Today is Sunday of Week 1. If you have not finished up the blog commenting and proofreading assignment from the Orientation Week, today is the day to do that. And if you missed them, here's a link to yesterday's announcements.
Class Procedures and Reminders
Monday holiday. (repeat announcement) Monday is a holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr., and the OU campus will be closed. I've extended the Monday morning grace period for the Orientation Week Friday/weekend assignments till Tuesday, and the Week 2 Monday assignment has also been moved to Tuesday. I would urge everybody to get ahead this weekend, though, if you can. In fact, now would be a great time to Design Your Own Schedule.
My Weekend Schedule. (repeat announcement) I know a lot of you are doing schoolwork over the weekend, but I'm usually not at work on the weekends; I try really hard to finish things up each week on Friday. I do check email on the weekends, but not as often as during the week; if it is something urgent, I'll reply as soon as I get back online!
Assignment Stack. You can check the stack to make sure I received your proofreading assignment (or your Storybook assignment for those of you who are working ahead).
The following items are for fun and exploration:
The Science of Talking with Computers. If you ever wondered by Microsoft Word's grammar checker is incredibly bad, you can get some clues from this excellent video. Human language is extraordinarily complicated, both spoken language AND written language. It's going to be a while before the computers even come close to catching up with us: Behind the Mic: The Science of Talking with Computers.
Indian Words in English: Today's word from India is MANDALA, which is a Sanskrit word for a circle or a disc. For details, see this blog post.
Featured Storybook: Paranormal: The Ayodhya Files. Right here, right now, the brothers Rama and Lakshmana are battling demons in Boston and New York, unaware that they are caught up in an ancient battle being fought all over again in modern times.
FREE eBook: Aesop's Fables by V. S. Vernon Jones, with illustrations by Arthur Rackham. This blog post provides additional information about the contents of the book. This is a very nice selection of Aesop's fables, and the illustrations by Arthur Rackham (some color, some black-and-white) are delightful!
Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is Dig a well before you are thirsty (a Chinese proverb). Details at the Proverb Lab. Good advice about water and also about all the necessities of life!
Ramayana Image: Today's Ramayana image is the Dashavatara, or the Ten Avatars of Vishnu. You can see Rama third from the top on the left, and Krishna is third from the top on the right (those of you in Indian Epics will be meeting Krishna in the Mahabharata). For more information, see Wikipedia.
January 18: Rudyard Kipling. Today marks the anniversary of the death in 1936 of the British author Rudyard Kipling, who was born in Mumbai, India in 1865 and who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907, making him the first English-language writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and also the youngest person to have received a Nobel (he was 42 years old at the time). You can read more about Kipling's life and career in this Wikipedia article, and you can find a listing of Kipling's books online at the Penn Online Books page. The video below is an audiobook version of his Just So Stories paired up with the text to form a video presentation:
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.
