Friday, August 27 - Sunday, August 29

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.

Saturday, August 28: Birthday of Goethe. Saturday, August 28, marks the birthday in 1749 of the great German writer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. For those of you in the World Lit class, you might be interested to know that Goethe was one of the early proponents of the study of Weltliteratur ("world literature") - meaning not just the literature of Europe, but also of non-European cultures. His contributions to German literature are enormous, and he is probably most famous for his play Faust, the story of a scholar who makes a bargain with the devil in exchange for knowledge. The story of Faust was an old German legend which Goethe adapted for his own purposes, just as you will be adapting old legends and stories for your own Storybooks. You can read more about Goethe in this detailed Wikipedia article. Goethe was very interested in botany; below you can see a poem Goethe wrote about the Gingko plant (here's an English translation), and he illustrated the poem with pressed leaves from the plant!

Thursday, August 26

Today is Thursday of WEEK 1 of class. Thursday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you forgot to do any of the assignments that were due on Wednesday. You must complete the Week 1 Wednesday assignments if you want to remain in this class, so please make sure you finish up all your Wednesday assignments by noon today at the latest!

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 at the class wiki. 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 the posts pop up from all the classes, since you might see something - an image, a title - that gets your attention and provokes your curiosity. Starting on Friday, you'll be able to do the official Read & Respond assignment, reading and responding to the blogs of people in your blog group (more about that in tomorrow's announcements), but feel free to leave comments on anything at the Ning that happens to get your attention!

August 26: Mother Teresa. Today, August 26, is the birthday of Mother Teresa, who was born in 1910 to Albanian parents in Skopje, a city which is now the capital of the nation of Macedonia. She left home at 18 in order to become a missionary and arrived in India in 1929, at the age of 19. In 1950, she received permission from the Vatican to found the Missionaries of Charity, in order to care for "the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers, all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society, people that have become a burden to the society and are shunned by everyone." You can read more about Mother Teresa and her life in this detailed Wikipedia article. The image shows Mother Teresa visiting the Gandhi memorial in New Delhi:

Wednesday, August 25

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 today 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. You will also see the current announcements displayed automatically inside the Ning and also inside Desire2Learn.

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 REALLY can call me Laura. As I mentioned in yesterday's announcements, you can just call me Laura - really! 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.

August 25: Birthday of Walt Kelly. The American cartoonist, Walt Kelly, most famous for his Pogo cartoons, was born today, August 25, in 1913. You can read about Walt Kelly's life and career in this Wikipedia article. You might be interested to know, for example, that he worked at Disney and contributed to the classical animated films Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, and Dumbo! The image below is from his Animal Mother Goose book, in which Kelly illustrated the traditional Mother Goose nursery rhymes with animal characters (click here for a larger version of the image), as here, where "Little Johnny Green" is an alligator, and "Little Johnny Stout" is an elephant!

Tuesday, August 24

Today is Tuesday of WEEK 1 of class. You have some Orientation assignments that are DUE TODAY, Tuesday. If you have not completed those assignments yet, please make sure you complete them today.

Ning blogs and comments. One of your Tuesday assignments is to post an Introduction about yourself in your blog at the class Ning. 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 some specific blogs of other people in class to read and comment on. Although you do the other assignments for class early (and I strongly encourage you to do so), 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 - I'll let you know more about that later in the week.

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 Declaration.

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. :-)

August 24 2010: Raksha Bandhan. Those of you in the Indian Epics class may be interested to know that today, August 24, is the Hindu festival of Raksha Bandan, which is observed on the the full moon in the month of Sravana, which this year coincides with August 24 (many of the world's religious holidays are based on the lunar calendar, such as Hanukkah or Easter or Ramadan, so the date changes from year to year). You can learn more about Raksha Bandan at the BBC website and at Wikipedia; the name of the holiday comes from a ceremonial red and golden woven bracelet which sisters tie around their brothers' wrist to symbolize their relationship of trust and protection (the word bandan is related to the English words band, bind, bond - and bandage). Here is a Raksha Bandan greeting card:

Monday, August 23

Hello everybody, and welcome to the FALL SEMESTER 2010. I hope you had a great summer and that you will have an exciting semester ahead! In this online course, you have a week of orientation activities to help you get acquainted with the tools and resources you will be using this semester. Please get started on the activities soon, since you have some assignments that are already DUE ON TUESDAY. Here is how to get started:

Course websites. You will find all the information you need about the course assignments at the website for the class you are enrolled in. Just click on Week 1 Orientation to find the list of assignments along with intsructions:

• MLLL-2003: World Literature
• MLLL-3043: Mythology-Folklore
• MLLL-4993: Indian Epics

You will see all fifteen weeks of the semester listed on the homepage of each of the course websites - and you are welcome to work as far ahead as you want. If you have some free time now before your other classes begin, you could get a really good head start on the class! :-)

Welcome email. I've sent around an email to everyone enrolled in the class with information about how to get started. PLEASE REPLY to that email (if you have not already replied) so that I will know you are checking your OU email.

Ning invitation code. The welcome email also contained the invitation code you need to sign up at the class Ning website. If you need me to send you an invitation code again, just let me know.

Desire2Learn. When you log on to Desire2Learn, you should see the course listed in "Fall 2010 Courses." If you do not see the course listed, please contact 325-HELP so that the folks who administer the Desire2Learn system can help you figure out how to access the course.

Storybook Stack. The only assignments where I record the points for you in the Gradebook are the Storybook-related assignments. As you turn those in, I list them in the Storybook Stack. You can always check the stack to make sure I have received your assignment. I work through the stack in the order that the items were turned in; sometimes I can get an assignment back to you the same day you turned it in, but if there a lot of items in the stack it can sometimes take longer.

Questions...? The first week's Orientation activities are designed to introduce you to all the class activities and procedures, so don't worry: everything will become a lot more clear as you work your way through the Orientation! Meanwhile, feel free to contact me if you have any questions about the class that are not answered at the course website.