Saturday, August 29

Today is Saturday of Week 1: welcome to the first weekend of the semester! If you didn't finish up the Week 1 assignments yet, you can do that this weekend; here is a link to the Orientation assignments. And for those of you who are working ahead, here is a link to the Week 2 assignments.

Class Procedures and Reminders

THANK YOU! I want to say a big thank-you to everybody in the class; we now have a big blog network already full of ideas and images, and you'll be 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, plus I still have some "favorite place" posts to comment on which I want to take care of this weekend also. :-)

Announcements. There are new announcements over the weekend (a lot of students do their work for this class mostly on the weekend), plus 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. It's always fun when someone finds an inspiring graphic to share in their blog, and I really liked this one that Lumingo found; here's her blog post. This thought is such a good one for the start of the year!


Twitter stream. Liniers is one of my favorite cartoonists, and he does his work in both Spanish and English (he's from Argentina); here is a new one from him (he does lots of cartoons about the magic of reading); larger view.


I was so excited to find this artist at Twitter, Yoshi Yoshitani, who has created a Tarot deck inspired by myths and stories from around the world; one of the cards features Sita, the heroine of the Ramayana:


Storybook. And here's a Storybook about Sita from last year that re-tells Sita's story asking all kinds of what-if questions: Reintroducing Sita.


100-Word Stories. Here's another story about Nasruddin, a famous wise-fool of the Middle East. Is he a fool in this story? or wise? or both? You can see what you think; here's the text of the story: The Sky in a Distant Land.



One quality that Nasruddin possesses in abundance is imagination. Here are some thoughts from the writer Neil Gaiman about the power of imagination:


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


One of the great works of the imagination is Homer's Odyssey, and here's a YouTube Channel where Leigh Ann Cowan, a graduate student at St. Mary's University, is signing Homer's Odyssey in ASL:


August 29: Joseph Jacobs. Today marks the birthday in 1854 of one of England's greatest folklorists: Joseph Jacobs. You can read about his life and career in this Wikipedia article, and you can see many of his books feature at the Freebookapalooza. He is one of my folklore heroes! Some of you may be reading Jacobs' book of Aesop's fables in the Myth-Folklore class in Week 3:



Jacobs also worked on the fairy tale traditions of India; here's a YouTube audiobook of his Indian Fairy Tales (which is a reading option later in the semester):



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