Friday, February 7

HAPPY FRIDAY! You have reached the end of Week 4! The Read and Respond assignment (blog commenting) is available now. Friday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you did not finish the assignments that were due on Thursday.

Class Procedures and Reminders:

Alternate Email Addresses. As the OU D2L and email outage showed on Wednesday, life can get complicated when email stops working. Since the folks at IT are not yet sure what caused the outage, I'm worried that we might have another one. So, it might come in handy if I had an alternate email address from each of you that I could use in case of a prolonged OU email outage. I've created a Google Form to collect the addresses. If you have a minute, please fill out the online form here: Alternate Email Address Form.

New Blog Groups. This week I did a reshuffling of the blog groups. The groups are random, but you should have at least one new person in your group and hopefully there will be two new people. There is also a "Getting to Know You" extra credit option so you can read the Introductions and another previous blog post for the new people in your groups! You'll see the instructions for that included in the regular assignment.

Storybook Stack. On Friday morning, I still had quite a few Storybooks left in the stack. I will make sure to reply to every Storybook assignment in the stack that was turned in before Friday; you can check the stack here: contents of the stack. Anything that comes in on Friday will be at the top of the stack on Monday!

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Writing Humor: Cooking Her Family. Yet more proof that punctuation saves lives! Okay, yes, it's Photoshopped... but it's still funny! :-)

Foreign Words in English: Today's foreign word in English is candy, a word which comes to us from ancient India, via Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic. For details, see this blog post. The image below shows a cotton candy vendor in Tamil Nadu, India:

Featured Resource: South Asian Literature Online. This is an excellent collection of South Asian literature online, including Arthur Ryder's Panchatantra, John Platts's Baital Pachchisi, and Mir Amman Dihlavi's Tale of the Four Dervishes.

Featured Storybook: The Vintner's Tale: How Chaucer Ruined The Canterbury Tales. The vintner is not someone that Chaucer included in his version of the Canterbury Tales . . . but if you want to find out what really happened on that pilgrimage, you need to read the vintner's own tale!

FREE Kindle eBook: Tales of Troy and Greece by Andrew Lang. Here is a link to the book at Amazon, and this blog post provides additional information about the contents of the book. It includes stories of Ulysses, Jason, Theseus, and Perseus.

Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is Every hour has its end. (a saying of Sir Walter Scott). Details at the Proverb Lab. Some hours, of course, seem longer than others!

Ramayana Image: Today's Ramayana image shows the wedding of Rama and Sita. You can see that Rama's brothers are also getting married at the same time.

Friday Event on Campus: Student Media is hosting an Open House in Copeland Hall, 11AM - 1PM with snacks and desserts (details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.

February 7: Laura Ingalls Wilder. Today, February 7, marks the birthday in the year 1867 of the American author, Laura Ingalls Wilder. I'm sure many of you may have read her series of books about life growing up on the American frontier, starting with Little House in the Big Woods, and you might also have seen the Michael Landon television series based on that series, Little House on the Prairie. You can read more about the life and career of Laura Ingalls Wilder in this Wikipedia article. This photograph shows the Ingalls family, with Caroline (mother) on the left, Carrie and Laura standing, then Charles (father) sitting, with Grace and Mary on the right (image source):


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