IE UnTextbook Summer Diary: Sunday, May 10 - PDE Ramayana done!

I am really glad about this: the PDE Ramayana is done! The first pass anyway. All 80 pages! You can see the index here: Ramayana Online: Public Domain Edition.

I'm sharing this as a #Rhizo15 post because this post is also a paean to LINKINESS, which is something magical about the web, and very rhizomatic too, I think.

Internet splat map by S. Jurvetson

The idea with this project is to give my students an online equivalent to the paperback book that, in the past, has been their first introduction to the Ramayana, a lovely English-language adaptation of Kamban's Tamil Ramayana: The Ramayana: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic by R. K. Narayan (1972). In Weeks 2 and 3 of my Indian Epics class, students would read that book, which was accompanied by Reading Guides I had written; you can see those here: Narayan's Ramayana Reading Guides. I wrote up those reading guides to help the students make their way through the book, and also to include LINKS and IMAGES so that they could go beyond the book, learning more (even much more!) about whatever caught their interest as they did the reading. The book was very nice but it suffered that from being a printed book: no links... and no images. I want a gorgeous color image on every page!

Public Domain Ramayana Translations

Now, moving to an UnTextbook model for the class, where the students will have lots of choices about what to read, including free public domain options online, I needed a good, solid introduction to the Ramayana — ideally, a version of the Ramayana that would be as satisfying as Narayan's book, which, for most students in the class anyway, turned out to be their favorite of the four books they read each semester. I found LOTS of public domain versions of the Ramayana in English, over a dozen... but none of them was really up to the task of providing a user-friendly, two-week overview of the Ramayana. They were either too short or too long, and the language was very dated. They are useful, and some of them are even very useful, but not so much as a first-time encounter with the epic. Plus, they would present me with the same problem I had with Narayan's book: there need to be lots of LINKS for students to use to pursue their curiosity, and there need to be lots of IMAGES to help bring the story to life in a visual way, not just words on a page. Digitized books which consist of page images suffer from the same link-deficiency and image-deficiency of printed paper books.

A New Public Domain Edition

So, what I realized I could do was to create my OWN version of the Ramayana to have online, a "public domain edition" that would be an anthology of the best bits of text from the existing public domain versions, along with public domain images, and lots of links to Wikipedia. This would not only be a good alternative to Narayan — it would probably be a BETTER alternative, except for those students who really prefer to read a printed book. Choosing the contents for this new edition of the Ramayana would allow me to include all the incidents that I hoped would catch the students' attention, telling the story in a fast-paced but clearly segmented way to reduce confusion, with the links and images woven through the text.

Plus, added bonus, it would give me a chance to introduce the students to those many different editions of the Ramayana so that during the second half of the semester, when the students have six weeks of free-choice reading, they would have perhaps have found some favorite authors that they want to investigate further. The idea is that they get to know both the Ramayana and the Mahabharata like this in the first half of the semester, and then in the second half of the semester they choose to do more reading of their choice: it can be all Ramayana or all Mahabharata, or a mix of both, or other kinds of Indian storytelling from the same time period, like the Panchatantra or the Jatakas, along with stories of the gods and goddesses from the Puranas and other religious texts. Hopefully the learning foundation provided by the first half of the semester will allow them to make great reading choices when the second half of the semester rolls around.

Making the PDE Ramayana

In order to make this happen, I decided to go with four sets of 20 blog posts each, with the blog posts being anywhere from 300-800 words of public domain text, plus some brief comments from me. I then made up a list of the 80 incidents from the Ramayana I would want to include, and that turned out to be pretty easy (but it is going to be so hard for the Mahabharata, eeek: I have way too many favorite episodes in that epic).

As I picked the Ramayana episode to include, I was excited at how many episodes I was able to include that were not in Narayan at all! In particular, I included the part about Sita's exile and the birth of her sons at the end. I've also got the demons Viradha and Kabanda, who are not in Narayan, all kinds of good stuff.

