NEW RESPONDING GROUPS. The blog responding groups have been shuffled around, so you should find some new people to read and respond to this week. I'll be shuffling the blog groups like this every three or four weeks during the semester. If somehow I've accidentally left anybody off the list, please let me know right away! With these new groups, if someone has not done the blog posts for the current week, you will certainly be able to find other posts in their blog from previous weeks that you can comment on (you can even go back and read their Introduction post, for example).
Storybook Stack. As of Friday morning, I had returned all the Week 3 assignments; there were still some early Week 4, 5, and 6 assignments. I will do my very best to finish reading and responding to every Storybook assignment in the stack that gets turned in before Friday at noon (contents of the stack). I don't do any grading over the weekend, so if you turn something in after noon on Friday, it will go into the stack. If you want to get comments sooner from me next week rather than later, turn in your assignment earlier - the huge majority of people turn in their assignments on Sunday. If you want comments back sooner, turn your assignment in on Friday or Saturday, not on Sunday or Monday.
Storybook comments. (repeat announcement) Please make sure you look for my comments in the emails I send back to you; my comments are marked with ==> which should make them easy to see as you scan down the text of the email. So, in addition to the top part of the email, the main comments are inserted into your assignment below. You should save these emails, too, since you will be working on the Storybook all semester and you might need to look back at a past email to get some information to help you with a later assignment.
Week 4 Internet: Coverpages. (repeat announcement) For your Internet assignment in Week 4, you will be publishing a Coverpage for your Storybook. This means you will create a NEW SITE with GoogleSites, and the homepage for that new site will be your Coverpage. I hope you will enjoy creating a website for your Storybook. To get some ideas, you can visit these previous Myth-Folklore and World Lit Storybooks, along with these previous Indian Epics Storybooks, and you can also take a look at this semester's new projects: World Literature, Myth-Folklore, and Indian Epics. After everybody publishes their coverpages for Week 4, the Week 5 Internet assignment will be to take a look at different coverpages and give people feedback about them! That assignment will be available starting next Tuesday, February 15.
Tech Tip emails. (repeat announcement) In the long list of things that I work on each week for these classes, the Tech Tip emails come last - sometimes I don't manage to get to those for a week or two, depending on how busy things are (and right now, with everybody getting their Storybooks started, it is a very busy time of the semester for me). Please don't let that hold you back, though - you can go ahead and complete other tips. You definitely don't need to hear back from me about your Tech Tip emails before you go ahead and do more tips if you want!
February 11: Frank Herbert. Today, Friday, marks the anniversary of the death of the science fiction writer Frank Herbert who died in 1986. His novel, Dune, published in 1965, is one of the most popular science fiction novels ever written. Herbert himself wrote five sequels to the novel, with further volumes added by Herbert's son, Brian Herbert, using notes left by his father at his death. Below is a cover for one of the paperback editions of Dune, showing one of the mighty sandworms!
