Portal:Ethology

Welcome to the Wikiversity Department of Ethology.

Ethology is the study of animal behavior in natural environment, as opposed to behaviorism, which studies behavior in the lab.

Ethology's tools are minute-by-minute observation and analysis of behavior, usually on adaptive grounds. Behaviorism is focused on the design of controlled and repetitive experiments, usually to study hard-wired innate behaviors.

The Department of Ethology is a Wikiversity content development project where participants create, organize and develop learning resources for ethology.

The "topic" namespace contains pages that are for management and organization of small academic units at Wikiversity such as departments (see: Topics).

Department news
Can the definition be changed? The definition of ethology is weak (over-simplistic) and behaviourism is completely mis-defined (it is actually focussed on acquired behaviours, as oppose to ethology...)
 * 6 November 2006 - Department founded!

Learning Projects
See: Learning Projects and the Learning model.

Learning materials and learning projects are located in the main Wikiversity namespace. Simply make a link to the name of the learning project (learning projects are independent pages in the main namespace) and start writing! We suggest the use of the learning project template (use "subst:Learning project boilerplate" on the new page, inside the double curved brackets – ).

Learning materials and learning projects can be used by multiple departments. Cooperate with other departments that use the same learning resource.

Remember, Wikiversity has adopted the "learning by doing" model for education. Lessons should center on learning activities for Wikiversity participants. We learn by doing.

Select a descriptive name for each learning project.