Monday, January 12

Today is Monday, January 12, the first official day of classes for Spring 2015! There are ORIENTATION WEEK activities in this class to help you learn your way, and I hope those activities will be both fun and informative. You will find instructions for getting started below, and if you have any questions that are not answered here in the announcements, just let me know!

Class Procedures and Reminders:

Course Websites. You will find all the information you need about the course assignments at the website for the class you are enrolled in:
Please get started on the Orientation Week activities soon because you have some assignments that are already due on Tuesday.

My Schedule. These online classes are my full-time job, and I work pretty much a standard work week, Monday through Friday, 9 to 5 Oklahoma time. You can expect to find me online during those times, and I'll answer emails (and tweets!) promptly during those hours. During the evenings, I do check email occasionally, so if you run into a snag or problem, let me know. If it is something urgent, I will get back to you quickly; otherwise, I will get back to you first thing in the morning. If I will be away from my desk for more than a couple hours during the day, I'll post an update here in the announcements.

About These Announcements. At the top of each day's anouncements, you'll see the announcements that pertain to the actual class activities — deadlines, important information for completing assignments, etc. That will always be at the top, and then below those announcements there will be some more items for fun and exploration. Also, be sure to check out the class Twitter stream for new fun stuff during the day; you can see the Twitter widget in the sidebar of this blog.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Writing Humor: Let's eat boys. Given how crazy English punctuation is, we need all the punctuation humor we can get! Here's a variation on the famous "Let's eat Grandma" comma meme:


Words to Watch: Today's words to watch out for are CAPITAL and CAPITOL. For details, see this blog post.


Featured Storybook: Hero Academy. Inside the ancient fortress of a remote citadel are the training grounds of the Hero Academy, and under the instruction of Master Felgar these future heroes debate the virtues of mythical diplomacy and the role of mankind in a world of many living creatures.


FREE eBook: The Book of Were-Wolves by Sabine Baring-Gould. This blog post provides additional information about the contents of the book. If you are interested in werewolves, this is a book you will want to look at, and it's available as a free Kindle ebook, along with other ebook options.


Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is Make hay while the sun shines (an English proverb). Details at the Proverb Lab. This is true for making hay, and it applies to anything you need to complete in the limited time you might have!


Ramayana Image: Today's Ramayana image is a Rama statue at the Chamunda Devi Temple.


Monday Event on Campus: You can play putt-putt for a Union parking pass, 11:30AM -12:30PM in the first floor lobby of the Union (details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.

January 12: Charles Perrault. On this day in 1628 Charles Perrault was born, and he went on to become the author of one of the most famous fairy tale collections in the world. The version of Cinderella that you probably know from the Disney film goes all the way back to Perrault's version of the story, called Cendrillon in French. You can read more about different versions of Cinderella at Wikipedia, and you can also read more about Perrault's life and career. The illustration below is from an English version of Perrault's fairy tales at Project Gutenberg:


Labels: