*** UPDATE ***
D2L now working! As of 2PM, it looks like the D2L problems have been fixed, so if you do have any trouble, let me know and I'll pass the information along to our great D2L administrator. (She does an amazing job of fixing problems when they occur - we are so lucky to have her help!)
(As of 9AM, I have heard from two people having trouble with Desire2Learn, and I have had some trouble this morning, too. It is not down, but it is very slow. VERY slow. If you run into trouble that prevents you from completing an assignment, send me an email to let me know which assignment you are having trouble with, and we'll get things sorted out somehow or other!)
(As of 9AM, I have heard from two people having trouble with Desire2Learn, and I have had some trouble this morning, too. It is not down, but it is very slow. VERY slow. If you run into trouble that prevents you from completing an assignment, send me an email to let me know which assignment you are having trouble with, and we'll get things sorted out somehow or other!)
Today is Thursday of WEEK 9. If you have not turned in your Week 8 Storybook assignment yet, you have until noon today to turn that in for partial credit. Thursday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you forgot to do any of the assignments that were due on Wednesday.
Class Procedures and Reminders:
Storybook Stack. I've still got quite a few items left in the Storybook stack. If you turned in an assignment on Sunday, you should have comments back from me now. If you turned something in on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday, your assignment is probably still in the stack, waiting for me to get to it. If you want to check to make sure your assignment is in the stack, you can see the contents of the stack here.
D2L Outage on Sunday. There will be a D2L outage on Sunday that may take all day. I'll be preparing a Google Form that will allow you to complete your Declarations at that time, and I'll send out an email with further information on Friday. For those of you who do not have this page bookmarked, PLEASE BOOKMARK the Announcements page since you will not be able to access it via Desire2Learn during the outage.
The following items are for fun and exploration:
Suggestion Box. You might have noticed the link in the right-hand sidebar of these announcements to the anonymous Suggestion Box. This is a way for you to share feedback with me about the class - what's going well, what I could improve, etc. Thanks in advance for any suggestions you want to share!
Featured Storybook: Rakshasas: Demons of the Ramayana. In Jeremiah's Storybook for this semester, each different rakshasa has his own storytelling style - so you can see Ravana featured on "Kosala's Most Wanted," while Maricha appears on "You Bet Your Karma" ... with more stories and styles to come!
Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is The one who is not strong enough to lift the stone must roll it (an Estonian proverb). Details at the Proverb Lab. The image is a public sculpture in Wrocław, Poland.
Mahabharata Image: Today's Mahabharata image is King Pandu and his wife Kunti. This is a 17th-century painting from Mankot in the far northern region of India.
Thursday Event on Campus: The Asian American Student Association's FREE Asian Food Fair will be open from 11AM - 2PM at the Armory, showcasing Asian food from restaurants all around the Metro area. Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.
October 17: Adam Michnik. Today marks the birthday of Adam Michnik, born in 1946, who was a leader of the Polish Solidarity movement and the founding editor of Gazeta Wyborcza, a newspaper which was first published on May 8, 1989, just as Poland began to win its freedom; the motto of the newspaper in Polish is: Nie ma wolności bez Solidarności ("There is no freedom without Solidarity" - in Polish, it rhymes). As some of you know, I used to live in Poland (back in the late 1980s, when Poland was still under communist rule), and Adam Michnik has been a hero of mine for all these decades. You can read more about his life and career at Wikipedia. Here is the book cover of his latest collection of essays in English:
Note: You can page back through older blog posts to see any announcements you might have missed.
