Friday, April 17

HAPPY FRIDAY! You have reached the end of Week 13! Friday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you did not finish Thursday's work. The blog commenting assignment for this week is available now — and if you missed them, here's a link to Thursday's announcements.

Class Procedures and Reminders

Project Stack. I'm still working on the projects turned in on Monday and later. I should be able to get through the stack today, replying to anything turned in before Friday. You can check the stack to make sure I received your assignment.

Blog Responding. The blog responding groups are ready to go! If you don't have a Storytelling post for Week 13, you are not in a group, so you have free choice for the blog responding: you can choose two people at random from any of the groups, or you can check in with someone you've met in the course whose name you see there, whatever seems good to you!

D2L Outage. As you have probably heard, there is going to be a D2L outage this weekend. Since the only work you do at D2L for this class is the Gradebook Declarations, I don't think this should be a big problem, especially because the system is supposed to be up and running again by 5PM on Sunday. So, please do your work as usual, and if you are working on Saturday or on Sunday morning or afternoon, you can do the Declarations on Sunday evening or on Monday morning. If you end up not being able to complete a Declaration, just send me an email to let me know what Declaration I need to record for you manually, no problem.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Grant Snider: Genius Is.... Instead of the Thomas Edison adage about genius being "1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." I suspect Snider's breakdown is closer to the mark!

Mythology Words in English: Today's mythology word in English is AEGIS, which is a protective animal-skin shield associated with Athena and also with Zeus. For details, see this blog post.

Featured Storybook: Legends of Fire. Deep in the woods is a tavern, and sitting around a table in that tavern are four wild-looking men: dragon-hunters! Listen to the stories of what happened when they confronted mighty dragons all over the world, from Scotland to Turkey to India.

FREE eBook: Polish Fairy Tales by A. J. Glinski. This blog post provides additional information about the stories in this book, including the tale of the frog princess. There's a free audiobook too!

Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is Teachers open the door; you enter by yourself (a Chinese proverb). Details at the Proverb Lab. The Internet is my favorite door to learning!

Mahabharata Image: Today's Mahabharata image is Visvarupa, Vishnu in his cosmic form as witnessed by Arjuna at Kurukshetra (see Arjuna in the lower left).

Friday Event on Campus: The 45th annual Eve of Nations celebration will take place in Lloyd Noble this evening, starting at 7PM (details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.

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.