Class Procedures and Reminders
D2L Outage POSTPONED. There was an announcement from IT late on Friday night that the D2L outage has been postponed until after the end of the Spring semester. So, no worries about this weekend: D2L should be available all weekend as usual.
Finishing up the class. After Week 13, there are just TWO more weeks of school: Week 14 and Week 15 (note also that Week 15 is on a shorter schedule because of finals, so all the Week 15 assignments are due on Friday, May 1, by noon at the latest). Please make sure you have a plan now for finishing up the class, i.e. choosing what assignments you want to work on, deciding on how many stories you want to include in your Portfolio or Storybook, etc. If you have questions about any of that, let me know!
Writing Resource: Fictional Worlds. Here's a TED-Ed video from Kate Messner: How to build a fictional world.
Words to Watch: Today's words to watch out for are SUIT and SUITE. For details, see this blog post.
Featured Storybook: Finals Week: Death Notes. Finals week is hard enough — and just imagine how much harder it would be if you were being haunted by a banshee in the depths of Bizzell Library . . . or worse!
FREE eBook: The Fables of La Fontaine translated by Elizur Wright. This blog post provides additional information about where you can find this book online. It is one of the sources for the La Fontaine unit in Myth-Folklore this week!
Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is Behind the cloud is the sun still shining (the words are from Longfellow's "Rainy Day"). Details at the Proverb Lab. It is scientifically true, and it is also metaphorically comforting!
Mahabharata Image: Today's Mahabharata image is Arjuna and Krishna at Kurukshetra, with the gods looking on.
Saturday Event on Campus: Saturday morning, from 8AM to noon is Undergraduate Research Day at the OCCE Forum Building (details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.
April 18: Albert Einstein. Today is the anniversary of the death of Albert Einstein, who was born in 1879 and who died on this day in 1955. You can read about his extraordinary life and career at Wikipedia. There are a lot of quotes attributed to Albert Einstein on the Internet, some of which he said, some of which he did not. If you want to investigate a quote, a good place to go is Wikiquote: Einstein, which provides references for quotes as well as remarks about incorrectly attributed quotes. This is an authentic quote: "The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think" (image source).
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.
