Friday, August 29 - Sunday, August 31

You have reached the end of Week 1! The Week 1 Read and Respond assignment (blog commenting) is available now, and all remaining Week 1 assignments are due on Friday or on Saturday or Sunday - please make sure you get started on those assignments soon. Also, Friday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you forgot to do any of the assignments that were due on Thursday.

Read and Respond blog comments. Now that everybody has had a chance to finish their blog posts for the week, the Read and Respond assignment for Week 1 is now available! You have been assigned two blogs to read; for detailed instructions and links to your assigned blogs, visit the Read and Respond assignment page.

Working on the weekend. This course is designed so that you can do all your assignments by working only on the weekends. This weekend, for example, you would need to finish up the Week 1 assignments, and you would also need to do the reading, quizzes and blog posts for Week 2. You will then be free all week, Monday through Friday. Next weekend, you will finish up Week 2 and start on Week 3. The weekend after that, you will finish up Week 3 and start on Week 4, and so on. If you plan your schedule to do all your work on the weekends, you can manage to have absolutely nothing due for this class from Monday through Friday, leaving you free during those days to attend to your regular classes and other responsibilities. Plus, following this "weekend-only" strategy will earn you some Early Bird extra credit (see below).

Early Bird extra credit. The Early Bird extra credit is the easiest extra credit you can get. To take these extra credit points, you don't have to do any extra work - you just have to be one week ahead of schedule. If you are one week ahead on the reading-quizzes-blogging, you can take an extra point each week. If you are one week head on your Storybook assignments, you can take an extra point each week. You can do either or both of these Early Bird options for one or two points of extra credit every week - and while it may not seem like much, those points add up fast! Those extra points can help you to finish the class even earlier, or make up for some assignments you might miss along the way.

Labor Day Holiday. Because you have no assignments due on Monday, there is no special schedule for this class as a result of the Labor Day Holiday. For more about that, see Thursday's announcements.

August 30: Birthday of Mary Shelley. Saturday, August 30, marks the birthday in 1797 of the famous English writer, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who is best known for her novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus, published in 1818. I'm sure you are all familiar with Frankenstein and his monster; Prometheus, meanwhile, was the Greek Titan who created human beings out of clay (he is also famous for having stolen fire to give it as a gift to humanity). You can read more about Mary Shelley in this Wikipedia article, which is also the source for this portrait of Shelley painted in 1840 by Richard Rothwell:

Thursday, August 28

Today is Thursday of WEEK 1 of class. Thursday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you forgot to do any of the assignments that were due on Wednesday.

Ning FAQs and Tips. I want to call your attention to the list of Ning FAQs and Tips which you will find in the left-hand column of the Ning's main page. You will find information there about managing your Ning blog and also about your profile page. If there is something you want to find out which is not answered there already, please let me know and I'll add to the list of tips!

Labor Day weekend. Several people have written to ask me about the Labor Day holiday and how it affects the schedule of this class. Since you do not have any assignments that are actually due on Monday, there is no change in schedule. There are some Week 1 assignments that are due on Friday or over the weekend (on Saturday or on Sunday, if that is more convenient for you than Friday). So, for those Friday/weekend assignments, there is a grace period on Monday morning, until noon, just in case you forget to do a Gradebook Declaration. This does not mean the assignments are due on Monday! They are due on Friday OR over the weekend (if I said the assignments were due on Friday, that would be really hard for people who do most of their class work over the weekend). So, please make sure you think about these as Friday/weekend assignments - do not think about them as Monday assignments, or you will really get yourself into a terrible time crunch on Monday morning.

3 classes = 1 Ning. As you have noticed, all three of the online courses I teach are combined into one Ning. There are a couple reasons why I did that. One reason is very practical: I am paying out of my pocket to have the Ning be ad-free, so I preferred to pay just once, instead of three times. But the more important reason is that I wanted to be able to let people interact among all three classes. You will ALL be doing Storybooks this semester - and you might have some good ideas to share with each other as you go about creating your Storybook webpages. Meanwhile, if you want to see just who is in your specific class, go to your class website, and then click on the Storybook Projects link you see there on the main page - that will take you to a page listing all the people in your class, with links to their blogs (and eventually you will find links to their Storybooks there, too).

August 28: Birthday of Goethe. Today, August 28, marks the birthday in 1749 of the great German writer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. For those of you in the World Lit class, you might be interested to know that Goethe was one of the early proponents of the study of Weltliteratur ("world literature") - meaning not just the literature of Europe, but also of non-European cultures. His contributions to German literature are enormous, and he is probably most famous for his play Faust, the story of a scholar who makes a bargain with the devil in exchange for knowledge. The story of Faust was an old German legend which Goethe adapted for his own purposes, just as you will be adapting old legends and stories for your own Storybooks. You can read more about Goethe in this detailed Wikipedia article. Goethe was very interested in botany; below you can see a poem Goethe wrote about the Gingko plant (here's an English translation), and he illustrated the poem with pressed leaves from the plant!

Wednesday, August 27

Today is Wednesday of WEEK 1 of class. Wednesday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you forgot to do any of the assignments that were due on Tuesday.

Class announcements. You should be reading the class announcements every day. If you miss a day, you can read the previous announcements at the Announcements blog. You can also subscribe to the Announcements by email if you want.

Ning blog posts. Thanks to everybody for the great Introduction posts! Your second Ning blog post (Aesop's fable) is due today, Wednesday. Then, you will have your final Ning blog post for the week (Storybook Favorites) due on Thursday. After that, the "Read and Respond" assignment will be available Friday-Saturday-Sunday, when you will be reading and commenting on the blog posts of other students in the class. If you want to leave comments for other students now, please feel free to do that - you can comment on the blog posts themselves, or you can leave comments for people on their Comment Wall. Meanwhile, the official "Read and Respond" assignment will be ready first thing on Friday.

Your Ning Settings. A few of you still have the default Ning "smiley face" as your image. You will need to change that to something else - either a picture of yourself, or some other picture (a picture of your pet, as some people have done), or an image (cartoon characters are great!), or anything at all really - whatever you want to use to represent yourself here at the Ning. Also, if you used your dotted-name OU email address for your Ning account and want to change that to your regular OU email alias (or any other email address you prefer), you can do that! Just follow these instructions for Updating Your Ning Settings. You can find other Ning tips and FAQs in the left-hand column of the main page of the Ning. If there are tips or questions you'd like me to add to that FAQ list, just let me know!

My Wednesday schedule. I do most of my work during regular business hours on Monday-Tuesday and Thursday-Friday, while scheduling my out-of-office commitments on Wednesdays. That means I may be a bit more slow to respond to your emails on Wednesday than on the other days of the week - but if you send me an email during the day on Wednesday, I'll definitely get back to you by the end of the day.

August 27: Sri Chinmoy. Today, August 27, marks the birthday in 1931 of the Indian guru and mystic Sri Chinmoy, who passed away in 2007. Sri Chinmoy preached religious tolerance and world peace, and is probably best known for his emphasis on sports and spirituality, as in his World Harmony Run. You can read more about Sri Chinmoy at this Wikipedia article; the image below is from the World Harmony Run website. (If you search for "World Harmony Run" at YouTube, you will find all kinds of videos - including a video from the Navajo Nation in Arizona).

Tuesday, August 26

Today is Tuesday of WEEK 1 of class. For those of you who are working ahead, Weeks 2 and 3 are also available!

Grace Period. Tuesday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you forgot to do any of the assignments that were due yesterday, on Monday. So, if you forgot to do the Declaration for an assignment that was due yesterday, or if you just plain forgot to do the assignment, you have a "grace period" - until noon today - to make it up. So, if you did not finish the assignments that were due on Monday, make sure you finish them up on Tuesday morning before noon! You will see that the Declarations in Desire2Learn for the assignments due yesterday are still available until noon today. After noon, those Declarations will no longer be available.

Ning blogs and comments. One of your Tuesday assignments will be to post an Introduction about yourself in your blog at the class Ning. You'll be doing two more posts at the Ning later this week... and then, after the posting assignments for the week are done, you'll have a "Read and Respond" assignment where you'll be assigned some specific blogs of other people in class to read and comment on. That's one assignment you cannot do early, since we need to wait until everybody has had a chance to finish their blog posting assignments for the week, which will not be until the end of the day on Thursday. As a result, the "Read and Respond" assignment will be available starting on Friday - I'll let you know more about that later in the week.

