Thursday, December 2

Today is Thursday of WEEK 14 of the class. If you have not turned in your Week 13 Storybook assignment yet, you may turn that in BY NOON for partial credit. 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.

VOTING: Polls close at 5PM today. Today, Thursday, is your last chance to vote for your favorite Storybooks. Just like every semester, because all the Storybooks are so good, the votes are VERY close - so, yes, a single vote does make a difference in this local micro-election. You can see the nominees here for all three classes. The voting will go until 5PM today, Thursday, and I'll announce the results in Friday's announcements.

Storybook stack. If you turned in a Week 13 Storybook assignment on time, you should have comments back from me. There are still some late Week 13 and early Week 14 and Week 15 Storybooks in the stack which I hope to get to today. You can check the contents of the stack to make sure I have received your assignment. If you want to get comments back before the weekend, make sure to get your Storybooks turned in by Friday at noon.

Week 14 - Week 15 Storybooks. For the Week 14 and Week 15 Storybook assignments, you will be doing your final revisions; there are no new stories for Week 14 or Week 15. If you want, you can turn in both the Week 14 and Week 15 assignments at once. If you are turning in both assignments at the same time, please send in SEPARATE emails, so that I will be sure to realize that you are turning in two assignments at once.

December 2: Ivan Illich. Today, December 2, marks the anniversary of the death in 2002 of the visionary educator, Ivan Illich. Already back in the 1970s, Illich realized that the personal networks made possible by digital computing could completely change the face of education, so that education could be centered on the learners themselves, rather than forcing learners to conform to the regime of the school. I still keep hoping that Illich's vision of "educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring" will someday come true. You can find out more about Ivan Illich's life and work in this Wikipedia article, which is also the source of the image below: