Week 11: Famous Last Words

It's Monday morning, so that means grace period, but I decided I wanted to write a famous last words post for Week 11 after all... mostly because I had so much fun working on the Freebookapalooza this past weekend. It's the first time all year that I've had time to really work on that, updating the bibliography pages and randomizers for the Indian, Native American, African, and Pacific books... which is over 500 books total, so that was a really good start. Call it SPRING CLEANING ha ha. I actually didn't even have a randomizer for the Pacific section but now, with over 50 books in the section, it made sense to have a randomizer, so now I do!

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Plus in addition to being spring cleaning, it was a great promise of things to come this summer. I wrote up a blog post about that at my Digital Teaching blog actually: Curating a Public Domain of Folklore and Mythology. It's certainly not as dramatic as all the students who will be graduating from OU in May (so soon!)... but I definitely have a sense of a kind of "graduating" as I move away from course design projects (where I focused so much effort over the past almost 20 years, wow) into something new that I hope will point me forwards (maybe not for a full 20 years, but still: for a long time!). There is such a wealth of resources there in the public domain books, but it's all kind of messy and also confusing: what is the best way to use those books really? Those are the kinds of questions I want to focus on... and once summer arrives, I will have some time to do that!

Meanwhile, things are wrapping up / winding down in a really good way overall for this class because I figured out what I am going to do with my final story. I didn't have a really good twist or focus, but now I do: I figured out a HUGE twist I am going to introduce into the story having to do with Pirakuan, the wife of Maiyarap. I almost left her out of my story for this week (Hanuman and Macchanu), but something made me keep her in the story... and now: surprise! I am going to use her character for a totally new plot development that I hope will give the Storybook a really strong sense of closure, while also wrapping back around to the first story.

But anyway, that's on the agenda for next time when I write a story next weekend. This past weekend was the weekend of the Freebookapalooza, and I totally had fun with it. Yay for free books online, and yay for spring cleaning!

I'll close with this inspiring graphic that came in my Buddha Doodle email today: