Wednesday, September 14

Today is Wednesday of WEEK 4. If you have not written a story for this week yet, that means today is Storytelling Day. I hope you will have fun with that! Here is a link to this week's assignments.

Class Procedures and Reminders

You really can call me Laura! As I mentioned before, you really can 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 adjunct instructor). So, given that I'm on a first-name basis with all of you, please do the same and just call me Laura!

Project Stack. On Tuesday, I read and replied to the Projects turned in on Sunday before 4PM; I'll carry on today, working through the Projects in the order that they were turned in. You can check the stack to make sure I received your assignment.

Storytelling Style. Many of you are writing stories today, so I wanted to feature a new style here in the Announcements: social media style! You can learn more here about using Simitator to create social media stories, and here's a wonderful example from Sara's blog this week: Ra Turns to Social Media for Help.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Writing Advice. The advice comes from Stephen King: Say what you mean. Say what you see. Make a photograph, if you can, for the reader.

Animals! And when in doubt, you can always use animals as a storytelling style, as here with Star Paws.

Word from Mythology. The word for today is exactly that: the word for today, Wednesday, which comes from the name of the Norse god Woden / Odin:

Featured Storybook. This project is from the Myth-Folklore class: The Real Arabian Nights. You may know the heroes of the tales of the Arabian Nights, characters like Aladdin and Ali Baba, but in this Storybook you will see things in a new way as the evil magician from the story of Aladdin shares with you his own version of events from those famous tales.

Free Book Online: The Iliad of the East: The Ramayana by Frederika Richardson Macdonald. See the Freebookapalooza blog for links and the table of contents. This book contains dramatic chapter that retell crucial events from the Ramayana in beautiful detail.

Words of Wisdom: Today's saying is Don't poke a stick into an anthill (a Polish proverb). Find out more at the Proverb Lab. This is good advice for real anthills... and for metaphorical ones too!

Today's Video: Prem Joshua: Secret Place. Prem Joshua is one of the most popular and creative fusion artists working with Indian musical traditions. I am a fan!

Growth Mindset: Today's growth mindset cat is self-aware: Assess yourself; then learn. You can find out more at the Growth Mindset blog.

Event on Campus: As part of Latin American Week, there will be a screening of “O Povo Brasileiro” from 3PM-4:15PM in Farzaneh Hall 148 (details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.

September 14: Typewriter ribbon. Today marks the anniversary of the day in 1886 when George Anderson of Memphis, Tennessee patented the typewriter ribbon. Now, I'm not sure how many of you (... any of you...?) may have typed on a typewriter with a ribbon, but I learned to type in 1973 on a manual Royal typewriter, complete with a typewriter ribbon. You can read an article about the history of the typewriter here at Wikipedia. Here is an old Hermes typewriter — and why was it called Hermes do you think? It was probably because Hermes was a speedy messenger... or perhaps because he was the Greek god credited with the invention of the alphabet!

Check out the Twitter stream for information and fun stuff during the day.