If you have a friend in the course and the two of you want to work together, you can establish a collaboration for all of the assignments with the exception of the reflective work and the final exam. The majority of the coursework--projects, USFs, online exercises, and optional extra credit--are done by your collaboration. Your collaboration submits one copy of the work (on either partner's e-mail account) and I prepare one grade listing until the end of the term, when I make a separate copy of the grade listing for each student so I can record individual reflective work and final exam grades. There's an extra requirement for collaborations, a rather minor one that makes sense. The team of two has to supply a single half-page, double-spaced narrative for each work item that explains specifically how the two students split up the work, recombined efforts, reviewed any work the other person did, and in general how they insured that both partners got the full benefit of the work item.
If you have a friend in the class and you want to form a collaboration like this, both people should send me an e-mail in the first two weeks of the term indicating it and acknowledging that they understand the requirement of the narrative. You can then proceed to work on the "team of two" basis. If you know a friend who might want to enroll in the course to fulfill an LSP science requirement or as an elective, feel free to encourage them to enroll so you can form this kind of learning partnership.
Some of the best work in prior classes has developed from an inspired team of two friends collaborating on the subject matter and learning a great deal with shared efforts. You're free to work out such an arrangement or not, at your option. Just decide it within the first two weeks of the term and make me aware of it as indicated above.
