Storybook Ballots. I've tallied up the nominations that people turned in (thanks to everybody who participated in that part of the process!), and you can see the top nominations for each class here: Storybook Ballot Spring 2010. For each class, you will find the actual ballot for voting in Desire2Learn at the top of the quiz list for Week 14. This is just for fun - not for points or a grade or anything. If you have a few minutes to spare, please vote for your own personal favorites! The ballot will be available till 5PM on Thursday and I'll announce the results Friday. Also, you might enjoy taking a look at some of the nominated Storybooks in the other classes, too - there are so many wonderful creative projects that people have come up with!
Course evaluation at eval.ou.edu. You all should have received an email from the College of Arts & Sciences about the course evaluations for all your courses available now at the eval.ou.edu website. I hope you will take a few minutes to complete the evaluation - your feedback is incredibly helpful to me in making improvements to these courses, and it is also a big help to the College in general as they continue to develop the online course program. The online course program exists because students find it valuable to be able to take courses online, and any ideas you have for how the program can be improved will be very useful to the College as they continue (hopefully!) to offer these online courses.
Storybook stack. The Storybook stack is still FULL of assignments. This week I get kind of overwhelmed by all the assignments that are coming in as people try to finish up the class early, so please be patient and I'll be sure to get comments back to everybody by the end of the week - meanwhile, you can check the contents of the stack to make sure I have received your assignment. If you turned something in on Saturday, you should have comments back from me by now; if you turned something in on Sunday or on Monday, it is probably still in the stack.
April 27: Birth of "The Mouse." On April 27 in 1972, Bill English, a researcher at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, California, created the first prototype of the computer "mouse" that later became widely used in the 1980s and 1990s (I myself first saw a computer mouse in operation in the summer of 1984... and yes, I know that is before most of you were even born, ha ha). Earlier versions of the mouse had operated with a system of wheels (example), but the mouse that English built had a ball inside, as you can see in the image below. You can read more about the history of the mouse in this Wikipedia article, which is also the source for this image below:
