WEEK 1 WEEKEND. January 30-31

It is the Week 1 Weekend... yay for weekends! If you have not finished the Week 1 Orientation assignments yet, you can finish over the weekend. Here is a link to Week 1. Some of you will be starting on Week 2 this weekend, so here is that link also: Week 2 assignments. Working ahead is always the best strategy, especially if you have a little more free time now at the start of the semester.

Class Procedures and Reminders

THANK YOU! I want to say a big thank-you to everybody for the work you did this week; we now have a big blog network already full of ideas and images, and you'll start reading and commenting on each other's blogs in Week 2. I know that blogging is new to a lot of you, and I hope you will enjoy all the opportunities to connect and share that a blog network makes possible.

My schedule. I usually do not do schoolwork over the weekends, but this weekend I'll definitely try to keep an eye on my email to answer any questions you have as you finish up the Orientation stuff from Week 1.

Announcements. In addition to these announcements, you can also look through this past week's announcements. You can also subscribe to the announcements by email if you want; here's a link to do that: subscribe to the announcements

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Blog stream. Since these are announcements for both Saturday and Sunday, I'll share two things from the blog stream today... so here are two items from the favorite places posts. First is the Imperia statue of Konstanz that you can read about in Maya's post: Konstanz. She even has her own Wikipedia article too: Imperia.


And Krishna, in the Indian Epics class has been to the amazing Ajanta and Ellora Caves! Check out her blog post for more pictures: Ajanta and Ellora. You can find out more about these amazing temple complexes at Wikipedia also!


Twitter stream. The British Library is doing great work digitizing and sharing this collections, and I thought this was really cool: someone creating new scripts based on traditional script styles... in Indonesia!


And the British Library is also digitizing musical scores! Here's a post from their blog about that: Digitised Music Manuscripts.


The Google Arts and Culture Twitter feed is one of my favorites; here's a short video about restoration work in the great cultural center of Mosul:


Plus some thoughts to inspire you from the writer Neil Gaiman about the power of imagination:


And here's a video from Yuval Noah Harari on Imagined Realities:


Along with some good advice for the weekend or any time: Unplug for a few minutes.


You might even find some friends to hang out with: Friends Furever.


Saturday, January 30: Gandhi's Death. Saturday marks the anniversary of the day in 1948 when Mohandas Gandhi was assassinated. The image below shows the memorial in New Delhi where Gandhi's body was cremated. The gold letters on the black stone read "Hey Ram" (Oh Rama!); this is what Gandhi reportedly said at the moment he was shot. There is some controversy as to whether those were Gandhi's last words, but here is something he wrote in December 1947, just weeks before his assassination: "In the end it will be as Rama commands me. Thus I dance as He pulls the strings. I am in His hands and so I am experiencing ineffable peace."


Sunday, January 31: Alan Lomax. Sunday marks the birthday of Alan Lomax, one of America's great musicologists. He was born on January 31 in 1915 and died in 2002. You can read about his life and career at Wikipedia. After he graduated from college, Lomax traveled all over the country recording folksongs and recording interviews with musicians like Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly and Jelly Roll Morton. You can listen to the Lomax archive of sound recordings at CulturalEquity.org. The image below is an album cover from his collection of Prison Songs:

Here is one of those songs in a YouTube video:



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