Physics for future Presidents


Joining the PffP facebook group at CMU

IWe hope "Physics for future Presidents" will be a very interactive course: You should interact with your fellow classmates, during lecture, in recitations, and while learning the course material. However, I realize that there are particular challenges for this course, because students from all across campus will participate, so there are many classmates you will likely not see very much outside of official PffP events. However, in this age of social media, there are simple fixes for that.

I have created a facebook group for this course, which works under the umbrella of the Carnegie Mellon Groups Community. Facebook organizes this through its "groups for schools" concept. Our particular group is a "closed group", which (at the time of writing) according to facebook means that "Anyone can find the group and see who runs it. Only members can see who's in it and what they post." Joining up does not mean you have to be or become facebook friends with anybody else in this group. In particular, I will not be able to see your wall or timeline, and neither will you see mine. The details depend on your own facebook privacy settings, especially what information you have declared as "public", so you might want to revisit this first. Nonetheless, please take to heart the following truism: nothing you post online is ever truly private, so we advise that you conduct yourself responsibly.

Joining this group is not mandatory! But it might make your PffP experience more interesting and rewarding. Discussing course material, asking questions about difficult concepts, pointing out interesting current events that link to our classroom topics, and sharing useful material are just a few of the things you can do. And since I will also be able to partake in this discussion and give feedback, consider this as more bang for your teaching buck.

Here is how you sign up:

The group's facebook link is this: www.facebook.com/groups/PffPatCMU. If you go onto this page, you can request to join the group by clicking the appropriate link. If you're not yet a member of the CMU groups community, you might have to sign up at this webpage first: www.facebook.com/groups/groupsatcmu. The purpose of this is that facebook needs to check whether you are currently an active member of Carnegie Mellon University. It tests this by verifying your email, which has to end with "@andrew.cmu.edu" or "@cmu.edu". Once you request to join, I, as the administrators of the group, will see this request and link you in, provided you are part of our 2019 course roster. Please allow a little time for this to happen.