Evaluating Learning

Final Writing Assignment

Part I: Re-evaluation of Atlantis Found

Ground rules for Part I: You may discuss any aspect of this question with people in this class, with the TAs, or with me, but you must prepare and write your own answer.

As you know, in the prologue to Atlantis Found, Clive Cussler postulates that a meteorite more than 15 km in diameter slammed into the Earth in the year 7120 BC (9076 ypb). He describes a series of geologic and historical consequences of the proposed impact, including formation of Hudson Bay in Canada, global geologic changes of many types, mass extinction, and destruction of advanced human societies, including the lost continent and civilization of Atlantis (quelle surprise....).Earlier in the semester, I asked you to use your knowledge of geology and geologic processes to evaluate the plausibility of his hypothesis. Since your wrote your first essay, you have learned things that should help you be better able to evaluate Cussler's hypothesis.

Using what you have learned in this course, write a short essay re-evaluating the plausibility of his claim that a 15-km diameter meteorite slammed into the Earth at Hudson's Bay in 7120 BC (9076 ybp) and caused the effects described in the introduction to his book. Choose specific claims, and
make arguments that draw on your increased knowledge of the geology and human history of North Africa, of the nature and rates of geologic processes and evolution, of the age of the Earth and the length of geologic time, and of the character of the geologic record. At the end of your
essay, add a short paragraph explaining whether your assessment of Cussler's hypothesis is different now than it was in September and, if so, in what ways.

Part II: What You Have Learned About How Geologists Solve Problems

Ground rules for Part II: You may discuss any aspect of this question with people in this class, with the TAs, or with me, but you must prepare and write your own answer.

We began the course with the Nile River region, where we have spotty historical records for events back to about 5000 ybp. That length of time is only one ten thousandth of one percent of the entire history of the Earth! How do geologists reconstruct events during the other 99.9999 percent of Earth history? How do geologists determine what the Earth was like at various times, what happened when, and so on? Write a short essay that conveys a clear understanding of what kinds of questions geologists ask, what kinds of data geologists collect and why, and how geologists use these date to help them build up a picture of past events. You may use examples to illustrate your points.

Writing

- This is a writing intensive course, and the Writing Program has organized the following plenary sessions for students taking writing intensive
courses. I expect you to attend all four sessions, so please put them on your calendar.

- While this course is officially designated as a "writing intensive" course, the writing you will do is not solely designed to help you become a better writer. Writing will be an integral part of learning the material we cover in the course. Unless a person processes information in one way or another, he/she will not learn very much. Many courses ask students to process information by studying and taking exams. This course has no exams, and you will be processinginformation in this course by doing a good deal of writing and teaching. I will grade your writing according to the grading guidelines on the attached sheet.

Individual Worksheets and Questions

Due dates will be marked clearly on each sheet. Late assignments will be penalized 10%, and late assignments not submitted before graded
assignments are returned will receive a zero.

Standards

- In this course, you will be graded on both your written work and your oral work. Some papers will receive standard number grades out of 100 (e.g., homework problems involving calculations, short-answer problems, etc.). Other papers do not lend themselves as well to number grades, and those papers will be graded on a scale of 0 to 5, with each number reflecting a clearly-defined standard for the assessing your efforts. Those criteria are outlined on the next page. I will do this, rather than give you a letter or standard number grade, because I want you to focus on what kind of work you have done and what kind of work I expect from you, not on what grade you have gotten. A satisfactory job on an assignment will earn a 3. To earn a 4, you must do more than an average workmanlike job, and a 5 requires that you really knock my socks off. Yes, the standards are high in this course.

- On the next page, you'll find both the general criteria for the 0-5 scale and a general view of where "satisfactory work" stands in terms of the College's grading system. Please notice that a B is good work, not merely satisfactory. So. This handout will let you know at the outset what it takes to get a B or an A in this course, both of which involve work above a satisfactory job on assignments, and that's the last time you'll see standard grades in this course. From now on, you'll simply receive a grade on the scale from 0-5 in the hopes that you can then focus on the quality of the product you produce in the course, not on the letter grade.

Overview of the Diamond Mine Module

This module gives students experience in project planning, data collection, analysis, and presentation via a simulated diamond exploration project set in southern Algeria.

The exploration project occupies the middle month of the semester, but preparation for the project begins at the start of the semester and continues with one class and assignment per week that run parallel to the main work that students do on the Nile and the Sahara during the first part of the semester. For example, students begin preparing for the projectat the end of the first week of the course, when they spend two days in the field studying river processes, panning for heavy minerals, and performing mineral separation and analysis in the lab on the samples that they collect. The once-a-week assignments also give them basic background on diamonds and kimberlites.

- Once the exploration project starts in earnest, students do not (of course) travel to the exploration site in southern Algeria, but they do work in groups as if they were there. Teams design an exploration program, carry out a simulated sample collection project, analyze real samples with instrumentation in our department, carry out simulated geophysical surveys (see class photos), iteratively plan additional phases of exploration based on results, and prepare an exploration evaluation for a hypothetical client company.

- At the end of the semester, I bring to campus a colleague who has experience in international mineral exploration and who can play the role of a potential investor, and each team presents and tries to sell its prospect. Final preparation for this presentation takes place in parallel with course and class work on the final section of the course on the East African Rift.

