Friday, January 20

HAPPY FRIDAY! You have reached the end of the Orientation week! The blog commenting assignment for this week is available now, and I hope you will have fun meeting new people and reading their stories. Here is a link to the Orientation assignments, plus a link to the class calendar so that you can move on to the Week 2 assignments when you're done with Week 1. With Week 2, the regular class routine will start to take shape!

Class Procedures and Reminders

Thursday grace period. There is a grace period in Canvas this morning, Friday, for any Thursday assignments you did not finish. All the Orientation Week assignments are about getting ready for the rest of the semester, which is why they are required. So, if you didn't finish the Thursday posts, please make sure you do that by noon today!

Blog groups. I created the blog groups on Thursday afternoon after everyone had a chance to finish their story and Introduction posts. Normally I do the groups at random, but this time I tried to match people up with similar majors where possible. Maybe you will find out you already know some people in the class! Meanwhile, I'll keep commenting on the Introductions, and I'll carry on with that next week until I have read all of them. I am having fun meeting everybody!

THANK YOU. I owe everybody a big thank you for all the work you did getting your blogs set up: now we have a blog network. You should all be really proud of that accomplishment, and I'm excited to see what you will create and share here in our own blogosphere!

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Wisdom. I thought this would be a good poster for the end of the first week at the beginning of the semester: Everything that has a beginning has an ending.

Blogging. And here's an infographic that I hope will inspire you about the adventure of blogging: Blogging for Learning.

Word from India. Here's another word that has come to English from India: BANGLE.

Featured Storybook. This project is from the Myth-Folklore class last semester: Fifth Dimension. This is a dimension of imagination and imitation. A place in which strange things make perfect sense, and normal things can appear quite strange. The first story... CTHULHU. Need I say more?

Free Book Online: Today's free book is The Talking Thrush and Other Tales from India by William Crooke and W. H. D. Rouse. See the Freebookapalooza blog for links and the table of contents. It has illustrations by W. H. Robinson!

Words of Wisdom: Today's saying is If Jupiter hurled his thunderbolt as often as men sinned, he would soon be out of thunderbolts (from the Roman poet Ovid). Find out more at the Proverb Lab. Here it is in Latin: Si, quotiens peccant homines, sua fulmina mittat / Iuppiter, exiguo tempore inermis erit.

Video: The video for today is such a fun one: Be Brave for Education. Find out more at the H.E.A.R.T. blog.

Growth Mindset: Today's growth mindset cat is ready to climb high: The higher you climb, the more you can see. You can find out more at the Growth Mindset blog.

Event on Campus: There will be free showings of the science fiction drama Arrival in Meacham at 6PM, 9PM, and midnight (details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.

January 20: DeForest Kelley. Today, January 20, is the birthday of DeForest Kelley, who was born in 1920 (he died in 1999). His most famous role was that of Dr. McCoy on the original Star Trek series. This image shows the characters Spock and McCoy, and the good-natured tension between the two of them was one of the recurring themes of the show. Happy birthday, DeForest Kelley, wherever in time and space you may be!

And if you're into geek humor, you can use this McCoy-inspired image to make a badge for the next meeting you go to. McCoy's signature line, "Dammit, Jim, I'm a doctor, not a ___" even made it into Wikipedia!

Check out the Twitter stream for information and fun stuff during the day, or click here for past announcements.