Wednesday, January 20

Today is Wednesday of WEEK 1. Wednesday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you did not finish the Tuesday Orientation assignments.

Class Procedures and Reminders

THANKS to everybody for setting up your blogs: it is really exciting to see all the blogs coming online like that! You will have several different posts in your blog by the end of this Orientation week. Here are the assignments for Wednesday and the rest of the week: Orientation. Please make sure you finish these Orientation assignments as soon as you can; once you have done the Orientation, you will be ready to move on to Week 2, no need to wait!

Please call me Laura. As you may have noticed, I sign my emails "Laura," and please call me Laura. No need to be formal and call me Dr. Gibbs, and since I'm not a professor, that title is actually not correct (I'm an instructor in the online course program). Since I'm on a first-name basis with all of you, please do the same and just call me Laura!

Blog comments. Thanks also for all your "favorite places" posts! I'm still reading through those and making comments; I don't comment on all the blog posts, but since this is everybody's first post, and since the "favorite places" are so much fun to learn about, I'm trying to comment on all of them. Later this week you'll be reading and commenting on each other's blog posts too; I'll have more information about that in Friday's announcements.

College of Arts and Sciences Online Orientation. (this is a repeat announcement) You received an email earlier from the College of Arts and Sciences about a D2L Orientation for online students. Since we are not using D2L for discussions, dropbox, etc. in this class, that CAS D2L Orientation is not important, and you do not need to complete it for this class — but if you are using D2L in any of your other classes, especially any other online classes, you will probably find it helpful.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Knowing is (Super)Power. This cartoon is inspired by a famous Latin quote: Scientia potentia, "Knowledge is power."

Indian Words in English: Today's word from India in English is serendipity, from Serendip, an old name for Sri Lanka — Sanskrit, Sinhala-Dvipa, Lion-Island. For details, see this blog post.

Featured Storybook: 1000 Ways to Die: Demon Edition. One after another, the asuras and raskshasas meet their deaths. It's "an arrow through the marrow" that undoes Ravana, for example, and Thataka and Hidimba also meet their doom, defeated by the epic heroes Rama and Bhima.

Free Book Online: Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. This blog post provides additional information about the contents of the book. There's even a free audiobook version at LibriVox!

India Featured Book: The Sons of Rama: Luv and Kush — The Invincible Twins . This blog post provides additional information about this reading option for Indian Epics. It is another one of the many comic books on Reserve in Bizzell Library.

Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is Those who can read and write have four eyes (an Albanian proverb). Details at the Proverb Lab. You can see the world in a whole new way thanks to the magic of reading and writing!

Today's Video: Be Brave for Education . This video is produced by BeBrave4Education, which is an allied group of Montessori schools and teachers. If any of you attended a Montessori school, you will have figured out by now I am trying to use the Montessori approach in this class. :-)

Growth Mindset: Today's growth mindset cat is Learn to look at things from different angles. Details at the blog. Changing your point of view is a good way to grow your awareness!

Event on Campus: At 1PM in Meacham Auditorium, Dr. Robert Putnam will give a lecture about his book, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (details). Putnam's book is the selection for this year's One Campus, One Book project.

Note: You can page back through the 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.