Monday, September 26

Today is Monday, and Week 5 of the class is now over - and that means you have completed one-third of the semester. Wow! Week 6 will begin tomorrow - and those assignments are available now if you want to get started. Monday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you forgot to do any of the assignments that were due on Friday/Saturday/Sunday.\

D2L QUIZ PROBLEMS.
Around noon on Monday (of course!), D2L had the same quiz problems as before, where you the quiz will not display and you get an error message. As before, it is not clear how many quizzes were affected or how many people got the error - I've been assured they are in the process of fixing it right now (Monday afternoon), but if you run into quiz problems that prevent you from completing an assignment on time, let me know and I'll record the points manually. My apologies for all this: we have never had these kinds of problems with D2L before, but we are running a new version this Fall - hence the bugs. Thanks to the folks who wrote in about this; a big part of the problem is that they do not know there is a problem until someone reports it!

Storybook stack. As always on Monday, I will have a huge bunch of assignments in the Storybook stack that were turned in over the weekend or on Monday morning. The first thing I will do on Monday morning when I get to work is to update the list of items in the Storybook stack. So, after 9 a.m. or so on Monday, you will be able to check the contents of the stack to make sure I received your assignment. I will be reading and replying to the assignments in the order they were turned in, beginning with the assignments turned in on Friday afternoon or on Saturday. You need to wait on my comments to any Storybook assignment you have in the stack before going on to the next assignment - so, if you want comments earlier rather than later, turn your assignment in on Friday or Saturday instead of waiting until Sunday. Usually around 60 people or so turn their assignments in on Sunday, so it takes me a while to get through them all!

Tech Tip Emails. This week I should have time to reply to the big pile of Tech Tip emails that has accumulated over the past two weeks. It often takes me a week or two to get around to replying to those emails, but please don't let that hold you back - you can keep on doing Tech Tips for Week 6 and 7 and 8 and all the way through Week 15 if you want; you don't need to wait for a reply from me before going on to do another tip.

Monday Events on Campus. A free Flute Recital by DuoSolo - Michael & Mary Kirkendoll - at 8PM in the Pitman Recital Hall, Catlett Music Center (time/location/details). Find out more about this event and other events happening on Monday at the Campus Calendar online.

September 26: Vladimir Voinovich. Today is the birthday of one of my favorite Soviet-era writers, Vladimir Voinovich, who was born in 1932. His satirical novel, The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, is kind of like a Soviet Catch-22, but even sharper and funnier, in my opinion. You can read about the book in this Wikipedia article - and yes, the book is available in English translation, too!