide website information, publication date, publisher’s names, article name, and author.

Here is an example-

34Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park, National Park Service, last modified April 9, 2010, http://www.nps.gov/choh/index.htm . 

Research Presentation Requirements guide

I. IDS -2891

A. Each research presentation must include the following:

1. Research of president’s background

2. Research of Scandal(s)

3. Creation of Visual Outline (Normally a PowerPoint or Prezi)- Not a paper

4. Works cited page

B. Visual Outline

1. Power Point (is preferred) and other audiovisual aids such as music, movies… (video clips should be no more than 5 minutes long) This assignment should not be submitted as an essay.

2. The visual outline should be both informative and easy to follow.

There is not a set minimum or maximum number of slides. Less than ten slides is normally too short, and more than twenty slides is normally too long.

There should not be full paragraphs on slides. There should not be more than seven lines of text on each slide.

C. Works Cited

Please provide the instructor with a detailed works cited page with a minimum of four sources.

MLA or Chicago Style can be utilized

D. Requirements of visual presentation

A. Introduction

1. Provide basic background information

a. Provide a brief background about the president-where was he born, family background, political career, years in office

B. Content

a. Provide the pertinent information related to the scandal.

b. Discuss whether the president was tied to one or more major scandals

c. Did the scandal(s) involve other members of the president’s administration?

d. Did the event involve illegal behavior?

e. Was the American public made aware of the incident?

f. How was the incident settled?

C. Conclusion

a. Summarize why was this scandal significant?

b. Did the event have national impact?

c. Were there economic costs?

d. Was there a loss of confidence in the president?

e. Did the scandal change American society?

Peer Reviews due by Sunday, March 25, by 11:59 pm.

Students should write a summary that comments on the quality of ten individual presentations in a paragraph format with clearly written sentences.

Students should properly label each of the selected presentations being reviewed. Each of the peer reviews should be submitted collectively on a word document and uploaded as an attachment to the designated assignment tab. NO peer reviews should appear on the discussion board for the research presentations. No students should be able to see the peer reviews from their classmates.

The peer reviews are the work of individual students. The peer reviews should reflect the individual effort of each student to clearly communicate his or her own ideas. The instructor will take note of student commentary that appears to mimic that of other students. In addition, redundant commentary that lacks reflection and effort will be noted as well.

The evaluations should thoroughly critique the quality of each of the selected presentations.

Students should reflect on the following points while writing each summary. Did the student appear to have put much time and effort into researching and preparing materials? Was the presentation clear and easy to follow? Was it informative? Was it well researched? Did the student present new/interesting material?  Does the presentation appear to be lacking in facts, detail, and effort? Did the student proofread it and ensure that there were no spelling or grammatical errors? Were there pictures, graphs, maps, videos, or any other sort of visual to engage the viewer? Did the content appear to repeat basic points from the textbook? Did the content appear to be copied and pasted from an external website? Does the content appear to be plagiarized? Were the sources utilized properly documented? Was the presentation engaging, standard, or lacking in how it appears?

Using either a scale of 100- 0 or A- F, what grade would you give the student? 

General Education Assessment Assignment due by Sunday, February 11, by 11:59 pm.

Holistic Assessment of Critical Thinking

Essay Directions:

Read the passages below and write an essay that addresses the following:

· What is the position in each passage?

· What evidence or reasons are given in support of each position?

· Which position is more convincing and why?

Do no additional research on the topics other than using a dictionary. [NEW]

The Controversy: Does fracking contribute to global warming?

Passage 1. Pro: from "Fracking Contributes to Global Warming" by Louis W. Allstadt

The fracking that's going on right now is the real wake-up call on just what extreme lengths are required to pull oil or gas out of the ground now that most of the conventional reservoirs have been exploited—at least those that are easy to access.

First of all you have to look at what is conventional oil and gas. That was pretty much anything that was produced until around 2000. It's basically a process of drilling down through a cap rock, an impervious rock that has trapped oil and gas beneath it. And once you're into that reservoir—which is really not a void, it’s porous rock—the natural pressure of the gas will push up the gas and oil.

Now what's happened is that the prospect of finding more of those conventional reservoirs, particularly on land and in the places that have been heavily explored like the US and Europe and the Middle East just is very, very small. And the companies have pretty much acknowledged that. All of them talk about the need to go to either nonconventional shale or tight sand drilling or to go into deeper and deeper waters or to go into really hostile Arctic regions and possibly Antarctic regions.

