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| 60000 Level Courses (61000-61099) 61013 THEMES IN PREHISTORY: FOSSILS, DINOSAURS, AND HUMANS Dinosaurs have held the public imagination for almost 200 years now. Beyond an intrinsic interest in animals that lived in an unimaginably distant time, dinosaurs and dinosaur paleontology figured greatly in the development of concepts of geologic time and biology from the Renaissance on and are still centered in the public’s appreciation of "science." This course will take students through a tangled web of emergent concepts of time, organisms and ‘public relations’ through the last 300 years or so, focusing on the tangible and intangible impressions that dinosaurs have made on modern civilizations. As an online course, it's weekly modules can only be completed on a weekly basis and thus require systematic, weekly work.
It is said that in times of prosperity, when a nation is at its peak of power, that the Theatre thrives. It is also understood that the Theatre is a reflection of life and society. The Theatre opens an active portal to ancient civilizations and allows one to experience a world now gone. This comprehensive Web-Based course will explore the theatre and drama of three historical periods; Ancient Greece, Elizabethan England and 20th Century America; along with the societal influences that shaped the art form, and compare them to our contemporary world. *61033 DILEMMAS IN AMERICAN POLITICS: FREEDOM, ORDER, EQUALITY This class will examine the perennial dilemmas between Freedom, Order and Equality especially as they pertain to political ideology and public policy. To understand the dilemmas, we will examine the basic structure of our government with special attention paid to the structural tensions that augment this dilemma. Next we will look at how the dilemmas surface in contemporary debate among liberals and conservatives and how the dilemmas impact the definition of policies in the United States. We will be discussing and debating a number of current issues that pit these three valued ideals against one another to better understand the positions presented by advocates on both sides of the policy debates and to illuminate our personal positions and views.
This class explores changing ideas that make someone a jerk, nitwit, or loser from antiquity to the 20th century. How and why have these ideas changed? What cultural values-about individuality, about equality, about sympathy-do these ideas reveal? What are the social and political functions of labeling someone a jerk, nitwit, or loser? Under what conditions are these anti-heroes admirable, even heroic? Readings will possibly include: Homer’s The Iliad (selections), Plautus’s Miles Gloriosus, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (selections), Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Austin’s Pride and Prejudice, Melville’s Bartleby the Scriviner, Wodehouse’s The Mating Game, and Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. 61053 PARAPSYCHOLOGY: WEIGHING THE EVIDENCE The field of parapsychology includes phenomenon such as telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, ghosts and hauntings, spirit communication, and near-death experiences. The claim by many parapsychologists is that these paranormal occurrences have been studied with rigorous research methods, and that there is considerable evidence to support their existence. This course will weigh the evidence for parapsychology by tracing the history of psychical research from the dawn of spiritualism to the present day use of the ganzfeld technique. We will discuss the careers of famous psychics as well as the contributions of many noted parapsychologists. The methods and results from parapsychological studies will be evaluated in the context of the approaches used by researchers in the natural sciences. This course will address the following important issues: are testimonials useful evidence to support the existence of these phenomena; do fraudulent claims preclude acceptance of the field; can parapsychological research findings be replicated; do probability and chance help explain paranormal events; how have magicians and skeptics affected the perception of parapsychology in the scientific community and the general public. The objective of this course is to present perspectives from both "believers" and "skeptics" such that in the end each student can make up his/her own mind as to the strength of the evidence.
Human beings receive over 80% of their information about the spatial environment through vision. The mechanism by which this visual environment is revealed to us is light. It is the quality of that light, in all of its manifestations, that has inspired mankind for thousands of years. Ranging from the philosophical statement "I see", which has more to do with the act of understanding than the process of seeing, to the psychological aspects of certain three dimensional visual illusions that work, based solely upon stored mental information on the location of our sun and the resultant cast shadows; light has both inspired and guided our relationships with the world that surrounds us. So strongly interwoven is this relationship that is passes for the commonplace. This course seeks to explore and clarify the inter-relationship between man and light. Students will combine the advantages of distance education and concentrated explorations in the TCU Center for Lighting Education to create a unique learning environment. Individual/team investigations will concentrate on the use of light and color to create sophisticated themed environments. The TCU Center for Lighting Education will be used to support the actual demonstration of and investigations into the use of various types of electric lighting devices, ranging from simple track fixtures to computer controlled fixtures that can change color, lighting position, and pattern. The course will be further enhanced by two Lighting Designers in Residence who each provides a week long interactive lighting/learning experience.
*61073 THE SUPREME COURT’S GREATEST HITS - EQUAL PROTECTION OF THE LAW "The Supreme Court's Greatest Hits" is an on line course featuring student/professor analyses of Supreme Court decisions (for the Summer 2005 course, interpreting the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment). The focus of the course will involve evaluating the consequences of the Supreme Court's opinions in Brown v. Board of Education (1954, 1955), which attempted the integration of public education in the United States. Students will be asked to write a research paper evaluating those consequences. Students may choose to focus on the consequences within a particular metropolitan area.
Well…was it wild? When? To whom? What tamed it? This course wrestles with these questions by surveying the history of the trans-Mississippi West from earliest human settlement to the present (possibly into the future) and considering the significance, or insignificance, of frontiers in American History. Students will read a textbook (Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher's The American West: A New Interpretive History) and analyze the West through extensive use of web sites and representations in popular culture, especially films.
61093 PROFILES OF COURAGE: CINEMATIC STUDIES OF GREATNESS This MLA course capitalizes on great films to investigate the lives of people who achieve greatness. Films such as Amadeus, Braveheart, Glory, Lawrence of Arabia, Patton, and Schindler’s List are used as laboratories for studying the principles of greatness as played out in the lives of heroes, creators, commanders, and statesmen. Although the domains of greatness vary, from music to politics to the battlefield, many of the essential ingredients are the same. Chief among these is courage, which Ernest Hemingway defined as "grace under pressure." (Note: Students enrolled in this eCollege course must have access to a video source, either a library or a video outlet such as Blockbuster.)
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