Next, I went through and started filling in the pages with chunks of text lifted from the most likely candidates, starting with the texts that have been fully digitized (not just page images). So, I did Mackenzie first, which gave me really good coverage, and then I did some verse segments from Romesh Dutt. I then filled in the remaining blanks with Gould and Sister Nivedita, along with a couple of pieces of Hodgson and one from Oman. When it seemed that Gould or Nivedita were way better than Mackenzie, I swapped him out. I even found a bit of poetry from Ryder, and I also used some poetry from Griffith (although he is going to be hard-going for the students who don't like poetry, so I used him on just two pages). I also used two very literary passages from Richardson (and I need to ponder if I want to include more from her). Best of all, I was able to include some of Manmatha Nath Dutt's literal translation for a couple of pages. Again, like with Griffith, Dutt's English is slow going, but very much worth it. It feels great to give the students a sense, at least indirectly, of the epic style while also letting them know that the whole English translation is available online like that.

Then, I went through the 80 pages one by one, adding an image to each one, along with a kind of "Reading Guide" to smooth over any gaps between the page and to add any extra information that the students might need (with their comments, students will be able to help me do a better job with those notes in future iterations).

So, that is what I just finished today! All 80 pages are done: the public domain text on every page, the comments from me, plus an image. REALLY cool images.

And, since this is all so modular, it's super-easy for me to keep improving this: I can swap out the text for any episode if I decide another chunk of text would work better. I can swap out the image if/when I find a better image. And so on.

In Praise of Images and Linkiness

And here's what I love about all of this compared to a traditional printed book. This Public Domain Edition of the Ramayana is soooooooo connected to a whole world of "stuff" online that they students can explore if they will just click on the links.

So, there are tons of links to Wikipedia articles about all the people and places in the epic, like Parashurama here:

Then there are links to the public domain sources for the Ramayana that I used, so you can click and read all of Frederika Richardson Macdonald's book if you want (public domain! free!), just to take one example.

Plus there are links for the image sources too so that people can learn more about the images if they want. And there are so many amazing images, like this gorgeous depiction of Lava and Kusha's encounter with Rama during his ashwamedha:

As you can see in that screenshot, there are links in the sidebar to all the image tabs at my image library, so for any given character, there are usually several images to look at, and lots of images for the major characters.

LINKS.

Going in all directions. Paths to follow. Your choice.

So................... CHOOSE!

Click.

Learn.

I am very happy about this, and so excited to see what the students will think!!!!!!!

And........ when I get back from Texas, I will start on the Public Domain Edition of the Mahabharata. That will be more of a challenge (the epic is so much bigger!) but also more satisfying (I am a far bigger fan of the Mahabharata). And for that one, Ganguli's literal English translation is already digitized, just waiting to be copied and pasted. :-)

IE UnTextbook Summer Diary: May 8-9 - blog reorganization

So, Friday was a big BLOG REORGANIZATION DAY, and I'm flagging this for #Rhizo15 also because I'm wondering if my great fondness for blogging and the de-centered content development process it fosters is something for which the rhizome metaphor might work well.

What I realized was that the big, sprawling Indian Epics blog I had been using for the past several years was getting so "overgrown" as it were that I had to let the roots extend outwards so that there would be some new nodes to grow up and out from, while still having everything be connected "underground" as it were. In this post, I will try to show how this blog growth spurt works; I went through a similar process with another cluster of course-related blogs like this some years ago, and I was excited that this moment had come at last for Indian Epics! 

Here are the three interconnected blogs I've ended up with:

Indian Epics: Images and PDE Epics

Indian Epics: Reading Guides

Indian Epics: Amar Chitra Katha

As far as Blogger is concerned these are three separate blogs, but as far as I am concerned they are three interrelated blogs. Here's what holds them together:
* same basic template (all built off the "simple" template)
* same widgets in sidebar (more about those widgets below)
* identical overview paragraph (with links to all three sites)

At the same time, the three blog sites are very distinctively different from each other, with a different color scheme and a different choice for the patterned background. That sense of "different spaces" (but connected!) is important for the students because it helps to reinforce the sense that they are doing different things with each of these three class websites. The different spaces are also important for me in terms of content development, helping me to spread my content development efforts out in these three general directions, while still staying connected.

Although I had been suspecting for a while that I would have to do this, getting the OER development grant (whoo-hoo!) made me realize that the time had come to make this big decision... and, having made the decision, it was surprisingly easy: everything fell into place, and I was so happy about the blog space when I was done at the end of the day on Friday. If only remodeling a house were so easy, eh?

I was especially happy with the content in the sidebars. I often dither about that, but for this set of blogs, I felt really clear about what I wanted to include:
Overview: This top paragraph is what holds the three sites together; easy to write.
Labels: The labels are working really well for the three separate blogs now, so either one or two label widgets provides all the navigation needed.
YouTube Playlist: I am really excited about learning more about YouTube channels, and I will be encouraging my students to make a playlist for their blog too!
Recent Posts: There are three widgets in each blog sidebar for the latest posts at all three of them.
Twitter: Cleaning up the content allowed me to better imagine how to have new items every day for this Twitter stream, even during the summer! It's a hashtag widget so it will pull from both my Twitter streams plus anything that might come from students also.
Google+: I use this instead of the default Blogger profile widget.
Blog Archive. This is more useful for me than for students/visitors, which is why it is down here near the bottom.
RSS Feeds. I need to think of what cool ways I can re-use the RSS feeds for these sites over at Inoreader! I haven't even started to think about that yet.
CC License. For the two sites where the content is being created by me, I have put a CC license. For the image library site, the contents are public domain (at least, I am endeavoring to make sure that is the case), and I have linked in every case to the website where people should go to find the same public domain source materials that I am using.

So, the blog reorganization day put me off schedule, but I am so glad I took the time on Friday to get this set up and to move Reading Guide content over to the new Reading Guide site. I still have a lot of work to do moving over all the book posts, but those were a mess anyway, so I can clean them up as I repost them, and far better to post them in a new home suited for them! Most important: this all feels very comfortable, very stable, so I can safely let this sit while I go to Texas next week, and then I can see how it suits me when I get back next weekend.

My Rhizo15 "subjective" was working on this UnTextbook, and I have been really grateful for the discussions over the past couple of weeks, the discussion about content in particular and also about the role of the instructor in developing and sharing content. All those ideas and provocations have been percolating as I work through this, and I am sure that the results are going to be so much better than they would have been otherwise. So, thanks to the Rhizo15 gang for getting the summer off to such a good start, and thanks also to Stacy Zemke and the OU Libraries for supplying me with comic books and other books so that Indian Epics next year is going to be such a great experience for the students!

Now I need to see just how much of the PDE Ramayana I can get done before I leave on Monday. I had hoped to finish before I go. That's probably not possible... but I might give it a big push this weekend and see what happens!

HAPPY WEEKEND, EVERYBODY........!!!

IE UnTextbook Summer Diary: Thursday, May 7

Today was a busy day (family stuff), but I managed to keep on making some progress: two comic books, and another nine pages of the PDE Ramayana... leading up to the story of Sampati and Jatayu, one of my favorites. I am so glad I had the version in Richardson to use there!

Of the two comic books I did, Dasharatha was nothing special (although some students might enjoy all the palace intrigue among the queens), but the Ancestors of Rama one was great. It is exciting to be able to offer students these stories that come from Kalidasa's Raghuvamsha. And such cool stories: Nandini the cow was definitely my favorite, but the story of Aja's magic spear was another good one. I like how the comic book page can stand on its own as a resource for the whole class too, in addition to however many students choose that particular comic book as a reading option. 

  

IE UnTextbook Summer Diary: Wednesday, May 6

WOW, what a great day!!! It started with great news from Stacy Zemke, OER goddess in the Univ. of Oklahoma Libraries: I've got a grant to help me in developing the Indian Epics UnTextbook!!! I have PLENTY of public domain materials to make the UnTextbook work... but thanks to this grant, it is going to allow me to try all kinds of new experiments, building paths for students to follow in all kinds of directions.

* Amar Chitra Katha comic books. This is what actually got me thinking about how nice it would be to have some funding! I bought a set of ACK comic books for myself, and then got to thinking how cool it would be if there were a set of ACK comic books on reserve in the Library. So, even before the grant got approved, Stacy helped me get that moving through the Library, and I already started writing up Reading Guides for the comic books. So fabulous!

  

* Movies and television. One of the things I want to do with the grant money is to buy some films to have on reserve. There is already the genius public domain film by Nina Paley, Sita Sings the Blues, so that means there is already one movie for people to watch, but with the grant money I hope to purchase the full version (5 hours!) of Peter Brook's Mahabharata. I can writing Reading Guides to go with the films, helping students link up the movie versions to other versions of the epics.

* Audiobooks. I'm also really keen on making audiobooks available... ideally for remote listening, but I'm not sure about that; students might have to come in and listen to audio on reserve. In any case, I'd really like to share Devdutt Pattanaik's Mahabharata, and there are some other audiobooks that would be nice!

* Books. There are LOTS of public domain books, but of course there are also lots of books not in the public domain that could be really useful. I'd love to "synch" my own personal book library with the Library's resources, writing Reading Guides to help students navigate those books, seeing how all these different books connect. Best of all would be if the Library can buy Kindle books which students could rent and read on their own devices, using the Kindle Twitter feature to share highlighted passages! Now THAT would be awesome, but I don't know yet if our Library can do that.

So, this is all incredibly exciting to me. The Indian Epics UnTextbook was going to work great just with public domain content, but having a chance to interweave the public domain content with Library materials is going to be so cool!

So, that was the big news today, and then I also made lots of progress on the Public Domain Edition Ramayana: I am halfway done! Yep, I finished all the way up through page 40, which is the end of the first week of reading. Sita has been abducted by Ravana, and Rama is on his way to find her! They meet up with the rakshasa Kabandha and get valuable information from him; I was really glad to include the Kabandha episode because he is not part of either of the books I had been using for class — even though he is a super-cool character in the epic!

IE UnTextbook Summer Diary: Tuesday, May 5

We're going to some friends' Cinco de Mayo party, so I'm publishing this earlier rather than later today! After my first diary post from yesterday where I tried to summarize my progress so far, I can make this more like a true diary post: what I did today (well, in the 24 hours since last post and this one). And I'm sharing this with #Rhizo15 ... Twitter convo about content with Jesse Stommel et al. gave me lots of good things to think about as I worked away on the UnTextbook today, pondering content-as-exploratorium.

Comic books. I did two Ravana-related comic books and they are both going to be so useful, especially Lord of Lanka because it contains the stories of Vedavati (not in either of the books I had previously used for class) and the story of Rambha (in Buck only before).
Ravana Humbled: An Arrogant King Finds New Friends
The Lord of Lanka: The Rise and Fall of a Demon King

PDE Ramayana. This is my main focus right now as I want to get that done if I can before I leave for Texas next week. It is really fun writing up the Reading Guide portion to go with each page (including a few words about the source when a new source gets added to the mix), along with adding an image. I have now FINISHED the first 20 pages, which is the first day's worth of reading (total of 80 pages, four days of reading = two weeks). If printed out as a book, the PDE Ramayana would be around 150 pages I guess... but the whole point is that it is NOT a book. :-)

Ramayana Images. Illustrating the posts in the PDE Ramayana, I had to search for a few new images to include, like this one for Rama breaking Shiva's bow; I really wanted an illustration that put the focus on the bow, and I found this one by Evelyn Paul — it's an illustration for Monro, one of the books that will be a reading option later!

I also loved this Rama-and-Sita sculpture that I found at Flickr. Photographer: Indi Samarajiva.

YouTube. I was listening to background music today, and so I started building a Background Music playlist. Some good kirtans in there, other nice stuff.

IE UnTextbook Summer Diary: Monday, May 4

So, today (Monday) is the first day of summer for me, and I've already made a lot of progress on the Indian Epics UnTextbook, which also happens to be my "subjective" for #Rhizo15 (and as it so happens, the question of content posed for this week really gave me a lot to think about!). So, for this post I'll summarize where I stand so far with the Ramayana. This represents work I've been doing for the past couple of weeks as I've had time to spare... and now I will have lots more time. Goal is to finish the minimum Ramayana materials by May 23.

Ramayana reading options: I've pretty well cataloged the Ramayana reading options, and targeted (with an asterisk) the ones for which I want to write up Reading Guides. Of course, I already have the Guides for the two printed books I've been using. Here are the books I've identified online: Ramayana reading options.

Ramayana Reading Guide. The Reading Guide I wrote today is for Sita Sings the Blues, a video by Nina Paley. I LOVE THIS MOVIE. It was a real pleasure to make the Reading (Watching) Guide. This is a one-week Ramayana option. I really hope lots of students will choose it for the Week 4 "reading" after having read a more traditional version of the Ramayana; they will also have the option of choosing to watch the film during the free choice half of the semester, Weeks 9-14.

Ramayana, Uttara Kanda. I did a detailed link index for Dutt's literal translation of the Uttara Kanda, and I target two one-week reading options from that book. I would love to do this for all the books of the Ramayana (which is barely feasible) and for the Mahabharata too (which is crazy impossible, but I could link to Ganguli just as I have linked to Dutt here), but there's not going to be time, I know, although I do have a giant spreadsheet with the kandas and sargas numbered and titled so I will be able to navigate Dutt more easily. I am glad I got the Uttara Kanda done as a fully linked index that the students can use because my students are very interested in this material; indeed, the whole second half of Nina Paley's film comes from the Uttara Kanda.

Public Domain Edition: Ramayana. I am really proud of what I got one with the PDE Ramayana over the weekend! All 80 pages have content on them now, although I may swap some content out (in particular, I think students are just not going to be happy with Griffith's verse translation; it will be easy to swap that out with Dutt's literal prose translation now that I have started indexing Dutt). It was hard limiting myself to just the 80 pages, but it provides a really solid two-week experience, and I've included excerpts from 8 different sources so far; I hope to include more now that I've got my Ramayana sources indexed. Next step, writing up the Reading Guide portion for each page and adding images. Here's what I have so far: PDE Ramayana.

Comic Books: I need to check with the Library to see if they have processed the order (the wheels of bureaucracy grind slowly... but they are moving forward at least; the idea is that there will be a complete set of ACK comic books in the Reserve area of the Library for students to read). I have completed two readings guides — Sons of Rama: Luv and Kush and Kumbhakarna: The Sleeping Giant — and when I finish this post I will be doing more comic book reading guides today! Whoo-hoo!

Images. I'm in pretty good shape with my image library so while I would really like to improve that, I'm not really stressing about it. I did some browsing for Ramayana images yesterday and found some new items to include for sure, writing them up as blog posts here (I have not done that yet: I have a lot of notblogged images at Diigo). For example, I made sure to include Shabari in the PDE Ramayana (I love her story!), and I found this Balasaheb Pant Pratinidhi illustration from 1911 that I can use:

And searching for Shabari images led me to this YouTube video!

Which relates to the next item on the list! :-)

YouTube Channel. I've never been a good user of my YouTube Channel... but that all changed this weekend! I cleared out all my old likes and playlists (I just had a few, very random)... and made it all-Indian, a resource space dedicated to providing music for the UnTextbook!!! I am really excited about this. If I find a few videos each day to save and share, that will make it easy to include a music video of the day in my class announcements each semester. SO EXCITING!!!

So, I think that's it, and if I forgot something, I'll add it in tomorrow's post. And now........... comic books!!! :-)

Discontented, but in love with content: The #Rhizo15 paradox

So, today is really the FIRST DAY of my summer... Monday: but no school! And the first thing I wanted to do when I sat down at my computer was get to work on the Indian Epics UnTextbook. That is a good sign!

For this post, I want to explain more about the specific situation I find myself in with a class titled "Indian Epics" and what kind of UnTextbook experience I want to create. In the Rhizo15 posts from the past week, I see a wide range of reflections on content. Insofar as there are content camps, I am in what might be called the "discontented" camp, but in this post I hope to show that it is not that I am anti-content but rather that I am intensely aware of the difference between student-centered content and a traditional, top-down approach in which content is assigned by the instructor.

No Force-Fed Humanities, Please

In my case, I am teaching Gen. Ed. Humanities courses which are required for graduation, on the assumption that there is some diet of Humanities content that is "good" for the students, content food that I can feed them (by force if necessary) because the consumption of that content will benefit them. That force-feeding approach makes me very uncomfortable. It's not that I don't love the content; I'm the one who created the Indian Epics course at my school because when offered the chance to design a new Non-Western Gen. Ed. course, this was what I most wanted to do. I do indeed love these epics, and they have been a hugely important part of my life since I discovered them, thanks to Peter Brook's Mahabharata as shown on public television way back in 1989.

But for all that I love the epics, I don't expect the students will necessarily share that love, and I certainly don't want to try to force my feelings on them. Instead, I want to create an environment where the students can explore the epics freely and have their own experience of them, responding to their own curiosity and values, an independent experience, not just an awkward imitation of my own experience. So, while I think it's great that the Indian Epics UnTextbook will be free of charge, reducing costs is not my main goal (indeed, the paperbacks I was using previously were so cheap to buy used at Amazon that all four books cost less than $25). Instead, my goal is to do a better job of responding to those challenges by taking a student-driven approach.

Some History

When I first started teaching the Indian Epics class online in 2003 after having started teaching online with Myth-Folklore in 2002, I was really in a bind. From the very first semester of Myth-Folklore, I was able to give students a choice of reading (two reading options each week) and build the course in a modular way; the online resources were a small fraction of what they are now, but given the immensity of Myth-Folklore as a topic, it was easy to take a student-centered approach to the content from the start. With Indian Epics, though, everything was different. These were epics, not topics I could just "modularize" with weekly units so that every week was an independent choice. Plus, there were no readings available online (not even at Sacred Texts Archive); that meant, like it or not, I was going to have to make choices about books to buy for the class.

So, for the past ten years I had taken a very traditional approach, although one that I hoped would inspire my students to think about the content in a fluid, changing, subjective way: each semester, we would read TWO versions of each epic, the Ramayana as told by R. K. Narayan (Indian writer) and the Mahabharata as told by William Buck (American writer). In addition, the Ramayana books were themselves based on two different originals: Narayan was working with Kamban's Tamil Ramayana while Buck was working with Valmiki's Sanskrit Ramayana. And that was good so far as it went: by reading multiple versions of the epics like that, it helped the students to see that there was no "objective" epic, but only versions of the epics, interpretations, stories told by particular storytellers for particular audiences, just as they would be telling their own versions of the epics, their own stories. This multiplicity was a real surprise to the students, and disorienting in a good way, especially for those students who come to the class with assumptions about the Bible as a monolithic text (and teaching at the University of Oklahoma, that is not an uncommon assumption).

Indian Epics and the Myth-Folklore UnTextbook

Then, last year, I was able to break up my Indian Epics reading list thanks to the UnTextbook I had created for the Myth-Folklore class which had a lot of options from India (Buddhist stories, regional folktales, etc.): 12 different India units to be specific. In Myth-Folklore, those units provide one or two weeks of reading, along with similar modules of reading from Africa, Asia, British Isles, Europe, Middle East, and Native America.

So, for the Fall semester in Indian Epics, to make room for the UnTextbook option, I made Buck's Mahabharata optional so that the students could choose units from the UnTextbook for those four weeks if they wanted. It was a huge success! The UnTextbook option went so well in Fall that  in the Spring I also made the second half of Buck's Ramayana optional. As a result, students had six weeks of epic reading and six weeks of optional reading from the UnTextbook, looking at other Indian storytelling traditions.

I should note, however, that most students actually still chose to read the Buck books. I suspect this was because many students are still most familiar with reading actual books for school, and the assumption that books-are-the-course is very strong. But here's the thing: because of the social nature of the course with students reading each other's work all the time, even the students who stuck to the books got to learn about the UnTextbook by looking at the stories written by the students who explored the other reading options. So, that was great: the class ended up being a richer reading experience for everybody because of the UnTextbook options woven into the mix. But it was, admittedly, a more diluted epic experience because the materials in the UnTextbook were mostly folktales, very much connected to India, but not necessarily to the epic tradition per se.

Summer 2015: An UnTextbook for Indian Epics

So, for next year, I want to take the idea of the UnTextbook while keeping the focus on the epic tradition, along with the ancient storytelling traditions embodied in the Panchatantra and Buddhist jatakas which were taking shape at the same time as the epics (and, indeed, you can see those stories told by characters in the epics themselves, which is very cool). That means I will be making a specifically Indian Epics UnTextbook this semester, one which is fully focused on the incredibly rich storytelling tradition preserved (miraculously!) in these ancient texts.

For the first few weeks of summer, I am focusing on the Ramayana, hoping to finish that by May 23 (I'm out of town for one week in there to see my dad). Then I will work on the Mahabharata for the rest of May and all of June, hoping to finish that by July 1 (I'm out of town for another week in there to go to the DML conference). And then by July 25 (and I'm guessing another trip to see my dad will take up part of July), I want to finish up the epic-related readings that I also want to include: stories about Krishna, stories of the gods and goddesses, plus Buddhist storytelling traditions. That will then give me the last week of July to make sure everything fits together before my husband's daughter and grandson come visit in first week of August, followed by a frenzied few days of getting everything up and running for students to start on August 11.

