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HOME - Desire2Learn - Ning - Mythology & Folklore - World Literature - Indian Epics |
During this semester, you will be building your own online Storybook containing a group of related stories that you retell in your own words. You will retell traditional stories that you find online, just as you retold a story for the Aesop's fable story retelling assignment earlier this week. This assignment is designed to introduce you to the many story collections you can find online. There are many wonderful collections with stories from all over the world, and you can start thinking now about what kind of project you might want to choose for your Storybook. (In Week 2 you will start brainstorming about your own Storybook topic.)
STEP ONE: Read the Bibliography Guidelines
When you do Bibliography citations for this class, I recommend that you use a simple but complete form of citation based on the title, author, and year of publication, plus the URL (webpage address). You need to read these Bibliography Guidelines and apply them in this assignment. You might find it helpful to print out a copy of this page to have as a reference.
Please notice also that there are some Bibliography Tip pages to help you navigate some of the websites that people most commonly use for this class. Some sites do not make it easy to find the bibliography information that you need, but these tips will help you find the information you are looking for.
STEP TWO: Browse Previously Published Books Online
Previously Published Books Online. If a book was published before the year 1923, it is part of the "public domain," meaning that it is no longer copyrighted and can be freely reproduced on the Internet. As a result, many of the books you will find online are older publications, published before the year 1923. In these older books, the language is sometimes stilted and old-fashioned, but don't worry about that: you will be retelling the stories in your own words anyway. The same goes for children's books: sometimes children's books make a really good source for you to use, giving a very clear presentation of the plot and charactersin the story so that you have the raw ingredients you need to create your own version of that story.
I try to keep track of the good books that I find online that would be relevant to this class. I use a service called del.icio.us to save these bookmarks and to share them with others. This is also the same service I use to keep track of previous student projects - so you already saw some del.icio.us webpages earlier this week when you did your Favorite Storybooks assignment.
For this assignment, you will be browsing through my del.icio.us bookmarks for "ebooks" to find five different books that interest you for some reason. It can be any reason at all - maybe you know something about the topic already, or maybe you know nothing about it at all. You are not required to use any of these sources for your project later in the semester, so please feel free to pick anything at all that gets your attention right now.
You need to pick these five different books from five different categories, one book per category. Here are the categories you can choose from:
To see the actual book, click on the blue link - that will take you to the actual book online, where you can browse through the book and see if it really is of interest to you.
LOOK AT THE SAMPLE ENTRY BELOW. For the assignment, you will turn in five entries like this. Notice that it provides the basic bibliography information required for a book: book title (every book has a title), book author (almost every book has an author, with very few exceptions), year published (this is required information), and the URL (in other words, the http: web address). For each entry, you also need to include a brief comment (2-3 sentences) explaining briefly what the book is about and why you chose it. In addition, I would strongly suggest that you bookmark each of the five books as "favorites" for future reference - that way if there is any problem with the assignment, you will be able to find the books again quickly.
Book Title: Stories of the Ancient Greeks
Book Author: Charles D. Shaw
Year Published: 1903
Web Source: http://www.mainlesson.com/display.php?author=shaw&book=greeks&story=_contents
Book Comments: This is a collection of stories about the ancient Greeks, including stories about the ancient Greek gods. This is something I definitely want to learn more about - I was curious about the story called "The Kingdom Under the Ground," and also about the story with the title "The Singer and the Dolphin" (I like stories about dolphins).
NOTE: There are some Bibliography Tip pages which will help you in finding the information you need for each book, depending on the website where the book is published. In particular, you have to find the original year of publication for each of the books you cite. If you are not certain how to find all the bibliographical information, you can send me an email to ask for help, or you can simply choose another book - just make sure that when you turn in the assignment, the bibliographical information for each book is complete.
STEP THREE: Submit the assignment
When you are done, send me your FIVE book entries in an email. Please do not send an attachment - just type the five different entries into the body of your email message.
If you are in the Myth-Folklore class, use the Subject Line Myth-Folklore Storybook Bibliography. If you are in the World Lit class, use the Subject Line World Lit Storybook Bibliography.
There is no Gradebook Declaration for this assignment. After you submit the assignment, I will send it back to you with comments via email. When I send you back the comments, I will also record the points for you in the Gradebook.
NOTE ABOUT TURN-AROUND TIME: As these assignments are turned in, they go into a stack, and I read and respond to them in the order that they are received, Monday through Friday. I do not respond to assignments over the weekend. Just how quickly I will get back to you depends on how many items there are in the stack. You can check on the contents of the stack if you want to make sure I have received your assignment. If you want comments back quickly, turn your assignment in early! If you turn it in the day that it is due, I will be much more slow in getting comments back to you because of the large number of assignments that will be in the stack.