Class Procedures and Reminders:
Monday: Time to work ahead. You do not have any assignments due on Monday, which makes it the PERFECT chance to work ahead on the Week 2 assignments. Believe me: if you put off the assignments in this class until the day that they are due, you are going to be under a lot of stress. If you can work at your own pace, even just a day or two ahead of the deadlines, you will find the class much easier to manage!
The Stack. As always on Monday, I will have a huge bunch of assignments in the stack that were turned in over the weekend or on Monday morning - the Week 1 Bibliography assignments from Myth-Folklore, plus early Week 2 and Week 3 Storybook assignments from both classes, along with some Proofreading assignments also. The first thing I will do on Monday morning is to update the list of items in the Storybook stack. So, after 8AM or so on Monday, you will be able to check the contents of the stack to make sure I received your assignment. I will then start reading the assignments in the order they were turned in. For those of you who are working ahead on your Storybook: you will need my comments on the assignment before you can move on to the next Storybook assignment - but you can keep working ahead on other assignments, and I will get the Storybook assignments returned as quickly as I can.
Myth-Folklore: Gilgamesh OR Egypt. Those of you who are in the Myth-Folklore class will have a choice of readings each week. In Week 2, the choice is between Gilgamesh OR Egypt. You will do only one set of readings, and take the background quiz and reading quiz based on your choice of Gilgamesh OR Egypt. You will end up with some blank items in the Gradebook; that is because Desire2Learn, expensive software though it may be, cannot conceive of a world in which students have a choice of what to do (sad, isn't it?). So, choose your topic, do the reading, and complete the quizzes based on that reading. Then you can move on to the most important part: coming up with your own version of one of the stories that you read!
Ning Checklist. I saw some folks were including the Ning checklist in their comments on the blog posts. It's fine if you want to do that, but there's no need (especially if there is no image or video in your comment); the checklist is for blog posts where you need to make sure to take a few minutes to proofread, check your image and image information, etc. I know people often do schoolwork in a hurry, so the checklist is just a way to try to get you to slow down a little bit and read through your blog post carefully before you publish it. You'll see in the assignment instructions just which posts require a checklist.
The following items are for fun and exploration:
Featured Tech Tip: Custom Library Homepage. This is one of my all-time favorite Tech Tips. Did you know you can create a customized Library homepage with instant access to all the library resources and services that you use most? It is a great service made available by the wonderful IT guys in Bizzell Library. Highly recommended!
Featured Storybook: Merlin's Mystery Men. This is a fun Storybook modeled on the "Dating Game" TV show, and the author's notes are separated off on a page of their own in order to preserve the sense of mystery!
FREE Kindle eBook: Legends of the Gods - The Egyptian Texts by E. A. Wallis Budge. Here is a link to the book at Amazon, and this blog post provides additional information about the contents of the book. This might be of interest to those of you who are thinking about the Egypt option in Myth-Folklore this week. You can read more about the Egyptologist Wallis Budge in this Wikipedia article.
Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is The moon does not withhold the light even from the cottage of a chandala (a proverb from India). Details at the Proverb Lab. The word "chandala" is a caste term that refers to someone who deals with the disposal of corpses; you can read more about India's "untouchables," the Dalits, in this Wikipedia article.
August 26: The 19th Amendment. On this day in 1920, the 19th Amendment went into effect, so women could no longer be denied the right to vote. Prior to this time, some states (mostly in the western U.S.) did offer women full suffrage, but some states offered only limited suffrage, while other states offered no suffrage at all. You can read more about the amendment in Wikipedia. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had drafted this amendment all the way back in 1878, and it took over 40 years for the amendment to become part of the Constitution. The image below shows Stanton and Anthony circa 1900; Stanton died in 1902 and Anthony died in 1906, so neither of them lived to see the 19th Amendment ratified. Some of you in Myth-Folklore might be writing about the role of women in the Egyptian stories this week, so it is worth remembering that it is less than 100 years ago that women in this country won the right to vote.
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