NOTE: For the availability of the upcoming Internet assignments in Week 13 and Week 14, please read the notes below!
Week 13 Internet assignment. The Week 13 Internet assignment will be available starting tomorrow, Tuesday, when Week 13 begins. I hope you will find this a fun assignment: you will be nominating your favorite Storybooks from the semester. After everyone has turned in their nominations (the assignment is due by the end of Week 13), I'll prepare a ballot with the Storybooks that get the most nominations, and you'll be able to vote on the best ones - the voting is not for a grade, but just for fun, as a way to give the people who worked really hard on their Storybooks some well-deserved recognition.
Week 14 Internet assignment. For the Week 14 Internet assignment, you will be completing a course evaluation online, much like the evaluation you fill out in the classroom for your regular classroom-based courses. As soon as the online course evaluation form is made available by the College of Arts & Sciences, I will let you know. The Week 14 Internet assignment will not be available until that online course evaluation becomes available; I'll keep you posted based on what I learn about when that will be.
Storybook stack. As always on Monday, I will have a huge bunch of assignments in the Storybook stack that were turned in over the weekend or on Monday morning. You can check the contents of the stack to make sure I received your assignment. I will be reading and replying to the assignments in the order they were turned in - if the points you will be getting for the Storybook assignment(s) you have turned in will give you the points you need for your final grade in the class, let me know and I'll check on the points total for you! :-)
November 17: Birth of "The Mouse." On November 17 in the year 1970, computer pioneer Douglas Engelbart was granted a patent for what would become the "mouse" interface for supplying data, manually, to a computer. In the patent application, he described the wooden box with its two metal wheels as an "X-Y position indicator for a display system," although he nicknamed it the "mouse" because it had a tail coming out one end that connected it to the computer system. Dr. Engelbart has not profited from his invention because the patent ran out in 1987, before the widespread use of personal computers made the mouse ubiquitous (although I remember first seeing someone using a mouse in the summer of 1984). You can read more about the history of the mouse in this Wikipedia article, which is also the source for this image, which shows Dr. Engelbart's mouse, circa 1970:
