Tuesday, August 27

Today is Tuesday of WEEK 2, and I've re-arranged the Quiz area in Desire2Learn so the new week is on top. This week's topic in the Myth-Folklore class is Egypt OR Gilgamesh, and in Indian Epics you will be starting Narayan's version of the Ramayana. I hope you will enjoy the readings!

Class Procedures and Reminders:

Blog Responding. Everybody should have received at least one comment, and hopefully two, on their Introduction and storytelling post from last week, although in the chaos of add/drop during the first week, that may or may not have happened for everybody. If you ended up without any comments, please send me a note, and I will be sure to take a look at your posts and leave a comment! I do try to make sure that the groups are set up so that everybody will get at least one comment. In the unpredictable world of how people do their work for this class in any given week, though, it might happen that you end up without a comment, in which case just let me know, and I'll jump right in!

Assignment Stack. I finished comments on the Proofreading assignment on Monday morning, so everybody should have gotten comments back about that. I'm now working my way through the very large number of Storybook assignments came in over the weekend and on Monday. If you turned something in on Saturday before noon, you should have comments back from me; if you turned something in later on Saturday or on Sunday or Monday, it is probably still in the stack. If you want to check to make sure your assignment is in the stack, you can see the contents of the stack here. I always try to get everything returned promptly, and you can keep an eye on the stack to see how I am progressing!

Proofreading Results. Everybody should have gotten back the results of the proofreading practice from last week, and if you are curious about the results overall, I've put some information up here: Proofreading Practice - Fall 2013.


The following items are for fun and exploration:

Featured Tech Tip: Create a Map. This is a new Tech Tip that I added to the list just this weekend so that you can create your own world map of countries visited / lived in or a U.S. map of states visited / lived in. Here's the map I made of all the different countries that students in these classes visited this summer!


Featured Storybook: Tokyo Underworld. This is one of my all-time favorite Storybooks, in part because the topic of Japanese urban legends was new to me, which meant that I learned A LOT - plus, I was so proud of myself for figuring out who the murderer was!


FREE Kindle eBook: An Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic by Morris Jastrow. Here is a link to the book at Amazon, and this blog post provides additional information about the book. This item might be of interest to those of you who have chosen the Gilgamesh option for Myth-Folklore this week.


Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is A stitch in time saves nine (an English proverb). Details at the Proverb Lab. This is one of those proverbs that is literally true when it comes to sewing - and it also holds true for life in general!


ESCAPE. For an OU item today, I wanted to call everyone's attention to ESCAPE, which is a magazine supplement to the Daily that was published on August 22. There is an online edition, plus you can access the articles via the Escape section of the Daily's website. Evin (from Myth-Folklore) is editor-in-chief for this publication: congratulations, Evin! If there is anyone else involved in media production on campus, let me know so that I can include your media project in the class announcements too!



Remember, you can page back through the older blog posts here to see any announcements you might have missed.