2015 Student Website Project
(scroll down for Assignment details and last year's examples)

Food Caching Behavior in Pikas
- Kerry Jones, Linden Mullins, & Aubrey Pelz

Arboreality in Clouded Leopards (Neofelis nebulosa)
- Avehi Singh & Karla Velarde

Hive Behavior in Honey Bees
- James Holland & Theresa Steele

Marine Animal Sex-Dispersed Migration Behavior
- Margalit Leiser and Jaelin Cola

Animal Play
- Jocelyn Hansson

Cooperative Hunting Behavior of Moray Eels and Groupers
- Clara Herrera & Hye Min Park

Cross-Species Tool Use
- Jasmine Huang & Lauren Vanderhooft

Autotomy and Regeneration
- Hulali Alford & Rose Driscoll

Hummingbird Vocal Learning
- Alex Loukides and Hannah McConnell

Territorial Behavior in Pinnipeds
- Denis Ivanov & Stephanie Opiyo

Social Dominance in Spotted Hyenas
- Elaine Kushkowski & Duncan Herb

Corvid Vocalizations
- Nathaniel Klein & Sophia McKean

Sexual Cannibalism
- Mary Cho & Sydney LaStella

Honest Signals
Mikela Sheskier & Shirin Porkar-Aghdam

Dominance Hierarchies in Male Rattus Norvegicus
- James Ryan

Student pairs will create a web site for an animal behavior of their choice.
Students will comment on each other's draft website.
For examples from previous years see my TEACHING page.

FOR THIS INFORMATION AND ADDITION DETAIL DOWNLOAD THE ASSIGNMENT (handed out in class)
For instructions working with dreamweaver, dowload the tutorial (covered in lab)

For instructions to decrease image resolution for web display download instructions.

For general pointers on website context and style download information.

Animal Behavior Websites
Website design can be a very effective means of communication. In science we use websites to advertise our own work, recruit students to our labs, convey the breadth of our research interests, discuss immature ideas, solicit collaborations, disseminate supplementary data, host databases that may be of use to other researchers in our field, organize our courses, advertise conferences, and generally communicate with scientists and the public around the world.

Students will work in pairs to design and create a website to summarize the current scientific understanding of a specific animal behavior. Students may either use Tinbergen’s 4 questions to fully describe all aspects of an animal behavior, or they may use some other comprehensive scheme. The index site must include information describing the main areas/questions of behavior that the students have decided to use. Because some model organisms are more suited to specific types of research, it may be necessary to incorporate research from multiple organisms in order to discuss the ontogeny, mechanism, phylogeny and adaptive value of the specific animal behavior. While books, websites, and newspapers may be used, the majority of the information presented should be supported by primary literature and all sources must be cited (including images). When appropriate, students should include historical perspective. The completed websites will be hosted on the web with students' permission

Evaluation:
Websites will be evaluated according to the "web critique" criteria. Students are expected to have a completed website by the draft due date. This draft will then be "polished" after receiving peer review. Both the draft, and the final product, as well as the critiques will be part of the total grade for this project.
Draft - 25%
Critiques - 10%
Final product 65%

See examples from past years:
http://academic.reed.edu/biology/courses/bio342f06/index.html

Schedule:
Week3 During Lab: pairs and topics
Pick a partner to work with and pick an animal behavior topic.

Week 5 During Lab:
By now, you and your partner should have begun to research your topic and have decided on a categorization scheme and have written some text for each area of inquiry including citations and images.

In lab time you will:

pick which template you want to use
Create a "site" folder with your chosen templates.
Create a home page with:

the title.
a brief outline and/or bullet points (to be expanded later).

Create 5 sub-topics pages to be filled with information the draft information that you have.

MECHANISM
ONTOGENY
PHYLOGENY
ADAPTIVE VALUE and
REFERENCES

Experiment with colors and text styles using the style sheet.
Learn to create internal and external links.
Learn to add images to your webpage.

Tuesday November 3rd @ 5:00 PM
All websites must be posted on the courses server by 5:00 pm.
The websites should be ready for public viewing. It is each student's responsibility to check that all images and links are functional from any computer on campus. If you have failed to create correct relational links and images they may work on your own computer but not when viewed across the web. Please seek advice before noon today for assistance.

Students will be assigned 3 websites to critique.

November 11th
Constructive critique is due in class.
These critiques will be delivered to the webpage authors

Tuesday December 1st
Final websites, incorporating the critique comments, must be posted on the courses server by 5:00 pm. They will be linked to create a webpage for the course.