Storybook Stack. Some of you are already working ahead and turning assignments that I need to read and comment on for you. I do that in the order that the assignments are turned in, and the stack can get pretty big! If you want to check and make sure that I received your assignment, I keep a list of assignments in the Stack, which I've received but have not read yet. So, if you want to make sure that I received your assignment in the email, just take a look there and you should see your name listed. If not, please check with me!

Week 4. Yes, several students have finished all the work for Week 1 and Week 2 and Week 3 already! Wow! So, for those of you working way ahead, the Week 4 assignments will become available on September 2, the first day of Week 2. At any given time, there are up to three weeks of assignments available. Right now, Weeks 1, 2 and 3 are available. When Week 2 begins, Weeks 2, 3, and 4 will be available. You can see how that works if you scan down the list of Declarations and quizzes in Desire2Learn - along with the stop date for each item, there is also a start date which shows you when it will become available. That's a bit confusing this week (since I opened up the class a week before the "official" start of classes), but it will settle down into a regular schedule now that the semester has officially begun.

August 26: Mother Teresa. Today, August 26, is the birthday of Mother Teresa, who was born in 1910 to Albanian parents in Skopje, a city which is now the capital of the nation of Macedonia. She left home at 18 in order to become a missionary and arrived in India in 1929, at the age of 19. In 1950, she received permission from the Vatican to found the Missionaries of Charity, in order to care for "the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers, all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society, people that have become a burden to the society and are shunned by everyone." You can read more about Mother Teresa and her life in this detailed wikipedia article. The image shows Mother Teresa visiting the Gandhi memorial in New Delhi:

Monday, August 25

WEEK ONE BEGINS. Today, Monday, is the first day of class. As you will see if you visit the class website, you have assignments that are due today, Monday.

• Mythology-Folklore (MLLL-3043)
• World Literature (MLLL-2003)
• Indian Epics (MLLL-4993)

So, go to the website for your course, and then click on the link that says "Week 1 Orientation." That is where you will find the list of assignments that are due this week, including the assignments that are due today, Monday.

Class announcements. There will be class announcements like these every day, Monday through Friday. You can see the announcements each day at the course website, in Desire2Learn, or at the Ning. For previous announcements, visit the announcements blog. You can also subscribe to the announcements by email!

Desire2Learn. After you log on to Desire2Learn (learn.ou.edu) and access this class, you will use the Quizzes and Declaration link to get to the quizzes and declarations. To check on your grade, click on the Gradebook link, and you should see your TOTAL POINTS displayed at the very top. As you take the quizzes and complete the declarations, points will be added to your total. If you do not see your Total Points listed at the top of the Gradebook, please let me know! Sometimes I have to do a little adjustment to make sure the Total Points are displayed.

Ning.com. For blogging and discussion, you will be using a Ning.com discussion board (oumyth.ning.com). This is a private discussion board for members of these classes only. You should have received an invitation to join the discussion board (contact me if you did not receive this invitation). After you log on to the discussion board, you can update your Profile and adjust your settings . I hope you will enjoy using the Ning. It seems to be working very well so far! If you are familiar with the discussion board in Desire2Learn, I think you will see why I decided to use Ning instead.

Working ahead. I would strongly recommend that you work ahead in this class, instead of doing your work on the day that it is due. If you can work just a day or two ahead of the deadlines, you will find the workload for this class much easier to manage. If you want, you can work up to two weeks ahead! The assignments for Week 1, Week 2 and Week 3 are all available to you now. Some students have actually finished the first three weeks of class. So, KUDOS to you guys who are already so far ahead: that will make the rest of the semester go so much more smoothly for you! I hope everybody will take the chance now, at the beginning of the semester, to get a week or two ahead, before you start getting lots of assignments in your other classes.

Contact me if you have questions. For many of you, this may be your first online class, and you may have a lot of questions as you get started. I hope the information that I've provided at the course website will answer most of those questions - but if something is not clear to you, or even if you are just curious about something, please send me an email! Teaching these three online courses is my full-time job, so you will find that I am very accessible online, Monday through Friday. Especially if you have a question that is preventing you from completing an assignment, please get in touch with me right away!

Words of wisdom... As you will see when you create your Ning Profile, there's a place where you can share words of wisdom. Not sure what words of wisdom are? Just ask Cookie Monster! (The cartoon is from Dan Piraro, a.k.a. Bizarro, one of my favorite cartoonists.)