Both the horizontal drilling and fracturing have been around for a long time. The industry will tell you this over and over again—they've been around for 60 years, things like that. That is correct. What's different is the volume of fracking fluids and the volume of flowback that occurs in these wells. It is 50 to 100 times more than what was used in the conventional wells.

The other [difference] is that the rock above the target zone is not necessarily impervious the way it was in the conventional wells. And to me that last point is at least as big as the volume. The industry will tell you that the mile or two between the zone that's being fracked is not going to let anything come up.

But there are already cases where the methane gas has made it up into the aquifers and atmosphere. Sometimes through old well bores, sometimes through natural fissures in the rock. What we don't know is just how much gas is going to come up over time. It's a point most people haven't gotten. It's not just what's happening today. We're opening up channels for the gas to creep up to the surface and into the atmosphere. And methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas in the short term—less than 100 years—than carbon dioxide.

Source Citation

Allstadt, Louis W. "Fracking Contributes to Global Warming." Natural Gas, edited by Dedria Bryfonski, Greenhaven Press, 2015. Opposing Viewpoints. Opposing Viewpoints in Context, Accessed 12 Dec. 2016. Originally published as "Former Mobil VP Warns of Fracking and Climate Change," Truthout.org, 19 July 2013.

Passage 2. Con: from "Fracking Does Not Contribute to Global Warming" by Coral Davenport

A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concludes that hydraulic fracturing—the controversial technique behind the nation's recent oil and gas boom—doesn't appear to contribute significantly to global warming, as many environmental groups have warned.

It's great news for oil and gas companies such as ExxonMobil, Shell, and Chevron, which have relied on breakthroughs in so-called fracking technology to cheaply unlock vast new reserves of domestic oil and natural gas that had been trapped underground in shale-rock formations.

"It's very good news," said Richard Keil, a spokesman for ExxonMobil, of the study. "This is a groundbreaking survey. It's the most extensive one that's been done yet, and it serves to add important new evidence that hydraulic fracturing does not contribute to climate change—it does not contribute methane emissions at levels higher than those set by the Environmental Protection Agency [EPA]."

The study concluded that the majority of hydraulically fractured natural gas wells have surface equipment that reduces on-the-ground methane emissions by 99 percent, although it also found that elsewhere on fracking rigs, some valves do allow methane to escape at levels 30 percent higher than those set by EPA. Overall, however, the study concludes that total methane emissions from fracking are about 10 percent lower than levels set by EPA.

The $2.3 million study was conducted by scientists at the University of Texas, with funding provided by nine energy companies, including ExxonMobil, and one environmental group, the Environmental Defense Fund. A spokesman for the University of Texas said that while the companies contributed money to the study, they had no input on the research or results, which were subject to independent peer review before being published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, one of the nation's most prestigious scientific journals.

University of Texas researchers say their yearlong study, which involved measuring methane emissions from 190 natural gas production sites in the Gulf coast, mid-continent, Rocky Mountains, and Appalachia, is far more comprehensive than [other studies], which relied on existing data rather than new fieldwork.

Source Citation

Davenport, Coral. "Fracking Does Not Contribute to Global Warming." Natural Gas, edited by Dedria Bryfonski, Greenhaven Press, 2015. Opposing Viewpoints. Opposing Viewpoints in Context, Accessed 12 Dec. 2016. Originally published as "New Study Says Fracking Doesn't Contribute to Global Warming," National Journal, 16 Sept. 2013.

Essays will be evaluated on the following criteria:

1.   IDEAS--focus on topic; effective support; explains & discusses main points

2.   ORGANIZATION--underlying plan to guide reader; progresses logically

3.   WORDING / DICTION--clear, straight-forward, lacks wordiness & inappropriate expressions

4.   SENTENCES--clear & well-constructed; avoids fragments & run-ons; variety in structure & length

5.   GRAMMAR--reflects standard written English; spelling & punctuation do not interfere with meaning

6.  MEETS OBJECTIVE--follows written assignment directions

COURSE SCHEDULE

Week 1	· Review course assignments · Watch video on Watergate scandal and answer related questions · Watch Unprecedented video and answer related questions · Sign up for research presentations · Due by Sunday, February 18, by 11:59 pm.
Week 2	· Create your presidential press release · Due by Sunday, February 25, by 11:59 pm.
Week 3	· Presidential scandal articles and questions Due by Sunday, March 4, by 11:59 pm.
Week 4	· Research Presentations · Due by Sunday, March 18, by 11:59 pm.
Week 5	· General Education Essays · Peer Reviews of Research Presentations · Due by Sunday, March 25, by 11:59 pm

Final course grades will be submitted by March 28.