Week 2 Expectations

Summary

In this lecture, Kourtnie McKenzie outlines the expectations and assignments for Week 2 in English 3. Students impressed with timely submissions, except for a test student. She emphasizes no late extensions on discussion boards but allows extensions on critical analyses without penalties except delayed grading. Week 2 explores animal intelligence, shifting from artificial intelligence studied in Week 1. Students will tackle themes around anthropocentric biases, requiring readings from scientific articles and popular media to broaden understanding of intelligence beyond a human-centric view. Assignments include discussion board contributions with peer replies and a critical analysis essay.

Highlights

• Kourtnie McKenzie appreciates timely submissions for Week 1, except for a test student. 🌟
• Discussion boards track attendance and have a firm due date, while critical analyses deadlines can be extended. 📅
• Week 2's focus transitions from artificial intelligence to biological, exploring animal intelligence. 🦉
• Readings involve challenging scientific articles and more accessible public articles, pushing intellectual boundaries. 📖
• Discussion themes explore anthropocentric biases and require engagement with complex ideas. 🎓
• Extra credits are available for additional peer responses in discussion boards. 📈

Key Takeaways

• Timely submissions are encouraged, but critical analyses can be extended albeit with delayed grading. 🕒
• Week 2 focuses on animal intelligence, transitioning from artificial to biological perspectives. 🧠
• Key themes: Anthropocentrism and exploring intelligence without human biases. 🌍
• Assignments include engaging with readings, participating in a discussion board, and writing a critical analysis. 📚
• Students can earn extra credit through enhanced participation in discussion boards. 🌟

Overview

In the Week 2 lecture for English 3, instructor Kourtnie McKenzie sets the stage for exploring intelligence from a non-human perspective. Building on last week's subject of artificial intelligence, the focus shifts to examining animal intelligence. McKenzie acknowledges students' impressive engagement in Week 1, emphasizing the importance of discussion boards for tracking participation, with a hard due date of March 30th, while offering leniency for critical analysis submissions with extended deadlines for those juggling multiple commitments.

This week's readings challenge students to explore intelligence beyond an anthropocentric lens, facilitating a shift from synthetic to biological intelligence forms. They involve dissecting intricate scientific articles on plant and animal intelligence as well as a New Yorker piece that promises to be more accessible but equally informative. McKenzie encourages students to approach these readings with an open mind, highlighting the growing body of research that recognizes high levels of intelligence in various animal species.

Assignments for the week include discussion posts requiring students to reflect on and debate intelligence topics with peers while quoting from course materials. Additionally, students must complete a brief critical analysis essay. Performance and understanding will be gauged through participation in discussion boards and submission of analyses, with encouragement to seek further insights by reviewing additional course materials offered on Canvas.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction and Week 1 Highlights The chapter titled 'Introduction and Week 1 Highlights' begins with a warm welcome to the English 3 class. The instructor mentions the focus on the week 2 module but takes a moment to review and celebrate the achievements from week 1. Notably, all students, except for a test student account, participated actively by submitting their posts on the week 1 discussion board, indicating strong engagement from the class members.
• 00:30 - 02:00: Assignment Overdue Symbol and Extensions The chapter discusses the policy for overdue assignments, specifically regarding discussion boards and critical analyses. Discussion boards are not extended as they are used to track weekly attendance. However, extensions for critical analyses are allowed without any penalty to scores. If a student misses a critical analysis, they can inform the instructor via Canvas’s inbox.
• 02:00 - 04:00: Week 2 Overview In the 'Week 2 Overview' chapter, the instructor discusses the policy for submitting critical analysis assignments late. The main point highlighted is that there is no penalty in terms of points deducted for late submissions. However, the late submission will be graded after all current assignments in the instructor's queue, which could result in delays of a week or two for receiving the grade, as both English 3 and English 1A assignments are also being handled. The instructor emphasizes that students should feel free to reach out if they require more time for completing their assignments.
• 04:00 - 05:30: Reading Assignments for Week 2 The chapter titled 'Reading Assignments for Week 2' revolves around the possibility of needing extensions for assignments due to juggling multiple classes. In particular, students are advised to contact the instructor through Canvas's inbox if they miss the critical analysis for week two. The deadline for the discussion board is emphasized as having a hard due date of March 30th. The chapter also introduces the week 2 animal intelligence opening page, which mirrors the earlier post made by the instructor on Monday morning.
• 05:30 - 07:00: Plant Intelligence and Critical Thinking In this chapter, we transition from discussing synthetic intelligences, such as Deep Mind's Alpha Go, to exploring biological intelligences. The focus shifts to forms of intelligence we might typically perceive as lesser compared to human intelligence.
• 07:00 - 08:30: Navigating Research Articles The chapter titled 'Navigating Research Articles' discusses the evolving understanding of animal intelligence, challenging human-centered perspectives. It highlights recent research suggesting that animals may possess superior intelligence to humans in certain areas. The chapter encourages looking at intelligence through a non-anthropocentric lens, urging a shift in how research articles are interpreted with regard to animal intellect.
• 08:30 - 10:00: The Magic of Bird Brains and Weekly Readings The chapter titled 'The Magic of Bird Brains and Weekly Readings' challenges the notion of human superiority over other forms of intelligence by examining plant intelligence from a comparative psychology perspective. The content leans heavily on scientific details, aiming to deconstruct biases and fallacies regarding human exceptionalism. Readers might find themselves navigating through complex scientific concepts, indicating a deeper dive into the subject matter.
• 10:00 - 11:30: Facious Reasoning and Textbook Chapters The chapter titled 'Facious Reasoning and Textbook Chapters' seems to emphasize the importance of being adaptable and open-minded when interpreting complex texts. The text suggests that readers should be like 'water' rather than 'rock,' implying flexibility and fluidity in understanding. The chapter appears to discuss the challenges of interpreting dense or abstract articles and encourages the reader to extract as much meaning as possible, even from challenging passages. This serves as an exercise in expanding interpretive skills and the ability to handle difficult research articles, suggesting that such exercises are intentional to improve students' reading and comprehension capabilities.
• 11:30 - 13:00: Fallacies and Biases The chapter titled 'Fallacies and Biases' emphasizes the importance of thoroughly reading research articles, advising readers not to be intimidated by their length. It suggests spending around 10 minutes to understand the content, advocating multiple readings for clarity, particularly if certain sentences are difficult to grasp. The speaker personally employs this strategy to extract meaningful insights. Additionally, the chapter mentions an article titled 'The Magic Bird Brains,' although further details about this article are not provided in the transcript.
• 13:00 - 15:00: Discussion Board Instructions This chapter provides instructions for accessing an article titled 'The Magic of Bird Brains'. The article, originally from The New Yorker magazine, is available as a PDF in the files section of Canvas. Unlike academic articles, it's written in a more entertaining and accessible style, providing a different voice while still being informative. This ensures that readers who might struggle with accessing the article through usual means have an alternative, and they are prepared for the different tone compared to academic texts.
• 15:00 - 16:00: Critical Analysis Guidelines The chapter titled 'Critical Analysis Guidelines' discusses the approach to analyzing reading assignments in further detail. The speaker mentions plans for a Thursday lecture that will review weekly readings, although there is less focus on textbook chapters and more emphasis on the section related to 'facious reasoning.' There is an intent to delve deeper into both articles assigned for reading. The chapter seems to provide insights into how weekly readings are integrated and examined within the course structure, emphasizing critical thinking skills.
• 16:00 - 19:30: Conclusion and Contact Information The chapter titled 'Conclusion and Contact Information' outlines the plan for the remainder of the semester. Each week, two articles are introduced to spark discussion on the weekly topics, along with textbook chapters to anchor these discussions within a framework of critical reasoning. The chapter also hints at various reasoning methods including logical and 'facious' (likely intended as 'fallacious') reasoning that might be explored. The focus is on enhancing students' reasoning and logical engagement.

Week 2 Expectations Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 [Music] hello hello everyone and welcome to English 3 in this lecture I'll be looking at our week 2 module but before I dive into that I just wanted to highlight that at our week one module I noticed that we had uh perfect responses u everybody turned in a post for the week 1 discussion board except for the test student that I'm using for this view they missed the discussion board so
• 00:30 - 01:00 if you see this symbol that says this assignment's overdue and it's next to a discussion board I don't typically extend the discussion boards because that's how I track attendance for the week uh but I do extend the critical analyses and I do that without any penalty to your scores so if you missed the critical analysis uh there were I believe a differentiation of five students between the discussion board the critical analysis so a handful of you missed it um just let me know through Canvas's inbox when you would
• 01:00 - 01:30 like to turn it in and I will give you a new deadline the only um finger quotes penalty for turning in a critical analysis late is it means that I'm going to grade it at the bottom of my queue and right now my queue has both English 3 and English 1A assignments in it so that means that you may be waiting an additional week or two uh in order to get a grade for an assignment if you need more time to complete it I take more time to grade it that's that's the only really uh penalizing factor but you can still get the full points so you might as well you know contact me if you
• 01:30 - 02:00 need that extension and that also applies to week two if you find uh you're juggling multiple classes and you end up missing the critical analysis for week two you can contact me through Canvas's inbox to get additional time to complete that up at the discussion board that does have a hard due date of March 30th so that said let's take a look here at our week 2 animal intelligence opening page which is pretty much identical to the announcement that I posted early Monday morning so for this
• 02:00 - 02:30 week's reading assignments you will be reading two more articles last week we looked at articles pertaining to um artificial intelligence and specifically we were uh taking a look at uh Deep Minds Alph Go and so now we're going to uh pivot from synthetic intelligences to the other side of the spectrum which we're returning to biological intelligences and we're looking at some that we may normally consider uh quote unquote lesser intelligence to us now
• 02:30 - 03:00 again I I use the finger quotes a lot um I say this uh uh quote unquote because uh that there's an increasing uh body of research that shows that animals actually are extraordinarily intelligent and may even surpass us in some categories of intelligence and so what we have for the articles today is looking at intelligence from a different angle trying to look at it not from that anthrop uh pacentric lenses right which
• 03:00 - 03:30 is going to be in your fallacies and biases this idea that uh humanity has some kind of superiority over other beings and other intelligent um emergences in reality uh so we're going to try to deconstruct that a little bit by looking at plant intelligence from a comparative psychology perspective and this article is going to feel uh a bit more on the scientific side uh so if you if you feel like you're swimming a little bit through this and you're hitting parts where you don't quite
• 03:30 - 04:00 understand what it says just try to go with the flow of it be more like the water and less like the rock and see if you can extract meaning from it moving between the sentences that do make sense to you um this article I do believe though will push the limits of um of your ability to interpret a bit and that that's on purpose that in and of itself I like to give students uh research articles like this for that uh additional reading exercise um but you can see most of what's here is its
• 04:00 - 04:30 citations and sources because it is very academically rich and so don't be intimidated at first when you open it about length it really shouldn't take you more than I would say like 10 minutes to digest it um and give it a multiple reads too if you feel like that uh that some of the sentences are tripping you up uh I I tend to read research articles several times in order to really try to extract what's coming from them and then this other one the magic bird brains so this is from the
• 04:30 - 05:00 New Yorker in the event that you're having issues with accessing this article you can go to the files section of Canvas and also find The Magic of Bird Brains as a PDF uh The New Yorker is not written for an academic audience it is written more for entertainment uh but it is still rich with information so we're going to have a completely different voice here it is going to feel a bit more accessible than the other article uh but at the exchange of it's also as
• 05:00 - 05:30 you see with me flying through it here a bit longer than the other article right so uh we are going to take a look at both of these reading assignments in a little bit more detail uh when I post our Thursday lecture which is going to review weekly readings uh now I will not really be looking at the textbook chapters as much in the weekly readings uh but I will be looking also at our facious reasoning which is the section
• 05:30 - 06:00 that you are going to see cropping up in place of the syllabus for the remainder of the semester so as I promised in last week's lecture you always have two articles that are going to open the conversation of what we'll be talking about for that week textbook chapters that are going to uh kind of ground those conversations in the whole um critical reasoning approach and then uh facious reasoning so these are going to be ways that we might reason or engage in logic uh in a way that's actually
• 06:00 - 06:30 illogical or doesn't serve um a a cogent reasoning or sound reasoning so in this case we're going to be looking at the false dilemma and anthropocentricism and the false dilemma you may have encountered this in a previous course if you took English one with me sometimes I go over this fallacy uh in my 1A classes uh the false dichotomy or the eitheror fallacy are two of the other uh common names that
• 06:30 - 07:00 you may run into when discussing this black and white thinking is another one it's basically thinking about things as uh this or that right uh whereas typically we live in a world of spectrum thinking where there's more than just two probabilities available so we're going to deconstruct how this form of facious reasoning or non-cogent reasoning may lead us astray when we're trying to uh critically analyze something then anthropocentricism this is more of a
• 07:00 - 07:30 bias so a fallacy is an error in how we process our thoughts logically and a bias is um a belief that is going to warp our perspective such that we're not able to reason cogently so anthropocentricism is this idea of things being human- centered again we're going to look at this in in more detail on Thursday uh but uh I think that you could already see the correlation between us looking at
• 07:30 - 08:00 anthropocentric thinking and then discussing plant intelligence bird intelligence and last week artificial intelligence and so this week's lectures and videos are going to uh build upon that not just through looking at the weekly readings but also exploring a TEDex talk where we uh see a researcher talking about the octopus mind and so this idea of a decentralized brain and kind of like an alien way of
• 08:00 - 08:30 intelligence uh that exists here on our planet and then when you are done going through all of this material you will have the chance to write about it in two different spaces the first is going to be our discussion board and the second is going to be our critical analysis now on our discussion board I'm asking you to look at intelligence beyond the human perspective and so you will be answering just one of the following two questions so the first one is how did the weekly readings challenge
• 08:30 - 09:00 or expand your understanding of intelligence beyond the human perspective uh so in this one we're trying to uh consider what we think it means to be intelligent and how the articles that we've read both in week one and week two um maybe redefine what we think intelligence is and then the second is that how did anthropocentric thinking limit our concept of intelligence so when we are raised in this container of humans being the
• 09:00 - 09:30 superior mind uh how does that limit how we approach other intelligent beings so one is more of a personal reflection and the other is looking more at maybe like the societal approach to intelligence and how we could reframe the way that we approach intelligence uh as as a larger species like last week I'm going to ask you to write minimum of a hundred words for your original post and then you're going
• 09:30 - 10:00 to respond to two peers now your peer responses should extend the conversation by adding or respectfully challenging ideas so it's not simply enough to say that you agree with someone uh if you do agree with them you want to maybe word what they're saying in a new way that's one way that we could add to a conversation is by giving an idea a slightly different angle think of it like taking a gemstone turning it in your hand and looking at different facets so it's the same gemstone but you're bringing another facet to that
• 10:00 - 10:30 conversation and then of course another thing that we can do is respectfully challenge ideas and emphasis on the respect right um the the ideal uh space for academic conversations to grow is one where we acknowledge that we have different beliefs and different points of view but we remain open-minded to other people's beliefs and points of view so just like last week it's going to be worth five points one for posting one for answering one of the two
• 10:30 - 11:00 questions one for including quotes from the assigned readings so I'd like you to include a quote from at least one of the articles on animal intelligence as well as a quote from either the textbook chapters or the facious reasoning sections of the reading assignments uh if you want to include one of the quotes from the previous week's articles as well you can do that as like a third quote because I do think that it is possible to tie in uh artificial intelligence and animal intelligence into the two questions that are being proposed from the discussion board but
• 11:00 - 11:30 you're not required to necessarily bring that in yet uh that'll that'll be later when we do our first uh essay in this class and then of course there's the two points for respond to peers but you can get four points for respond to peers which would net you seven out of five points for the discussion board if you decide to respond to um four posts rather than two posts so you can always get a little bit of extra credit every week in the discussion boards and I do that as a way for you to make up discussion boards that you miss since I
• 11:30 - 12:00 don't extend the due dates on them so the critical analysis uh you should watch the video from TEDex and read the articles from the New Yorker and from NDPI in order to really get an idea of these different kinds of approaches to intelligence through animals before engaging in this analysis it's also going to help you to read about the fallacies and biases that are
• 12:00 - 12:30 presented every week before gauging the analysis because as you can see anthropocentricism is at the center of one of the two questions so just like the discussion board you only have to answer one of these but unlike the discussion board I'm asking you to aim for a minimum of 200 words rather than 100 words and this is because there aren't any peer responses um I cap it at 500 words because there's over 30 of you i I uh overenrolled the class and so um it's just a lot of words for me to go through every week so if you could uh try to
• 12:30 - 13:00 keep in the micro essay form that's very helpful to me sometimes it's it's really easy to run with the scissors with these questions if this is a topic that you're passionate about so the first question uh how does anthropocent anthro Oh man I'm wait can you feel my brain being like two syllables ahead of what I'm saying it's my perpetual existence uh how does anthropocentricism limit our understanding of intelligence explain your reasoning with no less than two quotes from this week's
• 13:00 - 13:30 videos and readings again I invite you to bring in quotes from the previous week's readings as well so long as you're also reflecting that you engage in this week's uh articles uh what does animal intelligence and artificial intelligence Oh goodness we only need one of those verbs show us about the human experience of intelligence i'll go and edit that after this lecture so again only focus on one prompt you can when you hit start assignment go to this text entry and
• 13:30 - 14:00 type directly in this text box it's going to give you a word counter down here if you go that route or you can use file upload drag a file in there or you can click it and it'll prompt an upload uh window to pop up uh if you do upload a file I ask that you use a PDF docs or doc file uh if you have any questions comments concerns fears regarding the expectations for this week let me know through Canvas's inbox which you find
• 14:00 - 14:30 over here in our gray menu to the left otherwise I will see you on Thursday for reviewing the weekly readings