Tuesday, August 28

Today is Tuesday of WEEK 2 of the class. I've moved the Week 2 Quizzes and Declarations to the TOP of the Desire2Learn area now. This week in Indian Epics you are starting Narayan's Ramayana, while it's Ancient Near East week in Myth-Folklore - you will be choosing EITHER Gilagmesh OR Egypt. I really hope you will enjoy the readings!

Assignment Stack. I finished comments on the Proofreading assignment on Monday, so everybody should have gotten comments back on the proofreading (contact me if you did not get an email with my comments). I'm now working my way through the very large number of Storybook assignments came in over the weekend and on Monday. If you want to check and make sure your assignment is in the stack, you can see the contents of the stack here.

Storybook Comments via email. When I send back Storybook comments to you via email, you will see that my comments are inserted into your email and marked with ==>;; so you can find them easily. PLEASE READ THESE COMMENTS. The comments for each week should help you when you do your assignment for the next week, and possibly in future weeks, too. So, make sure you save the emails that I send back to you about your Storybook assignment. That way, you can consult them later as needed.

Technology Tuesday. I hope to be adding a new Technology Tip every Tuesday - and the tip I added today is a nifty tool from PicMonkey.com for creating image collages. This is a really easy-to-use web-based tool that can help you combine images into a single collage; it handles all the image resizing for you automatically - very handy! For details, see this Tech Tip: Creating a PicMonkey.com Collage.

Tuesday Events on Campus. Dress up as your favorite Star Trek character at the Star Trek Photo Booth in the Union from 11:30AM-12:30PM (time/location/details ... this is leading up to the Star Wars vs. Star Trek Laser Tag event this Friday). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.

August 28: Birthday of Goethe. Today, August 28, marks the birthday in 1749 of the great German writer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. His contributions to German literature are enormous, and he is probably most famous for his play Faust, the story of a scholar who makes a bargain with the devil in exchange for knowledge. The story of Faust was an old German legend which Goethe adapted for his own purposes, just as you will be adapting old legends and stories for your own Storybooks. You can read more about Goethe in this detailed Wikipedia article. Goethe was very interested in botany; below you can see a poem Goethe wrote about the Gingko plant (here's an English translation), and he illustrated the poem with pressed leaves from the plant!