Monday, February 10

Today is Monday. Week 4 is now over. Monday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you didn't finish any of the assignments that were due on Friday or over the weekend. The next week of class will begin tomorrow - and those assignments are available now if you want to get started!

Class Procedures and Reminders:

Storybook Coverpages. I'll be updating the list of Storybook websites for Myth-Folklore and Indian Epics on Monday afternoon when people have finished turning in their Week 4 coverpages. You can continue to experiment with your coverpage design all semester long, of course! Starting tomorrow, Tuesday, for the Week 5 Internet assignment you will be looking at and commenting on each other's Storybooks via the class list. I'll have more to say about that in tomorrow's announcements.

Storybook stack. As always on Monday, I will have a HUGE bunch of assignments in the Storybook stack that were turned in over the weekend or on Monday morning. The first thing I will do on Monday morning when I get to work is to update the list of items in the Storybook stack. You can then check the contents of the stack to make sure I received your assignment. This is usually the single busiest week of the semester for me, but I will do my best to get comments back to everyone by the end of the week.

Alternate Email Addresses. (repeat announcement) As the OU D2L and email outage showed last week, 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.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Pinterest Tech Tip: For those of you who are already using Pinterest or who want to give it a try, there is a new Pinterest Tech Tip. I've become quite a fan of Pinterest over the past few months, and I would really like to know what you all think about it too!

Writing Humor: Serial Comma. Because, hey, we all need some punctuation humor! If you don't use the serial comma (a.k.a. the Oxford comma) in the sentence below, things get seriously weird!

Foreign Words in English: Today's foreign word in English is panic. This comes to us from the Greek god Pan. For details, see this blog post.

Featured Storybook: I Am Not my Brothers' Sister: A Changeling's Journey. A young girl suspects that she is a changeling and embarks on a long journey to find out more about changeling legends . . . and more about herself.

FREE Kindle eBook: Ovid's Metamorphoses translated by J. J. Howard. Here is a link to the book at Amazon, and this blog post provides additional information about the contents of the book. Ovid will be one of the reading selections this coming week in Myth-Folklore.

Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is A barley corn is better than a diamond to a cock (an English proverb). Details at the Proverb Lab. This is another one of the many proverbs derived from Aesop's fables.

Ramayana Image: Today's Ramayana image is Rama in exile, accompanied of course by Sita and Lakshmana.

Monday Event on Campus: As part of "I Love Yoga" week at Huston Huffman, there will be a Harmony Yoga class at 8:45AM in Studio B, along with more yoga classes on Wednesday and Friday (details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.

Thoughts about Philip Seymour Hoffman. I don't know about the rest of you, but I spent a lot of time this week thinking about Philip Seymour Hoffman, both about his death and also about his many wonderful films. I noticed that Char wrote her Famous Last Words for this week about this, and I wanted to share that link here, both because it is a great post and also in case anybody wanted to add their comments. I don't participate a lot in the Ning, but I see the posts go by and sometimes I just feel compelled to comment, as I did this time. (image from Wikimedia)

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