Tuesday, November 19

Today is Tuesday of WEEK 14, 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 American folklore, and in Indian Epics you are finishing up Buck's Mahabharata (Week 15 will be a Mahabharata review week). If you have not turned in your Week 13 Storybook assignment yet, you may still do that for partial credit.

Class Procedures and Reminders:

Storybook Ballots. I've tallied up the nominations that people turned in (thanks to everybody who participated in that part of the process!), and you can see the top nominations for each class here: Storybook Ballot Fall 2013. The ballot contains links to all the Storybooks which you can use to refresh your memory or look at any Storybooks you have not seen before, and maybe you will want to visit the Storybooks in the other class if you are curious. For each class, you will find the actual ballot for voting in Desire2Learn in Week 14. This is just for fun - not for points or a grade or anything. If you have a few minutes to spare, please vote for your own personal favorites! The ballot will be available until 5PM on Thursday of this week, and I'll announce the results on Friday. 

Storybook stack. If you turned in a Storybook assignment on Saturday, you should have comments back from me. If you turned in your assignment on Sunday or Monday, your assignment is still in the stack; you can check the contents of the stack to make sure I have received your email. Meanwhile, if the points for that assignment will give you the points you need to finish the class, send me a separate email to let me know, and I'll put your Storybook at the top of the stack!

Thanksgiving Break. (repeat announcement) Because of Thanksgiving, Week 14 in this class actually lasts for two weeks instead of just one week. So, you will have all the regular assignments in Week 14, with those Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday assignments due today, tomorrow and on Thursday as usual. After Thursday, the remaining Week 14 assignments are not due until after Thanksgiving, with the usual grace period on Monday, December 2. Note that because of the very late Thanksgiving holiday date, the Week 14 Internet assignment is not available yet; it will be available starting on Monday, November 25; for more about that, see the Internet assignment page.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Featured Resource: History of the English Language. This video from the Open University is both funny and informative!


Featured Storybook: Misunderstood Women of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. This Storybook from last year features Taraka, Surpanakha, Kaikeyi and Amba meeting together for group therapy.


FREE Kindle eBook: Tales of Puritan Land by Charles M. Skinner. Here is a link to the book at Amazon, and this blog post provides additional information about the legends from New England contained in this book. You might recognize a few of the stories, but I suspect most of them would be new to you!


Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is Learning is a companion on a journey to a strange country (a proverb from India). Details at the Proverb Lab. These words of wisdom come from the ancient Sanskrit treatise called the Hitopadesha.


Mahabharata Image: Today's Mahabharata image is Bhima and Duryodhana. The death of Duryodhana marks the utter defeat of the Kaurava forces in the war.


Tuesday Event on Campus: There will be a screening of the film Six Miles Deep at 7PM in the Kerr Auditorium at the Sam Noble Museum, a documentary about action taken by the Iroquois to protect their traditional territory (details). You can see clips from the film at the Canadian National Film Board website. (I had to remove the actual clip I embedded here because it was causing D2L to fail in Chrome... argh.) Click on the image below to see all the clips:



Note: You can page back through older blog posts to see any announcements you might have missed.