Fall 2013 Has Come . . . and Gone!
HAPPY HOLIDAYS
The Final Announcements:
First and foremost, a big THANK YOU TO EVERYONE for all the good work that you did in the class, especially on the Storybooks. Every semester I am amazed by the creativity of the Storybooks, and that was very true this semester! Next semester's students will have so many inspiring projects to look at as they get started. I also had the pleasure of learning some new stories that I had never heard before, which is why I will never get bored teaching these classes: I get to learn new things all the time. So, thank you all for all your good work!
Ning. Please take a last look at your comment wall at the Ning and at your blog to see if you got some comments in the last days of class. There might have been some people who left comments on your Storybook as late as this Friday morning for the Week 15 Internet assignment. Also, if you want to save any of the stories you wrote at the Ning, please make sure you copy them and save them now. Sometime in early January I will need to clear out the Ning to make room for the new students; the Ning has a maximum number of users I can include, so the only accounts I will carry over are for the people who are taking another one of these classes in the spring. You could even create a new blog of your own to save the posts you want to keep and also to continue blogging! (Blogger.com is a great option, as is Tumblr.com - there are so many excellent free blogging options nowadays.)
Evaluations. If you have not filled out the course evaluation yet at eval.ou.edu, I hope you will do so! The deadline is Sunday, December 8. Your feedback is incredibly helpful to me in making improvements to these courses, and it is also a big help to the College in general as they continue to develop the online course program. Plus, you might win a free iPad just for participating! If you want to leave comments directly for future students in this class, you can do that too; here's how to add your comments to that page for future students.
Announcements. Some of you have signed up to receive these announcements by email. You can stay on the list if you want, or you can remove yourself from the list very easily; there is a link at the bottom of every email which is a "remove me" link. If you run into any problems with that, let me know and I will remove your manually. There will be new announcements again starting on January 13 when Spring classes begin. Some of the content in the announcements will be the same, but I will also be adding some new items too. For example, I'm preparing a "foreign words in English" item that focuses on words that have entered English not from Latin or Greek but instead from Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian.
Staying in touch. I am easy to find online of course! In terms of social networking sites, I'm very active at Google+ and I also use Twitter (but no Facebook or LinkedIn), and of course you can reach me by email. So, for example, if you have a campus event you want to publicize next semester, let me know and I'll be glad to include it in the class announcements. That would be great in fact!
The following items are for fun and exploration:
Featured Resource: From Sustainable to Thrivable. I thought this was a very inspiring graphic, both for environmentalism and also for improving our lives in general!
Featured Storybook: Characters of Christmas. In addition to the wonderful holiday Storybooks in class this semester, here is a project from last year dedicated to the characters of Christmas carols!
Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is A cloth is not woven from a single thread (a Chinese proverb). Details at the Proverb Lab. This is true of literal cloth - as well as the fabric of life itself!
Mahabharata Image: Today's Mahabharata image is Ganesha. You can also see Ganesha's vahana (vehicle), the rat, in the lower left corner.
December 6: Saint Nicholas Day. Although "Saint Nick" is sometimes associated in popular tradition with the Christmas Holiday, the actual day of Saint Nicholas in the church calendar is today, December 6. In some countries, the Eve of Saint Nicholas (December 5) and Saint Nicholas Day (December 6) is an occasion for gift-giving. You can read more about Saint Nicholas and the festivities associated with Saint Nicholas in this Wikipedia article. The image below shows "Sinter Claes" on a wall in Amsterdam:
Note: You can page back through older blog posts to see any announcements you might have missed.
