Friday, September 11 - Sunday, September 13

HAPPY WEEKEND! This is the end of Week 3. The Week 3 Read and Respond assignment (blog commenting) is available now, and the remaining Week 3 assignments are due on Friday or on Saturday or Sunday - please make sure you get started on those assignments soon.

Week 3 blog posts. For the Responding assignment, you should be looking for the Week 3 essay and story - which means you may need to scroll down, because some people are working ahead. So, if you do not find somebody's Week 3 blog posts at the top of their blog, just scroll on down till you find what you are looking for. Also, two people - Kathleen and Marjon - are enrolled in more than one of these classes this semester, so if you are reading their blogs make sure you find the posts for the class that you are in together with them.

Random blog assignments. As you saw over the past two weeks, the blog "read and respond" assignment has a random element to it, since you are assigned to people in your group at random - and it also means the people in your group are being assigned your blog at random... along with the added randomness that there is no way to predict who might miss that particular assignment in any given week. That means some weeks you may get lots of comments, and other weeks you may just have one or two comments. You'll also see that I sometimes leave comments on the blog posts - but my participation is also very much at random. So, if you feel like you did not get a lot of comments in one particular week, don't worry: the power of random will work its magic, and over the course of the semester you should end up receiving just about the same number of comments that you are leaving at other people's blogs.

Storybook Stack. On Friday, I should finish reading and responding to every Storybook assignment in the stack that is turned in before Friday at noon (contents of the stack). If you turn something in before Friday at noon, my goal is to get comments back for you before the weekend. I don't do any grading over the weekend, so if you turn something in after noon on Friday, it will go into the stack. I'll start working through the stack first thing on Monday morning, in the order received. So, if you want comments back next week sooner rather than later, don't wait until Sunday to turn in your assignment!

Famous Last Words. Some of you have already discovered the Famous Last Words extra credit option. Given how crazy the semester gets for everybody, I highly recommend this as a nice way to just pause and reflect on how the semester is going for you. If your semester is like mine, every week flies by and you cannot even quite figure out where it went! By doing the Famous Last Words extra credit assignment, you can take a few minutes to just think about how the past week went for you and what you are expecting around the corner next week... while getting extra credit for it, too! Also, if you are looking for even more extra credit points, here is information about the Grammar review quizzes which are available all semester long.

September 11. Friday is the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in the year 2001. Many of you in the Myth-Folklore class may have looked at the Snopes.com Urban Legends website for urban legends to use as a Storybook project. One of the sections at Snopes.com is devoted to rumors and legends about 9/11 - you might be interested to take a look at it, and see what the patterns of legend and rumor tell you about the American experience in those days. One of those legends had to do with the secret codes supposedly contained in Microsoft Wingdings font, shown below - a legend that actually dates all the way back to the year 1992, when people were using Microsoft's "new 3.1 Windows operating system" (that's 17 years ago - ancient history in computer software years).

Thursday, September 10

Today is Thursday of WEEK 3 of the class. If you have not turned in your Week 2 Storybook assignment yet, you may still do that for partial credit until noon today. For those of you in Myth-Folklore or World Lit, Thursday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you forgot to do any of the assignments that were due on Wednesday.

Storybook Stack. I'm still working my way through the large stack of Storybook assignments that people have turned in. If you turned in an assignment before 11PM on Sunday, you should have comments back from me now. If you turned something in later than 11PM on Sunday or on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, it is probably still in the stack, waiting for me to get to it (contents of the stack). A couple of people wrote to ask why they had not gotten comments back yet: that is because the stack is first-come, first-served. About 40 or 50 people usually turn in their assignments on the day that it is due, which creates a kind of digital traffic jam for me in terms of reading and replying. I always get through the stack by the end of the week, but if you turn in the assignment on the due date or after the due date, you will end up having to wait a bit longer for comments back from me.

Week 3 Read and Respond assignment. The Week 3 blog commenting assignment is not available yet; it will be available starting on Friday, September 11. The blog commenting assignment is the only assignment you cannot complete early, because people will still be adding posts to their blog today, Thursday. At midnight tonight, the list of blog assignments will become available and you will have Friday-Saturday-Sunday to complete the blog commenting assignment.

Week 3 Internet assignment: Images for your webpages. Congratulations to everybody who published their first webpages last week! For the Week 3 Internet assignment, you will be adding images to your pages. Again, as with last week's assignment, please try to do this early in the week if it is your first time creating and publishing webpages. I am available during the week to help you if you run into any snags as you add images to your pages and publish them; I am much slower to answer email on the weekend - so start on the assignment now if you can, and I'll be able to reply to any questions you have much more quickly.

Technology Tip: Picnik.com for images. Now that you will be using images on your webpages, you might want to try this Technology Tip for Picnik.com, a FREE online service you can use for editing your images - cropping them, resizing them, etc. When you work with images online, it's very useful to be able to get them just the size you want. If you learn how to crop and resize images, you can easily make a coverpage for your Storybook like this wonderful coverpage with four images, one for each story in the Storybook: Clash of the Heroes.

Sierra did something similar at her "About Me" webpage, with some musicians' images arranged horizontally (same height, different widths):

And here's another Storybook coverpage - Medieval Heroes - with four images in a row. As you can see, the key is to resize the images so that they are the same height, which allows you to use them in a nice layout of your own design!

Wednesday, September 9

Today is Wednesday of WEEK 3 of the class. If you have not turned in your Week 2 Storybook assignment yet, you may still do that for partial credit. Wednesday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you forgot to do any of the assignments that were due on Tuesday.

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.

Storybook Stack. I'm still working my way through the large stack of Storybook assignments that people have turned in. If you turned in an assignment before 6 PM on Sunday, you should have comments back from me now. If you turned something in after 6 PM on Sunday or on Monday or Tuesday, it is probably still in the stack, waiting for me to get to it. If you want to check and make sure your assignment is in the stack, you can see the contents of the stack here. It usually takes me most of the week to return all the Storybook assignments; the sooner you turn it in, the sooner you will get comments back.

Tech Tips emails. Quite a few people sent in Tech Tip emails over the weekend, which is great! Please feel free to work ahead on those extra credit tips now, since some of them can be really useful for the rest of the semester. I'll reply to all those emails, but not until I get through the Storybook stack. You don't need to wait on my reply before you do the Declaration; as long as you have sent me the email as instructed, that's great - you can go ahead and do the Declaration then, before you forget, since it may take me a few days to reply to your email.

September 9: Pieter Bruegel. Today, September 9, marks the anniversary of the death of the great Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who died in 1569. Bruegel is famous for his painting of the Tower of Babel - which may be of interest to those of you in the Myth-Folklore class this week who are choosing to do the readings from the Book of Genesis. You can read more about Bruegel's life in this Wikipedia article, and you can also read an article there about his painting of the Tower of Babel (1563). For a larger view of the image, click here:

Tuesday, September 8

Today is Tuesday of WEEK 3 of the class.In Indian Epics, this week you will be finishing up Narayan's Ramayana, and in World Literature you will be reading New Testament parables. In Myth-Folklore, it's the Hebrew Bible, with a choice between the story of Noah, or the stories of Samson and Daniel. If you have not turned in your Week 2 Storybook assignment yet, you may still do that for partial credit. (See note about that below.)

Storybook Stack. On Tuesday morning, I'll start working my way through the HUGE stack of Storybook assignments that people have turned in over the long weekend. If you want to check and make sure your assignment is in the stack, you can see the contents of the stack here. I read the assignments in the order that they are turned in, so the later you turn in the assignment, the longer you'll need to wait to get the comments back. It usually takes me all week to get comments back on all the Storybook assignments people have turned in. In fact, this is the main part of my job teaching online: I spend about 30 hours each week reading the Storybook assignments! :-)

Late Storybook assignments. Each week, the Storybook assignment is the only assignment that can be turned in late for partial credit. Since I cannot get all the Storybooks graded and returned immediately, it is okay with me if you turn in the Storybook late. A Storybook assignment turned in on Monday after noon can receive up to 9 points credit; if it is turned in on Tuesday, you can get up to 8 points of credit, up to 7 points on Wednesday and up to 6 points on Thursday. The absolute deadline for turning your Storybook assignment for partial credit is noon on Friday, when you can get up to 5 points of partial credit.

Adding Images to Your Webpages. Congratulations to everybody who published their first webpages! For the Week 3 Internet assignment, you will be adding images to your pages. Again, as with last week's assignment, please try to do this early in the week if it is your first time creating and publishing webpages. I am available during the week to help you if you run into any snags as you add images to your pages and publish them.

September 8: Star Trek begins. Yes, today is a great day in the history of television - it marks the broadcast of the first episode of the original Star Trek series in 1966, a series which ran for three seasons until June 3, 1969. My devotion to Star Trek began in 1972, when the show was in reruns and I was able to watch every afternoon when I came home from school (I was in third grade). I have never lost my love of that show and I can shamelessly confess to owning the complete original series on DVD. Anyway, it was a breakthrough show for television in so many ways, and if you're interested in catching some of the spirit of the old show, I highly recommend the 1986 movie, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, a wonderful feature film written and directed by Leonard Nimoy, who plays Mr. Spock, the one with pointy ears here in this cast photo from the original series: