Sunday, April 19

Today is Sunday of Week 13. The blog commenting assignment and the Project assignment are due today. The Project commenting assignment is different this week: you'll be nominating your favorite Projects. So, if you have not finished those up already, now is the time! And if you missed them, here's a link to yesterday's announcements.

Class Procedures and Reminders

Week 13 Project commenting. For the Week 13 Project commenting assignment, you will be nominating your favorite Storybooks and favorite Portfolios. Then, on Monday afternoon when everybody has submitted their nominations, I will put up a ballot based on the most nominated projects. The more people who make nominations, the better the ballot will be, so thanks in advance for your input!

Project Stack. I periodically update the Project stack over the weekend, so you can check there to make sure I received your assignment; I'll update it at least once or twice today. If you want comments back on your assignment sooner rather than later, don't wait until Sunday evening. If you wait until Sunday evening or the Monday grace period, you will be farther down in the stack and will have to wait longer for my comments back to you.

Finishing up the class. (repeat announcement) 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!

D2L Outage POSTPONED. (repeat announcement) There was an email 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.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Research Tip: The Things I Discovered. If you have seen the Ken Burns documentary The Civil War, you surely remember Shelby Foote, and I really like this quote from him: "I can't begin to tell you the things I discovered while I was looking for something else."


Mythology Words in English: Today's mythology word in English is COLOSSAL from the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. For details, see this blog post.


Featured Storybook: Tracking the Werewolf. Our hero, John Abbott, is tracking the werewolf, getting closer and closer . . . until we do indeed see the werewolves through his eyes.


FREE eBook: Folk Tales from the Russian by V.X.K. de Blumenthal. This blog post provides additional information about the stories in this book, including Baba Yaga!


Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is We never know the worth of water till the well is dry (an English proverb). Details at the Proverb Lab. This is a very useful proverb for an era of global warming.


Mahabharata Image: Today's Mahabharata image is Bhima and Duryodhana. This is an illustration from the Razmnama, the Persian version of the Mahabharata.


Sunday Event on Campus: The OU Spring Choral Concert will be at 3PM in Sharp Concert Hall (details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.

April 19: Oklahoma City Bombing. Today is the 20th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. You can read more about that terrible event at Wikipedia. The image below shows a panoramic view of the memorial:




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.