Tuesday: November 29

Today is Tuesday of WEEK 14 of the class. That means you are finishing up Buck's Mahabharata in Indian Epics (Week 15 will be a Mahabharata review week), while it's American folklore in the Myth-Folklore class. For those of you who are working ahead, Week 15 is also available, and I would really encourage you to finish those assignments now so that you can take full advantage of dead week. If you have not turned in your Week 13 Storybook assignment yet, you may still do that for partial credit.

Storybook Ballots. 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 Fall 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 class, 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.

Storybook stack. There are still a lot of Storybooks in the stack; I've been focusing on the people whose Storybook assignment would give them the points they need to finish up the class. If you turned in an assignment, you can check the contents of the stack to make sure I have received your email. Meanwhile, if the points for that assignment will give you the points you need to finish the class, send me a separate email to let me know, and I'll put your Storybook at the top of the stack.

UPDATE Week 14 Internet assignment. There was an IT error of some kind that has now been fixed - so, yes, the online course evaluations for these classes are NOW AVAILABLE, as of 10 AM on Tuesday morning, together with the evaluations for your other classes. If you logged on earlier and were told the evaluation was not available, give it another try. You should now be able to log on to eval.ou.edu and complete the online course evaluation for this course along with your other courses. (Thanks again to those of you who let me know where was a problem; the instructors do not have any access until January, so I had no way of knowing just what the situation was - if you run into other problems here, definitely let me know; thanks!)

IMPORTANT Week 15 Schedule Note. For those of you who will still be doing classwork during Week 15 (dead week), please be aware that it is on a different schedule: the final deadline for Week 15 assignments is Friday, December 9, at noon. There is no weekend time and there is no Monday morning grace period since that would run into final exam times. As a result, your Week 14 Storybook assignment must be turned in by Monday noon, December 5, at the latest - I cannot accept late Storybooks for Week 14 because that would not give me time to get comments back to you for your Week 15 assignment. So, please take note: no late Week 14 Storybook assignments.

Tuesday Events on Campus. On Tuesday at 2PM in the Photography Gallery of the Fred Jones Museum there will be a walking tour of the exhibit "No Heaven Awaits Us: Contemporary Chinese Photography & Video." (time/location/details). Find out more about this event and other events happening on Tuesday at the Campus Calendar online.

November 29: C. S. Lewis. Today marks the birthday in the year 1898 of the famous author and scholar, C. S. Lewis. Lewis is probably best known today for his series of Narnia books. You can read more about Lewis's life and career in this Wikipedia article, and there is also a biographical film about his later life which is very much worth watching: Shadowlands. The image below shows the first-edition covers of the Narnia books. I like these books very much; my personal favorite is The Magician's Nephew - and if you took a look at Kathleen's Storybook, A Town Called Diggory, you might have noticed that she made good use of names borrowed from that book for her project!