Tuesday, August 31

Today is Tuesday of WEEK 2 of the class. I've moved the Week 2 Quizzes and Declarations to the TOP of the list now. This week in Indian Epics you are starting Narayan's Ramayana, while it's Buddhist Jataka Tales in the World Literature class, and it's Ancient Near East week in Myth-Folklore. I really hope you will enjoy the readings!

Storybook Stack. A very large number of Storybook assignments came in over the weekend, and I've been reading through those in the order that they came in. If you turned in a Storybook assignment on Friday or Saturday, you should have comments back from me, with points recorded for you in the Gradebook (check and make sure!). If you turned something in on Sunday or on Monday morning, 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. If you want comments back sooner on your Storybook, turn it in before Sunday! If you turn your assignment in on Friday or Saturday, you will get comments back more quickly than if you wait until Sunday evening to do the assignment.

Storybook Comments via email. When I send back Storybook comments to you via email, you will see that my comments are inserted into your email, and are marked with ==> to make them easy to find. PLEASE READ THESE COMMENTS. The comments for each week should help you when you do your assignment for the next week, and possibly in future weeks, too, so make sure you save the emails that I send back to you about your Storybook assignment so that you can consult them later as needed.

Tech Tip emails. Until I get through the Storybook stack, I won't be responding to all the Tech Tip emails, but I'll get to that later in the week, I promise. Meanwhile, please feel free to go ahead and do more Tech Tips if you want. You certainly don't need to wait on my reply to your latest Tech Tip email for you to go ahead and do more of the Tech Tips.

Myth-Folklore: Gilgamesh OR Egypt. (REPEAT ANNOUNCEMENT) Those of you who are in the Myth-Folklore class will have a choice of readings each week. This week, the choice is between Gilgamesh OR Egypt. You will do only one set of readings, and take the background quiz and reading quiz based on your choice of Gilgamesh OR Egypt. This means that will end up with some blank items in the Gradebook; please don't worry about that. Your goal is to get 30 points per week, and if you do the quizzes for just one of the reading selections, you will end up with the points you need.

August 31: Kinetoscope Patent. On this day in 1897, the American inventor Thomas Edison was issued a patent for the Kinetoscope, an early motion picture device. The image below shows an advertisement from the early 1900s promoting the use of a projecting version of the Kinetoscope for home viewing. We've come a long way in the past one hundred years, with technology like the DVD making movies as familiar in the home as books on a bookshelf! You can read more about the history of the Kinetoscope in this Wikipedia article. (Click here for a a larger view of the image.)