If you were not aware of it before, you can now see that the seminar will be accompanied by this website. It is still under construction, but its basic architecture is in place. Please review what is currently available online and send me your comments and suggestions for changes, deletions, or additions.

Be sure to bookmark the site and check it frequently for additions and changes, especially in the schedule.

A preliminary outline of the aims of the seminar can be found in the Introduction. An explanation of what the seminar as a whole hopes to achieve and what is expected of the students can be found in the Introduction and Purpose sections.

Besides your presentations, some outside speakers will be invited and a couple of field trips will be included. So far, a geologist is more or less lined up, and Lincoln Brower is going to conduct a biological field trip to the Tye River some time in April.

• If any of you have suggestions for invited speakers or field trips, let us know.

As for the website, what we're intending to develop is a dynamic, multi-disciplinary resource base on the subject of water. Through the website, Sweet Briar will provide a new type of learning resource.

For the introductory page, each of you should prepare and write something that addresses in simple terms your discipline's approach to the topic of water.

This can be done in the form of a question that more or less asks how your discipline or field studies or responds to water -- for example: "How does a Physicist study water?" or "Is there water in Dance?" or "Is there a History of water?" -- to which you supply a clear, straightforward, layperson's answer in a few paragraphs. The "answer" can contain any number of hot links to more challenging material. Try to include images.

You are also asked to write the introductory page with high school students (and teachers) in mind. Additional pages hot-linked to the introductory page will cover more college-level material.

How much additional material you provide is up to you. Certainly links can be established to information online that the students in the course can read in preparation for your presentation.

You are encouraged to compile or compose material yourself for the website. Think about putting your actual presentation online.

The seminar will be conducted through the website. A laptop connected to an LCD projector or to a television set will be in use in the classroom at each meeting. Plan to place any text and/or images (including charts, diagrams, and graphics), plus sound files and clips of movies and videos online for use in your classroom presentation. This material will of course be available at all other times to the students in the seminar, to other faculty participating in the project, and to anyone else who is interested.

If copyright is an issue for any of the material you wish to use, it can be placed in a password-protected folder accessible only to students and participants in the seminar.

Please contact Chris Witcombe witcombe@sbc.edu or 381-6194 for any help you think you might need with web-based material

Besides whatever material you may want your students to read in preparation for your presentation, please also include additional bibliographic or web-based resources.

The idea is to make the website as interesting and as useful as possible to our students, and anyone else who visits.

Each department has been allotted two time slots. If you want to use only one of the slots, let us know soon.

If any of the scientists would like to schedule a lab for one of the time slots, let us know.

If you want to place your material on a server other than "Honors", let us know.

If you want to have direct network access to the "Honors" server, let us know.

The website will be more than the contents of the seminar. It is decribed as "A Sweet Briar Learning Resource" and will serve to "showcase" both Sweet Briar faculty and the departments involved this project. It will continue to exist after the seminar is over.