The Storyline

I believe that it is important to make a project such as this one as realistic as possible, and I worked closely with the colleague mentioned above to design an exploration program that mimicked as closely as possible what might actually occur in Africa if a company wished to conduct mineral exploration. I also wanted to design a quasi-realistic scenario for how a college student with a rudimentary knowledge of diamond exploration might become involved in a major diamond exploration program. So, I invented an Uncle Jesse who is a principal in an Algiers-based exploration firm called KMJ Consulting. The story begins with a boondoggle in Colorado, during which each student visits a hypothetical friend and spends a week chasing after the rumor of discovery of a diamond pipe north of Saguache, Colorado (in the folder, the related explanations and assignments are Boondoggle in Colorado 1 and 2). Upon discovering that his niece/nephew has had a little taste of diamond exploration, Uncle Jesse invites his niece/nephew to join him for an exploration season in Algeria. Each student receives two letters (separated by about a week) via campus mail from "Uncle Jesse" (you can find these in the folder under Uncle Jesse letters). I plan this as a surprise, and the letters arrive in student mailboxes in envelopes complete with KMJ Consulting logos, return addresses in Algiers, and Algerian stamps. The main part of the project revolves around actual exploration work in Algeria, with the students taking an admittedly larger role in planning and carrying out the exploration program than they would in the real world if the "Uncle Jesse" scenario were true.

Just as an aside, I wanted to site the project in an area in Africa that was likely to contain diamonds (based on its geology) but that had never been explored for diamonds before. I selected three areas initially, Mauritania, Western Sahara, and southern Algeria. I ruled out Western Sahara when I discovered that the wars of the 1980s and 1990s had left over 100,000 land mines in the country. In the real world, an exploration company would not be likely to choose such an area as a primary target. I decided against Mauritania because of extensive sand cover in the desert and settled on southern Algeria, which was very promising despite its very remote and inhospitable location. Roughly a year after I taught the Algeria module for the first time, I discovered that DeBeers had just been granted a concession by the Algerian government to prospect in southern Algeria, and a Belgian company had just finished its first season prospecting in Mauritania!!

The Overall Structure of the Module

The Exploration Program Overview provides general background for the exploration program and outlines the phases of exploration in the context of the course. Students receive actual heavy mineral samples for microscopic examination and use those samples to plan subsequent phases of exploration. After selecting possible target areas based on sample analysis, teams plan and carry out a simulated airborne magnetic survey using
scaled models of their exploration areas using CBL magnetic field probes (see class photos). After collecting data and creating appropriate Excel files, teams use Surfer to create contoured maps to locate magnetic anomalies. Teams receive geochemical data on garnets from samples that they request to have analyzed, and students have the opportunity to run a small suite of garnets on our SEM-EDAX to determine calcium and chromium contents, which are correlated with the presence of diamond in kimberlite. Students can continue to collect and analyze heavy mineral samples at any point in the project. Teams also plan and receive data for ground resistivity surveys and for a finalphase of diamond drilling. At every phases after the initial phase, teams must make a proposal that outlines what they want to do next and why and how much it will cost. If the proposal is inadequate or unreasonable, teams must re-do proposals. At each stage, teams receive bonuses for being aggressive (i.e., submitting progress reports, proposals, and data request ahead of the mandated schedule).

To simulate more closely the kinds of serendipitous things that can happen to a real field party, teams must draw two Serendipity cards each class period. One card each day is a negative chance happening (e.g., unusually poor quality for a particular set of samples or loss altogether of a suite of samples), and one card is a positive (or potentially positive) chance happening (e.g., discovery of a colorless stone, plus the instructions to roll a die to determine whether it is a diamond or not). The Serendipity Cards are included in the CD.

Teams do not compete directly with one another, and I think that is an important aspect of this module. Each team is responsible for designing and carrying out an exploration program for a different portion of the same large exploration area. Each exploration area adjoins at least one other team's exploration area, and teams have the opportunity to share data at the boundaries of their areas of they wish.

The other aspect of the project that I think is important is the overall complexity and openendedness of the project. As the project progresses, students have many different avenues to pursue, and the amount of data and diversity of data mount quickly. Teams must cope with keeping track of many strands of an exploration program and must plan subsequent phases using as many threads as possible in order to be most successful and not head down blind alleys. For most students, this is a new and valuable experience that is markedly different from their prior experiences in traditional labs that have a finite end-point at after three hours.

Advice for Using the Model as a Template

This module could be used for any kind of exploration scenario - water resources for a town, sand and gravel deposits, any type of mineral resource, petroleum, etc. Based on myexperience with the diamond exploration project, here is my take on what the important
 aspects might be:

- The problem should be as real-world as possible. My students actually enjoy the rather hokey story line, and they value the real-world details that range from government agreements to sample security to timetables and budgets.

- The problem must be open-ended so that teams have to make choices and so that no one clear path to a conclusion is obvious. At the same time, the problem can't be so open-ended that students are overwhelmed and don't know where to start. One way to achieve this is to constrain the first phase of the exploration program. I do this by stating that company policy in diamond exploration dictates initial regional drainage sampling (which is what any company would actually do) and by giving them a total budget and a per sample cost for the first phase. This limits what they do at the outset and gets them started. Subsequent phases are much more openended.

- It isn't important that students know all about possible exploration strategies before the project starts. They can learn about strategies as they go along when they need them. In the diamond exploration project, for example, most companies would start with drainage sampling rather than with airborne geophysical surveys, and the reading that I assign makes that clear. When it becomes obvious that geophysical surveys are a likely next option, students can learn about the various options and choose among them at the time (i.e., just-in-time learning).

- A final presentation to an outside expert (even if it is no more complicated than having a colleague from the department serve as the expert) really ratchets up the expectations. The presentations that my teams have done for my colleague from British Columbia have been truly outstanding and far beyond anything that my students have done or would do just for me.