Wednesday, August 21

Today is Wednesday of Week 1. Congratulations to everybody for getting your blog set up! Here is a link to this week's assignments, and today you will be exploring the Storybook projects from past semesters. I hope that will start to give you some ideas for your own project in this class.

Class Procedures and Reminders

Blog network. The blog stream is very lively now, full of new posts popping up! There's a "blogs" link in the Canvas left-hand navigation menu, so you can take a look and see what people are posting in (almost) real time, and you can see both classes side by side here: Blog Stream.

Blog comments. My goal this week is to comment on all the favorite places posts, and I will also comment on as many of the Introduction posts as I can. Meanwhile, for those of you who are working ahead, the Week 2 blog commenting assignment is ready to go now too!

Canvas Gradebook Labels. Some of you may be seeing these very annoying red labels in the Canvas Gradebook; please just ignore them. If you complete the work during the grace period, that's great; that's what the grace period is for, giving you time to finish up, and I don't consider it late, no matter what Canvas says.

Last semester I was able to use a script to remove the labels after they appeared, but that script is apparently no longer working. So, my apologies for any confusion: if you turn in an assignment during the grace period, the assignment is not marked late and there is no late penalty. Hopefully I can find a way to remove the labels. Meanwhile, please don't worry: there is nothing wrong with using the grace period, and the grace period for the Tuesday assignments lasts until noon today, Wednesday.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Blog Stream. I thought this was a cool coincidence: Cate wrote about St. Petersburg in Florida for her favorite place, and Dallas wrote about St. Petersburg in Russia. Here are the two cities:

Twitter Stream. I thought this was really fun: it is book recommendations for Game of Thrones characters by the libraries of the New York Public Library:

Story of the Day. Today's aetiology is Why the Clay is Red, an eerie African American folktale:

Indian Epics Today. The epic character is the god Vishnu, who you can see here holding his famous chakra (discus) weapon in one hand:

Vishnu has many avatars, and his ten main avatars are called the Dashavatar, The Ten-Avatars:

Storybooks. Starting today, I'll share a Storybook here in the announcements each day. Here's one from Myth-Folklore last semester, all about tigers: To Have a Tiger by the Tale.

Proverbs. And here's a proverb from India about a tiger: Beware the tiger who offers you a golden bracelet. He may be offering you a gift, but he really just wants to gobble you up!

Writing. And in the spirit of Game of Thrones (see above), here is a Game of Thrones character arc generator: yes, everybody dies.

HEART Video. I know a lot of you are planning on going into medicine, so I thought you might enjoy this video: Empathy: The Human Connection to Patient Care.

Event on Campus. Interim President Joseph Harroz will be giving the State of the University Address from 3PM-5PM in Sharp Concert Hall in Catlett, and the event will be live-streamed too!

August 21: Aubrey Beardsley. Today is the birthday of the great illustrator, Aubrey Beardsley, who was born on this day in 1872 and died at the young age of 25 in 1898 (he died of tuberculosis). Beardsley had a brilliant and unmistakable style; he is one of my favorites. You can see a collection of his art at the website ArtPassions, including his illustrations for the legends of King Arthur, such as this depiction of Morgan le Fay:

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