Wednesday, April 27

Today is Wednesday of WEEK 14 of the class. If you have not turned in your Week 13 Storybook assignment yet, you may still do that for partial credit. Wednesday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you forgot to do any of the assignments that were due on Tuesday.

Storybook Stack. There are still some Storybook assignments in the stack and I am making my way through them in the order that they were turned in. If you turned something in on Sunday, you should have comments back from me already. If you turned something in on Monday or on Tuesday, it is probably still in the stack. If you want to check and make sure your assignment is in the stack, you can see the contents of the stack here.

Storybook Ballots. (repeat announcement) I've tallied up the nominations that people turned in (thanks to everybody who participated in that part of the process!), and you can see the top nominations for each class here: Storybook Ballot Spring 2011. The ballot contains LINKS to all the Storybooks which you can use to refresh your memory - and also to visit the Storybooks in the other classes, if you are curious. For each class, you will find the actual ballot for voting in Desire2Learn in Week 14. This is just for fun - not for points or a grade or anything. If you have a few minutes to spare, please vote for your own personal favorites! The ballot will be available until 5PM on Thursday of this week and I'll announce the results Friday.

Course evaluation at eval.ou.edu. For information about the course evaluation now available online, please read the note in Tuesday's announcements.

Week 15 Schedule. For those of you who will still be doing classwork during Week 15 (dead week), please read the note in Tuesday's announcements.

WEDNESDAY Events on Campus. OU Civic Orchestra will be giving a free performance at 8PM in Sharp Concert Hall in Catlett Music Center. Click here for more time/location information and there is also an article about the concert program in the OU Daily. Find out more about this event and other events happening on Wednesday at the Campus Calendar online.

April 27: Birth of "The Mouse." On April 27 in 1972, Bill English, a researcher at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, California, created the first prototype of the computer "mouse" that later became widely used in the 1980s and 1990s (I myself first saw a computer mouse in operation in the summer of 1984... and yes, I know that is before most of you were even born, ha ha). Earlier versions of the mouse had operated with a system of wheels (example), but the mouse that English built had a ball inside, as you can see in the image below. You can read more about the history of the mouse in this Wikipedia article, which is also the source for the image below: