Friday, January 22 - Sunday, January 24

HAPPY WEEKEND! 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! I've put everybody into "blog groups." Each week you will be responding to two people at random your blog group (I'll change the groups every few weeks). 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.

Get ahead this weekend! This weekend is the absolute best time to get ahead in this class, before things really get busy in your other classes. If you can do all the Week 2 assignments this weekend, that will give you a cushion of extra time that will make the whole semester much easier for you in this class. So please, if you can, do all the Week 2 assignments over the weekend so that you can start the semester off one week ahead. Believe me: it is the single best thing you can do to guarantee your success in this class. If you don't believe me, read these comments from previous students - working ahead is the #1 piece of advice they offer!

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. So if you finish the reading and blogging assignments for Week 2 this weekend, you get extra credit! If you can finish the Week 2 Storybook assignment this weekend, you get extra credit! Think about: extra credit FOR NO EXTRA WORK - just for working ahead. I don't think you will get a better deal than that! :-)

My weekend schedule. 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!

Myth-Folklore: Week 2 Reading. This is an announcement that applies to the Myth-Folklore course only. Each week, you have a CHOICE of two reading units. You choose only one, and you do your storytelling and essay posts based on that unit. So, in Week 2, you do Egypt OR Gilgamesh. It means you will have blank spaces in the Gradebook for the quizzes about the other unit you did not choose, but that's okay. Desire2Learn doesn't understand the idea of students choosing things (sad, huh?), but since your grade is based on your total accumulated points, those blanks don't make any difference in your total.

First Storybooks of the semester! Claire, in the Indian Epics class, and Sara P., in the Myth-Follklore class, have both published the coverpage and introduction for their Storybooks. If you want to take a look at these first Storybooks of the semester, here they are: The Six-Fold Evils ... and ... Not a Fairy Godmother. Congratulations to Claire and Sara!

Friday, January 22: The "1984" Macintosh commercial. Friday, January 22, is a fun technology anniversary! On this day in 1984 -- over 25 years ago! -- the Macintosh personal computer made its debut in a television advertisement during Superbowl XVIII. There is an entire Wikipedia article dedicated to this advertisement which marked a real changing point in the history of personal computing, as well as being a landmark in advertising, too. You can watch the advertisement at YouTube - and if you haven't ever seen it, it's definitely worth taking a look, and I don't just say that because I am a Mac user...! It's a great example of storytelling, told with images, all in just 60 seconds.

Thursday, January 20

Thursday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you forgot to do any of the assignments that were due on Wednesday.

Grace period WARNING. Some of you are already getting in the habit of treating the Grace period as if it were the "real" due date for your assignments. Please don't do that - if you treat the Grace period as the deadline, then you do not have any Grace period left! The Grace period is there for real emergencies, totally random things that happen which prevent you from finishing your work on the day that it is due. So, if the weekly assignment list says that an assignment is due on Thursday, that means it really IS DUE ON THURSDAY, and you need to finish that assignment on Thursday. Or even better, finish the assignments several days before they are due, so you are not having to stress about the deadline at all.

Ning FAQs and Tips. I want to call your attention to the list of Ning FAQs and Tips which you will find here: Ning Tips. 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. The other reason is that it can be fun to see what is going on with the students in the other classes; you might even know some people in the other classes. So, there are about 100 students in all three of these classes combined - and you are all posting there in the same Ning, which makes the Ning a busy place, especially on Thursday evenings each week when probably the most blog posting takes place. I hope you will have fun with it!

January 21: George Orwell. Today, January 21, marks the anniversary of the death of the English writer, George Orwell, in the year 1950. He is the author of and also of Nineteen Eighty-FourAnimal Farm, which are both truly amazing novels; they are books that I make sure to re-read every few years or so, and I always notice something new each time. The image below is a poster advertising a movie version of Animal Farm from 1954:

Wednesday, January 20

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. You must complete the Tuesday assignments if you want to remain in this class, so please make sure you finish up all your Tuesday assignments by noon on Wednesday at the latest!

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.

Your Ning Settings. A few of you still have the default Ning "blue question mark" as your image. You will need to change that to something else - either a picture of yourself, or some other picture (a picture of your pet, as some people have done), or an image (cartoon characters are great!), or anything at all really - whatever you want to use to represent yourself here at the Ning. Also, if you used your dotted-name OU email address for your Ning account and want to change that to your regular OU email alias (or any other email address you prefer), you can do that! Just follow these instructions for Updating Your Ning Settings. If you have any other questions about using the Ning, please let me know.

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. :-)

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. For each Storybook assignment you turn in, you'll get comments back from me by email and that is also when I will record the points for you in the Gradebook.

January 20: Vasant Panchami. Today, January 20, is the date in 2010 for the celebration of the Hindu holiday Vasant Panchami, held in honor of the goddess Saraswati, who presides over music, art and wisdom. You can read more about Saraswati in this detailed Wikipedia article. Below is an image of Saraswati, showing her with a vina (a traditional stringed musical instrument) in one hand as she strums it with another hand; in her two other hands, she holds a book (a symbol of learning and wisdom) and a string of beads to be used in meditation (symbolizing spiritual practice and dedication). Her traditional animal vehicle is the swan, so you can see swans swimming around her feet, as well as a peacock in the background. Let's hope the goddess of wisdom will help to make this a good new semester!

Tuesday, January 19

Today is Tuesday 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 TODAY, 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 here, or 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 for each student.)

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!

Ning blogs and comments. One of your Tuesday assignments is to post an Introduction about yourself in your Ning blog. 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 to a "blog group" with other people in class so that you can read and respond to each other's posts. Although you do the other assignments for class early, 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 of this week - I'll let you know more about that later in the week.

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!

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 quiz and no Declaration. For each Storybook assignment you turn in, you'll get comments back from me by email and that is also when I will record the points for you in the Gradebook.

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!

January 19: Edgar Allan Poe. Today, January 19, marks the anniversary of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe in the year 1809, just over 200 years ago. You can read more about Poe's remarkable and tragic life in this detailed Wikipedia article. One of the best Storybook projects from last year was based on the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, so you might want to take a look at that; Poe's stories are so powerful and mysterious, and in this Storybook - Case Notes: The Mary Rogers Investigation - you can see the stories put to incredible use in the creation of a new mystery tale. Below is an image of the cover designed by the famous illustrator Gustave Dore for Poe's famous poem, The Raven: