Goodbye to English 368

All the grades (except class participation) have now been posted to Angel, and you should have received your paper either in the Dropbox or via email. Final grades have been submitted to the registrar.

Because of FERPA regulations, no grades can be transmitted or discussed via email, so if you have a question, you'll need to make an appointment when spring semester begins on January 8

Have a great winter break!

Dr. Campbell

Study Guide for Exam 2

Here's the link to the study guide for Exam 2: http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/engl368/study2.htm.

Checking your grades in Angel

Here's a video to help you if you are not sure how to check your actual grades in Angel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlYSGus5EBc

You have to run a report to see the actual grades; the percentage chart that sometimes appears is not always accurate.

Final Exam Thursday, December 15, 10:10-12:10

According to the Final Exam Schedule, the Final Exam for this course will be on Thursday, December 15, from 10:10 a.m. to 12:10 p.m. in our regular classroom.

The study guide will be available here: http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/engl368/study2.htm. 

Presentation Schedule

Here is the presentation schedule:

Thursday, 12/1:
Taylor
Margeux

Tuesday, 12/6
David
Emma
Kristen
Ashina
Andrew
Michelle
Lukas

Thursday, 12/8
Nick
Chris

Also, if you've been checking Angel, you'll notice that the grades for the weblog posts have been replaced by the final grade (expressed as a percentage) for that assignment, since it's now complete as of 11/29/11. 

We will have one more quiz today before the final (optional) quiz on 12/8.

Change in office hours on 11/15 and 11/17

My office hours tomorrow (11/15) will be from 1-2 rather than 12:30 to 2 because of a meeting; on Thursday, they will be from 1:30-2:30 for the same reason. However, I'll be on campus most of the day on Wednesday if you would like to meet with me then.

Responses to criticism

Add your responses to the critical essays in the comments below.

Lecture on Aesthetic Movement

The lecture material (PowerPoint) for the Aesthetic Movement is available in Angel.

Also, here is the link that Taylor talked about in class:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkA17QI1gSM
Taylor: "Here is the music I was playing on Tuesday after class. It's from the game Final Fantasy IX, and was composed by Japanese composer Nobuo Eumatsu."

Search exercise

http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/journalex.htm

Here is the link to the search exercise from today's class.

Paper 2 Assignment available

The Precis Assignment and Paper 2 Assignment are now available. I'll be giving you a paper version in class tomorrow, and we'll be doing some MLA searching that should give you a head start on the Precis Assignment.

Optional reading: Defense of reading Moby-Dick at npr.org

You don't have to read this; I just added it in case you were interested. 
http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2011/10/17/141429619/why-read-moby-dick-a-passionate-defense-of-the-american-bible?ft=1&f=1032&sc=tw&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Also of possible interest: the NPR informal roundtable on reading Moby-Dick, in which one segment compares Ahab to Bill Paxton in Twister: http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2010/06/18/127933161/-moby-dick-we-ve-come-to-the-en.  . A sample:
I have to say, I really thought that Ahab and the whale were going to realize that they loved each other all along.

Linda: And then they'd kiss at the end.

Marc: They SORT of did that.

Linda: They were bound together.

Marc: "With this rope I thee GRRRRRK!"

Reports on Tuesday

We'll have our first set of reports on Tuesday.  Our presenters will be David Boucher and Emma Marr.

You can see the report schedule and guidelines by clicking on the Reports link here or on the sidebar.

Papers Received and Study Guide

I've now received papers from everyone in the class--thank you.  When I return them to you next week, you'll notice that the filenames have been changed; please look at this link http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/format.htm to see the requirements for naming files and uploading in the future.

The Study Guide for Exam 1 is here: http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/engl368/study1.htm.

I'll be in the office from 12:30-2:00 today (Wednesday), but I'm discontinuing the regular Wednesday office hours since more of you seem to stop by on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  I'll still be in the office on some of those days for department meetings, but you can make an appointment if you need to talk to me--or, as always, contact me any day of the week so that we can talk by Skype or Google Talk.

Citation software

The items I showed you on Thursday are here:

1. WSU Lookup: Go to my main page (http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/index.html) and scroll down to the bottom of the page. Drag the WSU Lookup link up to the bar of your Firefox browser. From there, you can click on it when you're at the Amazon page of a book you want to look up.
2. Zotero, Mendeley, and so on: Scroll to the bottom of this page, since there are a few more that I didn't get a chance to mention: http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/engl402/social.htm .

Readings on Moby-Dick

Post your summaries and critiques of the articles in the comments section below.

Readings on Moby-Dick

The readings page for the essays on Moby-Dick is here: http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/engl368/mobydickreadings.htm.

Materials from today's class

The signup page is here: http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/engl368/mobydickreadings.htm .

The "Genres of Moby Dick" page is at http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/engl368/mobydickgenres.htm

Here's the crossword puzzle on Moby-Dick: http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/quiz/mdquiz.htm

You can find more of them here: http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/quiz/index.html

Remember to bring your "Moby-Dick artifact" on Thursday.

Virtual Office Hours for Monday, 9/19

Since your prospectus is due on Thursday and I'll be online for the English 210 class as well, I wanted to let you know that I will be available in Google chat from 8-10 Monday night for virtual office hours in case you have any questions. My Gmail address is dmcampbellwsu at gmail dot com.

You'll need a Gmail account to chat in this way, but if you have another form of email and would like to chat through another service (Yahoo, AIM, Hotmail, MSN, etc.), let me know and I'll sign in to it. If you are using Blogger for your blog, you already have a Gmail account.

Reminders about blog posts

1. Posts are due Thursdays by 9 p.m. If you miss just one (as some of you have), it's not a big deal, but you won't want to miss too many.

2. Some of you have comment moderation enabled, so the comments of other people aren't showing up on your blog. I've noticed this especially with the WordPress blogs. To moderate your comments in WordPress, go into your Wordpress Dashboard and go down to Comments (it's on the menu bar on the left-hand side). Approve the comments. Remember, I can't give your classmates credit for commenting on your blog unless I can see the comments.

3. Once everybody enables the comments so that I can see them, I'll start putting the grades for each week into Angel. The grading is pretty simple:

1. Substantial & acceptable post = 2 points (the usual grade)
2. Insufficient post = 1 point
3. No post = 0 points
4. Comment on someone's blog = 1 point

If you write a post and a comment each week, you should see a "3" (out of a possible 3 points) as your grade for the blog assignment that week. The points are there largely as placeholders because Angel doesn't do checkmarks.

4. On our course blog, I'll be adding things from time to time, not just announcements, but links to things that might interest you or are just for fun. For example, the other day someone on Twitter mentioned an iTunes playlist that Ahab might have made if he were around now, and I'll post the link if I can find it again. You do NOT have to visit the links.

5. Since several of you said that you check our course blog
(http://english368fall2011.blogspot.com/) more than Angel, I just wanted to remind you that all the assignments are linked on our blog. The only things in Angel that aren't on the blog are the presentations (PowerPoints) from the lectures.

If you're seeing this on the blog but did not get this via email, I don't have an email address for you.

Moderating comments

Some of you have comment moderation turned on in your blogs, which means that comments from others won't show up until you approve them. If you are not seeing comments, go into the Dashboard section of your blog and either turn off moderation or approve the comments.

Comments on posts

Don't forget that each week you need to comment on someone else's post as well as write your own blog post. You can comment on posts from the previous week or from the current week. The comments are due Thursdays by nine.

You all brought up a lot of good points in today's discussion, by the way.

Discussion Questions

You don't need to write out the discussion questions; just be ready to talk about those issues when you come to class.

Discussion questions

The discussion questions for our class are linked from our syllabus (http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/engl368/sched368f11.htm), but you can also find them on the various author pages (the Melville page at http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/melville.htm).

Report schedule

The report schedule has been updated with your names if you signed up: http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/engl368/reports.htm

Send your blog addresses

Once you send me a link to your blog, I can add you to the blogroll.