Welcome to GEOG 303i. The Graduate Assistants (who are Geography graduate students) and your instructor want this to be a stimulating and rewarding course for you. We have planned a variety of activities and assignments to fulfill the objectives of the course. We realize that each student enters GEOG 303i with a unique academic background, set of interests, and strategy for learning. After reading the introduction, it would be a good idea for you to plan your strategy for completing the course.

Course-Level learning Objectives

There are three levels (a hierarchy) of learning objectives for GEOG 303i. First, there is a set of learning objectives that cover the entire course, discussed below. They will help you synthesize the information and concepts from various parts of the course. Second, there are learning objectives for each major section (or Theme) of the course which help you relate concepts within the section. Finally, there are learning objectives for each unit in the textbook. Together, these learning objectives will guide your study and learning objectives will guide your study and learning throughout the course.

1. Look at the photograph of a landscape on the cover of your textbook. This is typical of the scenery we enjoy, even though the specifics of the scene will differ if you are standing on any other spot on the earth. There is a brief description of the landscape on the back cover of your text; this landscape is in Nepal. The first and overarching objective for this course is that you be able to discuss how this or any other landscape is created and changed, its origins and its dynamics. Many things have happened and continue to take place in every landscape involving the climate, the plants and animals (including human beings as important agents of change), and the underlying geologic forces and processes. Each leaves its signature on the landscape. There are two parts to this objective, observing and interpreting.

2. If you were to travel 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the location of the photograph on the cover, you would observe a different landscape, but most of the features would be similar. That is, what you observe is not random, but part of a pattern. There is pattern to the world created by the fact that the interacting forces and processes that create any given landscape each have a pattern. However, the interaction of these patterns leads to such variety that no two places on the earth are the same. However, the key to being to interpret what you see in landscapes is to understand the forces that create the patterns of climate, vegetation, soils, rivers, mountains, hills and valleys, and other features of the landscape. The second of objective is to learn each of the major patterns that interact in landscapes, and what creates the patterns.

3. The people who study various components of landscapes have a special way of describing what they find out. They use a specific vocabulary, have conventions for describing quantities, and use graphs, tables and diagrams to help them understand what they are studying and to make communication with others more efficient. An important part of this is the way that scientists express the relationships between parts of the landscape and make the landscape a system, how systems are described. The third objective is to learn the vocabulary, conventions for quantifying things, and the conventions for drawing graphs and diagrams, and using tables.

4. The scientists who study various components of landscapes use specific methods to obtain the information about landscapes that they report on. Actually, there are many procedures for measuring things, for verifying that the information being obtained is reasonable, and for checking new information with concepts that have been developed to interpret information. This is usually referred to as the "scientific method" but this makes it sound as if it is the special property of scientists. Actually, it is similar to the way we interpret the world around us, although it is supposed to be more rigorous and objective so that the information that scientists provide to each other and to the larger society can be relied upon. In fact, the most important thing that scientists have to teach us is not specific information about this phenomenon or that concept, but a rigorous set of procedures and standards to make sure that what we think we know about the world meets some objective standards. While the textbook talks about the many aspects of physical geography as if most of what is said is fact, in reality every item of information is tentative. Science is an ongoing enterprise. The fourth objective of the course is to understand that science is an ongoing search because there are many (maybe even most) things about the world that we do not really understand; today's "facts" will be refuted or reinterpreted in the future.