Class Procedures and Reminders:
Storybook Stack. As usual at the beginning of the week, there are still LOTS of Storybook assignments in the stack. I'm slowly making my way through the huge stack of assignments people turned in over the weekend. If you turned something on Saturday, you should have comments back from me now. If you turned in an assignment on Sunday or Monday, check to make sure your assignment is in the stack: contents of the stack.
Desire2Learn Check. Desire2Learn was acting quite oddly last week, especially on Thursday when a lot of you may have been doing Declarations. So, please take a minute to check your Week 9 Declarations. If something does not look right or you are missing points for a Declaration you thought you completed, let me know and I'll get that fixed. Please make sure you let me know exactly which assignment you need me to fix for you! Thanks!
Finishing up the class: Storybooks. As I've mentioned before, there is no absolute requirement about the number of stories in a finished Storybook; based on your strategy for getting your points in the class, you can finish your Storybook with just three stories or even just two stories if you want - it is up to you! The Week 14 and Week 15 Storybook assignments are final revisions, so if you are stopping with just two or three stories, for example, you can skip Weeks 12 and 13 (or skip Weeks 10 and 11 and add your final story in Week 12). If you have any questions about that, let me know - there is more information about grading and finishing the class here.
Week 10 Internet assignment: Extra credit option. The Week 10 Internet assignment is available now! In addition to the usual assignment of reading three Storybooks and commenting on them, there is an additional "extra credit" option where you can read three more Storybooks and comment on them for extra credit.
The following items are for fun and exploration:
Featured Tech Tip: Google Blogger. Blogger is one of the quickest ways to set up a website. You can use Blogger for blogging (these daily announcements are a Blogger blog, for example), but you can also use Blogger to publish any content you want as a simple website (like at the writing website some of you have probably seen by now, which is where I keep all the writing help pages for this class). This Tech Tip shows you how you can start publishing at Blogger in just a few minutes!
Featured Storybook: Rocky Mountain Tales. This project from last year shows that you don't have to go far from home to find some marvelous stories to tell. These stories are all about the Rocky Mountains!
FREE Kindle eBook: Fairy Tales by Charles Perrault. Here is a link to the book at Amazon, and this blog post provides additional information about the contents of the book, which includes such favorites as Cinderella and Puss in Boots, along with the horrifying story of Bluebeard.
Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is One generation plants the trees; another gets the shade (a Chinese proverb). Details at the Proverb Lab. And if one generation chops down the trees... just the opposite: no shade for future generations!
Mahabharata Image: Today's Mahabharata image is Bhima and Kichaka. Bhima's defense of Draupadi is one of the most dramatic moments of the epic!
Tuesday Event on Campus: There will be a showing of the Taiwanese film Eat Drink Man Woman at 5:30PM in the Scholars Room in the Union as part of Global Fluency week (Global Fluency week info). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.
October 22: Doris Lessing. Today is the birthday of the great British author, Doris Lessing, who was born in 1919 (so that means she is turning 94 this year); she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007. You can read more about Doris Lessing's life and career in this Wikipedia article. I would rate Lessing's novel Shikasta as one of the greatest science fiction novels I have ever read. If you are a science fiction fan, or interested in political literature (like Orwell's 1984, for example), it's a book I recommend most highly - it's an extremely unusual novel and quite amazing! Here's a recent photo of Lessing when she learned she had won the Nobel Prize. Happy birthday, Doris Lessing!
Note: You can page back through older blog posts to see any announcements you might have missed.
