There is an Orientation Week to help you learn about how this online class works, and you can find all the assignments here: Orientation Week assignments. I hope you will enjoy getting started in this class, and also that things will go well in your other classes today!
Class Procedures and Reminders
Two Classes | One Set of Announcements. These announcements are for BOTH the Myth-Folklore class AND the Indian Epics class. Each class has its own reading materials, but the weekly assignments are the same. So, these shared announcements are a way for those of you in Myth-Folklore to learn more about India (a great land of stories!), and also for the people in the Indian Epics class to learn about other storytelling traditions from the Myth-Folklore class.
Please call me Laura. I will be on a first-name basis with all of you, and I hope you will feel comfortable just calling me Laura. :-)
The following items are for fun and exploration:
Blog stream. One of my favorite things to do in the announcements every day is to share something from the blog stream, like a "favorite place" picture... so here is the LOVE statue in Philadelphia from Leah's post. I really like the idea that there are LOVE statues like this all around, including the OU campus. :-)
Twitter stream. I'll also share a couple items from the Twitter stream each day in the announcements too. The holiday of Ganesha Chaturthi was this weekend, and there was lots of great Ganesha art in the Twitter stream as a result; here's one shared by the writer Chitra Divakaruni:
From Open Culture, here's a project about women artists: A Space of their Own.
100-Word Stories. I'll share a 100-word story with audio (yeah, that's me, and you can add audio to your blogs too!) each day in the announcements. This is an Aesop's fable; the text is here: Aphrodite and the Cat.
And here's a video from Crash Course, which has a whole series on folklore and mythology, and this Crash Course video is relevant to both classes: Indian Pantheons.
And here's a graphic to inspire you in your blogging: Blogging for Learning. Blogs are for documenting... reflecting... collecting... and sharing:
August 24. Each day I do an "on this day" item in the announcements, and on this day in the year 79 C.E., Mount Vesuvius erupted, burying the Italian cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in lava and ashes. You can read the dramatic details in this Wikipedia article, which is also the source for the image below, showing a computer-generated image of Vesuvius erupting:
Check out the Twitter stream for information and fun stuff during the day, or click here for past announcements.
