Week 13 Internet assignment NOW AVAILABLE. Now that Week 13 has begun, the Week 13 Internet assignment is now available: you will be asked to nominate your favorite Storybook projects in various categories, and also to leave some thank-yous to the people whose comments were most helpful to you this semester. You have all of Thanksgiving break to complete this Internet assignment. Then, after Thanksgiving, on Monday afternoon, November 30, when everybody has submitted their nominations, I will put up a ballot based on the most nominated Storybooks.
Week 13: Thanksgiving. Week 13 begins today, and you will have the usual Tuesday-Thursday assignments due this week. The Week 13 Responding assignment will become available on Friday, November 20, as usual - but nothing is due until after Thanksgiving. You will have one week off: There are no assignments due between Friday November 20 until after Thanksgiving (Thanksgiving Day is November 26). The grace period for turning in your Week 13 weekend assignments will be until noon on Monday, November 30.
Storybook Stack. As usual at the beginning of the week, there are still LOTS of Storybook assignments in the stack. If you turned in an assignment before 6PM on Saturday, you should have comments back from me by now. If you turned something in later on Saturday or on Sunday or Monday, it is probably still in the stack. You can check on the contents of the stack here.
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:
