Ning blog pages. Those of you who have chosen a "theme" for your Ning Profile page may have noticed in the past few days that this theme does not work on your blog page now. My apologies for that! This is a change that Ning made across the board for all the Ning communities when they added some new features this past weekend. Personally, I think it's a terrible decision: I really enjoyed seeing the blogs look different ways based on the themes people chose! I've written a complaint to Ning, and many other people have complained as well, so I am hoping they might set it back to the way it was previously. Anyway, don't be surprised if your blog page looks different now. People will still see your chosen theme when they visit your Profile page to add comments at your Comment Wall, but they will not see your theme in your blog. (At least, not until Ning is convinced to change that back: fingers crossed!)
Storybook Stack. I'm still working my way through the large stack of Storybook assignments that people have turned in. If you turned in an assignment on or before 10AM on Monday, you should have comments back from me now. If you turned something in after 10AM on Monday or on Tuesday or Wednesday, your assignment is probably still in the stack, waiting for me to get to it. If you want to check and make sure your assignment is in the stack, you can see the contents of the stack here.
Friday drop deadline. This Friday, October 3, is the last day to drop the class with an automatic grade of W on your transcript. For more information, see yesterday's announcements.
Journey to the Sea: Rumi and Aesop. Many of you in the Myth-Folklore class are reading about the Sufi mystical writer Rumi this week, and as luck would have it, I published a brief article in the new October issue of Journey to Sea about Rumi and Aesop - it's something you might want to look at if you are curious about Rumi and/or about Aesop. Also, I wanted to let you all know about this journal since it is a project that was started by a former student in this class! Randy Hoyt was a student in Myth-Folklore many years ago (Fall 2003). He has since graduated from OU, and is now working as a webmaster for Blockbuster. Yet even as he climbs the corporate ladder, he has remained fascinated by the world of mythology, and this past summer he decided to start a journal in order to pursue this interest. He asked me to write some articles as the journal was getting started, and he has also been soliciting articles from other academics and writers and artists who study mythology. It's a great project - and just goes to show what one person can do thanks to the power of the Internet! You can find all four issues of the journal so far at JourneyToTheSea.com.
