Friday, January 21 - Sunday, January 23

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" to get started (I'll be changing the groups every few weeks). To find out just what you need to 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.

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, for example, if you finish the reading and blogging assignments for Week 2 this weekend, you get extra credit just for working ahead. Now is the time to take advantage of that, and you can then stay one week ahead for the rest of the semester.

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. If you turn in a Storybook assignment before noon on Friday (check the stack), I will get comments back to you sometime on Friday. Anything that comes in after noon on Friday will go into the stack on Monday morning.

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 - it's just a result of the fact that Desire2Learn doesn't understand the idea of students choosing things (pretty sad that such expensive software can't wrap its mind around the idea of a choice, eh?).

January 21: George Orwell. Today, January 21, marks the anniversary of the death of the English writer, George Orwell, in the year 1950. He is the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four and also of Animal Farm, which are both amazing novels; in fact, they both are books that I make sure to re-read every few years or so, and I always notice something new each time. The image below is a poster advertising a movie version of Animal Farm from 1954:

Thursday, January 20

*** OU CAMPUS CLOSED JANUARY 20:
See the OU Webpage for more info. ***

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 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 unexpectedly 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!

Thursday assignments. If you have not completed the Orientation Week assignments for Thursday, please make sure you do that today! First, you will be visiting some of the previous Storybook projects that students have done, which is the first step in figuring out what kind of Storybook you will want to do. Then you will spend a little time pondering the online life and sharing some of your thoughts about that. (For those of you who have taken a course with me previously, this one is a new assignment and I hope you will enjoy it. I have really enjoyed reading the blog posts people have published for this assignment so far.)

My Thursday schedule. I try to schedule any appointments or out-of-office commitments during the week on Thursday which means I am usually away from my desk for at least part of the day on Thursday. If I am slower than usual to respond to an email, that is why - but don't worry: if you write me with a question or problem on Thursday, I will definitely get back to you by the end of the day. I just might be a little slower about that than usual.

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!

*** I will let you know if/when this event is rescheduled! ***

January 20: World Literature Today Book Club. I am sharing this announcement from Katlin which might be of general interest: The next WLT Book Club selection is The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. The first meeting of the year is scheduled for THURSDAY JANUARY 20th at 12:30 pm in the WLT Conference Room (105 Monnet Hall, 630 Parrington Oval). Lunch will be provided. For more information, check with Katlin at the Ning. For more about this great book, here is the Wikipedia article.

Wednesday, January 19

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.

Class announcements. You should be reading the class announcements every day. If you did not read the Tuesday announcements, please make sure you do that now: Tuesday announcements. There was important information in the Tuesday announcements that will help you complete your various assignments for this week.

Your announcements for the class. If any of you are involved in campus activities that you want me to publicize with the rest of the class, please let me know. I'll be glad to include them here in the class announcements! Send me specific information about day-time-location, and also a link to a webpage or any additional online information you have about the group or activity.

Wednesday assignments. You have assignments due today, Wednesday, that will get you ready for the creative kinds of story re-telling you will be doing in this class. Please make sure you complete today's assignments; these first week assignments are MANDATORY and must be completed if you want to remain in the class.

You REALLY can call me Laura. As you've seen from the way I sign my email, you can just call me Laura - really! I'm not a professor (I'm just an instructor) - and since I'm going to be calling you all by your first names, it makes sense that you should call me by my first name too. :-)

January 19: Edgar Allan Poe. Today, January 19, marks the anniversary of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe in the year 1809, just over 200 years ago. You can read more about Poe's remarkable and tragic life in this detailed Wikipedia article. Because his books are in the public domain, you can find them in many different online editions. Among Poe's many claims to fame is the invention of the detective story, with The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Below is an image of the cover designed by the famous illustrator Gustave Dore for Poe's famous poem, The Raven:

Tuesday, January 18: Spring 2011 Begins!

SPRING SEMESTER IS HERE! Today is Tuesday of WEEK 1 of class. Go to the website for your course, and then click on the link that says "Week 1 Orientation." That is where you will find the list of assignments that are due this week, including the assignments that are DUE TODAY, Tuesday. Here are the course websites:

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

Class announcements. There will be class announcements like these every day, Monday through Friday. You can see the announcements each day here, or in Desire2Learn, or at the Ning. For previous announcements, visit the announcements blog. You can also subscribe to the announcements by email!

Returning students. For those of you who were in the class last semester, check out this announcement about changes to the class for this semester and these additional notes for returning students.

Ning blogs and comments. One of your Tuesday assignments is to post an Introduction about yourself in your Ning blog. 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 to a "blog group" with other people in class so that you can read and respond to each other's posts. Although you do the other assignments for class early, 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. As a result, the "Read and Respond" assignment will be available starting on Friday of this week - I'll let you know more about that later in the week. Of course, please feel free to comment on any blog posts that happen to catch your attention - but the official blog responding assignment won't be ready until Friday.

Working ahead. I would strongly recommend that you work ahead in this class, instead of doing your work on the day that it is due. If you can work just a day or two ahead of the deadlines, you will find the workload for this class much easier to manage.

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. You can check here 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 quiz and no Declaration. 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. I keep the Storybook Stack list so you will be sure that I received your assignment and not worry about that while you are waiting for me to get back to you.

Contact me if you have questions. For many of you, this may be your first online class, and you may have a lot of questions as you get started. I hope the information that I've provided at the course website will answer most of those questions - but if something is not clear to you, or even if you are just curious about something, please send me an email!

January 18: Rudyard Kipling. Today marks the anniversary of the death in 1936 of the British author Rudyard Kipling, who was born in Mumbai, India in 1865 and who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907, making him the first English-language writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and also the youngest person to have received a Nobel (he was 42 years old at the time). You can read more about Kipling's life and career in this Wikipedia article. Below is a book cover for an edition of Kipling's famous story about the mongoose Rikki-Tikki-Tavi: