Friday, August 28 - Sunday, August 30

CONGRATULATIONS! 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! In a new experiment this year, I have put everybody into "blog groups." Each week you will be responding to two people at random your blog group. Hopefully, you will get a chance to know the people in your group by reading each other's blogs from week to week. To find out just what you will do for this assignment and to see which group you are in, 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.

Storybook stack. The one assignment each week that I will be recording for you in the Gradebook is your Storybook assignment. You will turn in the assignment, and I will send you back comments, and at that time I will also mark the points in the Gradebook for you. As people turn in these assignments, quite a stack of work builds up, and sometimes it takes me a few days to reply to you. If you want to check and make sure I received your assignment, you can find a listing of the assignments received here in the Storybook Stack.

Email over the weekend. I check email occasionally over the weekend, and I will do my best to respond promptly to any urgent problems or questions that come up. In general, though, any email that you send to me over the weekend will wait until Monday morning, when I get back to work. So, please be patient: if you do not get an answer from me during the weekend, I will get back to you promptly on Monday, I promise!

August 30: Birthday of Mary Shelley. Sunday, 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 27

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!

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 having to pay for three Nings. 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).

First Storybooks for the semester! With people working a few weeks ahead already, that means there are now two Storybooks already taking shape for the semester. Congratulations to Kerry and Kaylee for doing such a great job with that! Here are their Storybook coverpages if you want to take a look:

• Indian Epics - Birth Stories: Party of the Century
• Myth-Folklore - Cailleach: Scottish Goddess

So, those are the first two Storybooks - and in the next few weeks, there will be many more Storybooks to come! You'll be publishing your own Storybook coverpages in Week 4 - or even sooner, if you choose to work ahead.

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).

Wednesday, August 26

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.

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.

Ning blog posts. Thanks to everybody for the great Introduction posts! I think I've responded to all the Introductions posted, except for the ones posted on Tuesday evening - I'll get to those later today! 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 just for fun, 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 morning.

Technology Tips. A couple of people have asked about the Technology Tips - yes, they are extra credit, not required. My goal is just to introduce you to some online tools that I use in my online work, and which might be useful to you for this class or other classes you are taking. You can do as many of them as you want now, and declare them, one by one, the first one you do in Week 1, then in Week 2, and then in Week 3, and so on. All 15 weeks are available to you at Desire2Learn right now; you don't have to wait until next week to declare a Tech Tip for Week 2. They are just one point each, but those points add up - and having some extra credit accumulated will allow you to take some time off from this class later in the semester, like during mid-terms, when you are super-busy in your other classes.

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:

Tuesday, August 25

Today is Tuesday of WEEK 1 of class. You have some Orientation assignments that are DUE TODAY, Tuesday. If you have not completed those assignments yet, please make sure you complete them today.

Ning blogs and comments. One of your Tuesday assignments is 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. Although you do the other assignments for class early (and I strongly encouragely you to dos), the "Read and Respond" assignment is something you cannot do early, since you 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.

Early Storybook assignments. As those of you who are working ahead turn in your Storybook assignments, I will get those back to you either that same day or the next day at the latest. You can check at this webpage to make sure I have received your assignment: Storybook stack. The Storybook assignments are the only assignments each week where I record the points you in the Gradebook; there is no Declaration.

You can call me Laura. As you've probably seen, I sign all my emails to you as "Laura," which is definitely what you can call me. I'm actually not a professor (just an instructor) - and since I'm going to be calling you all by your first names, it makes sense that you just call me by my first name also. :-)

August 25: Birthday of Walt Kelly. The American cartoonist, Walt Kelly, most famous for his Pogo cartoons, was born today, August 25, in 1913. You can read about Walt Kelly's life and career in this Wikipedia article. You might be interested to know, for example, that he worked at Disney and contributed to the classical animated films Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, and Dumbo! The image below is from his Animal Mother Goose book, in which Kelly illustrated the traditional Mother Goose nursery rhymes with animal characters (click here for a larger version of the image), as here, where "Little Johnny Green" is an alligator, and "Little Johnny Stout" is an elephant!

Monday, August 24

Today is Monday of WEEK 1 of class. 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 tomorrow, Tuesday. Please get to work on those assignments now!

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

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 cannot find your email 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!

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. A few people in class are already working on the Week 4 assignments: WOW!

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!

Ganesha Chaturthi. The festival of Ganesha Chaturthi in honor of the elephant-headed god is being celebrated right now... and as Ganesha is the god of good luck and of the beginnings of things, I thought it would be nice to include him in today's announcements. You can see some pictures from this year's celebration of Ganesha Chaturthi here at the BBC website, and you can learn more about Ganesha at this Wikipedia article, which is also the source for this image of a statue of the god: