Class Procedures and Reminders
Week 2 Blog Commenting. The Week 2 blog commenting assignment is not available yet; it will be available starting on Friday, right at midnight. So, for any of you night-owls, just check back after midnight tonight, and the assignment will be ready and waiting!
Week 2 Internet Assignment. For your Week 2 Internet assignment, you will be learning more about Blogger, and I hope you will have fun with that. Please ask questions if you are not sure about something, and that will help me keep building up our list of Blogger FAQs. In Week 3, you will be learning how to create a simple website using another Google tool called Google Sites. That Week 3 assignment is available now, so if you want to work ahead on that now, great! I think you will be happily surprised at how easy it is to make a website with Google Sites, and you got a sense from looking at past Storybooks of what those Google Sites can look like. (UPDATED: an earlier version of this announcement mixed up Weeks 2 and 3 - my apologies!)
Stack Update. I'm still working on the proofreading assignments turned in on Sunday, and I returned all the early Storybooks that were turned in as of Wednesday afternoon for those of you who are wanting to keep on working ahead. You can check the stack to make sure I received your assignment. I hope to get through the rest of the stack today!
The following items are for fun and exploration:
English Humor: Homophones Kill. Ladder and latter, pedal and petal, medal and metal... English spelling and pronunciation can be a dangerous business, ha ha.
Featured Storybook: Project Humanity. AXKZ-1029 has been put in charge of the "Human Research Program," seeking to understand these strange creatures who had once inhabited the Earth, the "humans" as they called themselves, by reading their ancient myths and legends. What AXKZ learns from those stories will change him, and the Earth itself, forever.
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. This is very different from Tony Kline's translation that some of you may have read this week: in this version, Ovid is rendered in English verse, not prose.
Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging (an American proverb). Details at the Proverb Lab. This advice works both for real holes and even more so for metaphorical holes!
Ramayana Image: Today's Ramayana image is Ahalya. You can see her bowing to Rama after he has freed her from her imprisonment.
Thursday Event on Campus: The topic of the FREDTalk at the Fred Jones Art Museum today is "the selfie" ... is this a narcissistic artform, or is it self-exploration? The talk will begin at 5:30 (details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.
August 28: Birthday of Goethe. Today, August 28, marks the birthday in 1749 of the great German writer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. His contributions to German literature are enormous, and he is probably most famous for his play Faust, the story of a scholar who makes a bargain with the devil in exchange for knowledge. The story of Faust was an old German legend which Goethe adapted for his own purposes, in much the same way as you will be adapting old legends and stories for your own Storybooks. You can read more about Goethe in this detailed Wikipedia article. Goethe was very interested in botany; below you can see a poem Goethe wrote about the Ginkgo plant (here's an English translation), and he illustrated the poem with pressed leaves from the plant!
Note: You can page back through older blog posts to see any announcements you might have missed, and you can check out the Twitter stream for information and fun stuff during the day.
