Class Procedures and Reminders:
Ning blogs and comments. One of your assignments this week will be to post an Introduction about yourself in your blog at the class Ning, along with some other posts... and then, after the posting assignments for the week are done, you'll have a "Read and Respond" assignment where you'll be assigned some specific blogs of other people in class to read and comment on. Although you can do the other assignments for class early, the "Read and Respond" assignment is something you cannot do early because you need to wait until everybody has had a chance to finish their blog posting assignments for the week, which will not be until the end of the day on Thursday. As a result, the "Read and Respond" assignment will be available starting on Friday - I'll let you know more about that later in the week. Meanwhile, if you want to leave comments for each other now, that's GREAT - please go ahead and make comments! Meanwhile, the actual responding assignment has to wait until everybody has had a chance to publish all their blog posts for the week.
Early Proofreading and Storybook assignments. As those of you who are working ahead turn in your Proofreading and Storybook assignments, I will get those back to you as soon as I can. You can check at this webpage to make sure I have received your assignment: Assignment Stack. I publish the list of assignments in the stack like that so you can check to make sure I have in fact received your assignment - if you do not see yourself listed in the stack, let me know so I can track down the missing email.
The following items are for fun and exploration:
Featured Tech Tip: Resizing Images. As you add images to blog posts and webpages in this class, it can be really useful to resize the image to exactly the size you want. You can use PicMonkey.com to resize any image and also to crop and do other basic image editing.
Featured Storybook: Sky Warrior: A Tournament of Champions. If you would like to look at a past Storybook that features really excellent writing, then this is a Storybook to look at. The student who created this project was a professional writing major, and I very much hope she will pursue a career in writing. That way I might get to look back years from now and say, "Oh yes, Amanda Stonebarger - I knew her when she was just getting started!"
FREE Kindle eBook: Folk-Lore of the Indians of the Kansas River Valley by Carrie de Voe. Here is a link to the book at Amazon, and this blog post provides additional information about the contents of the book, which includes stories from the Pawnee, Sioux, Kaw, Osage, Delaware, Wyandot, Pottawatomie and Shawnee tribes. (The name Kansas comes from the Sioux language family, while Oklahoma comes from Choctaw, which is a Muskogean language.)
Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is For one whose foot is enclosed in a shoe, the whole surface of the earth is covered with leather (a proverb from India). Details at the Proverb Lab. I really like this saying: it's a very ingenious way of looking at the power of shoes, which are surely one of the more amazing inventions from prehistoric times, as well as being a great symbol for other things that we might invent to aid us in our life's journeys, real and metaphorical.
Tuesday Event on Campus: As part of the Mid-Day Music series, Ivan Duvet will be playing piano in the Union Food Court from noon until 1PM (details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.
August 20: Konrad Wallenrod. On this day in the year 1391, Konrad von Wallenrode became the Hochmeister of the Teutonic Order of Knights. His fame is more literary than historical, however, as he later became the hero of a long narrative poem by the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz, and Mickiewicz's poem then unexpectedly became a catalyst for the November 1830 Polish uprising against imperial Russian rule. If you are interested in Romantic poetry and/or Eastern European history, you might enjoy reading an English translation of this great work of historical fiction: Konrad Wallenrod, a translation into English verse by M.A. Biggs. Here is an image of the poem's first edition as published in 1828:
