Desire2Learn outage: MONDAY MAINTENANCE 4PM-8PM. Because IT was unable to repair the hardware problem on Sunday, they have scheduled a four-hour window today, Monday, from 4PM until 8PM, to attempt to fix the problem again. Since there is nothing due on Monday, I hope this will not cause any problems with your work for this class, but you do have a specific scheduling problem that prevents you from completing some assignment for the class because of the D2L downtime today, please let me know. During this downtime, I will not be able to record Storybook points for you, but I will continue to read and reply to the assignments, sending you my comments. Then, when the system comes back online later tonight, I'll be recording the points. You should be able to find updates about their progress with this maintenance window at the alerts.ou.edu website.
Desire2Learn outage: Sunday evening. There was another unexpected Desire2Learn outage on Sunday evening. According to the information at alerts.ou.edu, it was a serious hardware failure. The hardware has not yet been fully replaced, so you may experience "intermittent slowness" when using Desire2Learn. Online instructors are encouraged to rely on Desire2Learn as their exclusive online resource but I prefer to use several systems: course website, Ning, students websites, and Desire2Learn. That way, if one system goes down, there is a good chance the other systems will still be working. Meanwhile, I will keep you posted about further scheduled maintenance on Desire2Learn this week. If the Desire2Learn outage prevented you from making a Declaration on Sunday evening and you are not able to complete the Declaration this morning, send me an email with the text of the Declaration and I will record that for you manually.
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. The first thing I will do on Monday morning when I get to work is to update the list of items in the Storybook stack. So, after 8 a.m. or so on Monday, you will be able to check the contents of the stack to make sure I received your assignment. I will be reading and reply to the assignments in the order they were turned in.
Storybook: Working ahead. In order to do the Week 7 Storybook assignment, you will need to wait for comments back on your Week 6 assignment. Depending on just when you turned in your Week 6 assignment, you may have to wait until later in the week, even as late as Thursday or Friday, in order to get comments back from me. If you want to work ahead on your Storybook, though, you can do that - just move right ahead to the Week 8 assignment, adding the second story to your Storybook. You can turn in your Week 8 Storybook assignment without waiting on my comments back on your Week 6 assignment.
March 2: Dr. Seuss. Today, March 2, marks the birthday in 1904 of the genius author Dr. Seuss, whose real name was Theodore Geisel. You are probably familiar with Dr. Seuss's marvelous books - my own favorite is Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose. If you want to find out more about his life, his goals as a writer - even detailed information about the poetic meters he used! - take a look at this long and detailed Wikipedia article. Dr. Seuss's books have been translated into many languages of the world - even Latin. Below is the book cover for The Cat in the Hat in Latin, Cattus Petasatus.