All told, I've got 14 weeks, of which 4 weeks will be travel/family weeks where I might get some reading done, but probably not much of that. So: 10 weeks. It's going to be a tight squeeze to get all the work done in that time, but I need to keep in mind the bare MINIMUM I need to get done... and not get distracted by the infinite possibilities. And really, especially when it comes to the Mahabharata, the possibilities are not just infinite but so tempting (I personally far prefer the Mahabharata to the Ramayana). So, it's good I am start with the Ramayana, ha ha, because I will be able to set more reasonable expectations that way.

I'll be keeping a diary here of my progress, so in addition to the Rhizo15 tag (where appropriate), I'll also be linking to Summer15 posts. And now.......... bring on the epics! My goal today is to write up the reading guide — but really a watching guide — for Nina Paley's GENIUS animated film, Sita Sings the Blues. It's in the public domain. It positively WANTS to be embedded in the UnTextbook.

HAPPY.

Summer is coming...

TWO WEEKS UNTIL SUMMER. It's like the anti-Stark motto: Summer is coming . . .

I cannot believe it myself, but it is true! School started so early this semester that I finish up on the afternoon of Friday, May 1... and Fall semester does not start until August 24, which means August 17 for me (I always open my classes one week early). So, that is all of May... all of June... all of July, then two weeks in August to do all the actual getting-classes-ready. THREE WHOLE MONTHS.

The next time I moan about how little I get paid, I need to remember this most incredible of all possible luxuries, afforded by very few jobs on this planet: TIME FOR MY OWN PROJECTS. Every single year. No one to answer to, no one telling me what to do. 100% my own time to read and think and write and make things. As I said in my "learning subjective" for #Rhizo15, my goal is to energize that whole process this summer in fabulous new ways.

I'll freely admit that I am selfish and protective about that time, too. During the school year, I commit every working day to my job, and in the evenings and weekends, I'm mostly just recovering, ha ha, because I really do work hard. So, when summer comes, the difference is total: I still work hard, but it is on projects that I choose. Basically, during the school year I am all about trying to find ways to help my students as they work on what they choose... but summer is my choice!

This summer I'll have some traveling to do (so far 2015 has been a pretty hard year for me, as my mother died, and so my dad is now on his own), and I'm also going to my first conference in years: DML in June! But aside from that, I'm going to be doing India-India-and-more-India this summer, retooling my Indian Epics class much like I did my Myth-Folklore class last summer.

And for those who watched the Myth-Folklore Textbook happen last summer, this may be hard to believe but ... I am even more excited about this project! It's a harder project, which is part of why it is exciting, but it is also one that is really meaningful to me personally because I am going to learn SO MUCH. I discovered Indian storytelling and the Sanskrit language much too late in my life (see below), but now I can make up, at least in part, for the Indian education I never got to enjoy for myself. I want to know ALL the stories, and given the vastness that is Indian storytelling, such a project would take a lifetime. But three months sounds pretty good to me! Plus, I have the benefit of the tricks and strategies I learned from the massive project I did last summer.

Overall: The goal is to move my class from using four paperback versions of the epics (Ramayana by Narayan and by Buck, Mahabharata by Narayan and by Buck) to an UnTextbook model where students can choose to read the printed books if they want, or they can choose to do all their readings online from public domain sources, along with a comic book option available on reserve in our beautiful Bizzell Library.

So, to make that happen, there is a series of tasks I need to accomplish. These are more or less in order, although they are a kind of "rolling" agenda in the sense that I can start on the first few projects now and then add on the later projects as I complete the earlier ones. Luckily, most of these are open-ended in the sense that there is a bare minimum I have to get done for my course to go well in Fall, but above and beyond that bare minimum, I can really just go with the flow.

1. Catalog my ACK comic books. This is so exciting I still squeak when I talk about it (I talk too fast in general, and I really do squeak when I get excited). I had ordered just for my own pleasure the 300+ comic book collection from Amar Chitra Katha when it went on sale a few weeks ago. Now I own them all:

Then, thanks to the wonder-working goddess of the OU Libraries, Stacy Zemke, the Library also purchased a set that will be on reserve for my students. So, I need to catalog the comic books and transcribe the little blurbs from ACK so that the comic books will be really searchable. The ACK website itself is pretty terrible and I have not yet found a good comprehensive text document anywhere online that lends itself to searching for specific comics. As a result, this catalog will be something useful for me, for my students, and I hope useful to the public at large! This will be happening at my Amar Chitra Katha blog.
Bare minimum: Write up blurbs on the Myth, Folktales, and Classics comics; the Bravehearts and Visionaries can come later.

2. Create my own Ramayana and Mahabharata online anthologies. This is a huge challenge, and I need to start at the beginning of the summer so that I have lots of time to revise. Basically, I want to create for each epic an online anthology of readings drawn from different public domain sources that would be appx. 150-200 pages long if it were a printed book (but they will take the form of individual blog posts for linking, remixing, etc. and also for easily including images, embedded video/music, etc.; Ramayana I am sure I can do in 150 pages, but Mahabharata will probably take 200). I'll have more to say about this in a separate post, but I see this as the biggest online writing challenge I have ever set for myself. I've been inventorying all the public domain sources I can draw on, ranging from literal English translations of the epics, to English verse translations, to prose retellings, along with audio resources at LibriVox. My goal is to make an online book that students can read over a two-week period which will give them an overall sense of the epic (comparable to what they now get in my classes by reading Narayan's condensed versions), and which will also give them a sense of which public domain books they might like to read for themselves later on in the course.
Bare minimum: I'm aiming for 50-60 episodes as a core for each epic (each episode as 500-1000 words or so), knowing I can build on that later, swap episode content, etc.

3. Write up Reading Guides for the public domain books. This item goes hand-in-hand with the previous item. As I write up the Reading Guides for the public domain sources (here are the Reading Guides I've done for the four class books in the past), I'll also keep an eye out for episodes that are really well told so that I can transcribe those episodes (most of the sources I am using are just page-images, not fully digitized texts) and consider them for inclusion in my own Ramayana and Mahabharata anthologies as described above. I'll start with the books (only a few of them unfortunately) that are available at Sacred Texts and/or at Project Gutenberg (which has better proofreading than Sacred Texts) so that I can being by copying-and-pasting, only transcribing when I need to use texts from Hathi Trust, Internet Archive, or Google Books.
Bare minimum: I need enough reading guides for 16 weeks of free reading (i.e. 8 weeks with at least 2 choices each week), ideally 24 as the minimum.

4. Keep building my Indian images library. Right now this exists in a kind of higgledy-piggledy way across my Indian Epics Resources blog, my Pinterest Board, and my Diigo bookmarks, but I've already started normalizing that (making sure that I bookmark everything in Diigo in order to avoid duplicates), and I'm really excited about developing this more systematically. Being able to include images in the anthologies (see above) is essential; in some ways students prefer to read the paperback books, but the images are a powerful lure to get them to read online. For most of the students in the class, the world of the Indian Epics is completely new and foreign, and the gorgeous, thought-provoking images are the best method I have to provoke the students' curiosity. Also, just speaking for myself, I love working with images. This is going to be a really wonderful part of the summer!
Bare minimum: What I have in my Library is actually enough, so this is truly an extra, but a fun extra. I'll probably set myself a goal of 5 new images per day, something like that.

5. Write up Reading Guides for the comic books. This is a project I can start as soon as I finish the cataloging of the comic books described above. My goal is to make sure that there are abundant comic book reading options for the second half of the semester which is all free reading (Weeks 9-14), but I also want to make sure to have some comic book materials available for the free reading in Week 4 (Ramayana-related) and in Week 7 (Mahabharata-related). My goal is to blend the comic book reading with other online sources, as you can see here in the Reading Guide I wrote up to go with one of the jataka comic books: Monkey Tales. I'll be able to use these for my Myth-Folklore class also, which is another big plus!
Bare minimum: As with the Reading Guides above, I'd like to have comic book choices to support 16 weeks of free reading options (32 individual comic books), so I'll pick those first and then move on from there. (Update: I just did my first pass and found it hard to limit myself to 40 comic books titles, ha ha. So that is what I will start with.)

Well, writing that out made it seem less intimidating! Of course, it's an infinitely large project because of all the materials available online and all the ways I can make those materials useful to my students, but what's great is that I can build the bare minimum (comic book catalog, the two anthologies, plus a core set of Reading Guides), and then just see how much more time I have.

I cannot believe all the great things I am going to get to read this summer... especially the Mahabharata-related materials. Discovering the Mahabharata in the form of Peter Brook's film shown on PBS back in 1990 changed my life forever, making me realize that my undergraduate education had been absurdly incomplete — the most absurd thing being that I had no idea whatsoever how incomplete it was.

Being completely mesmerized by that film from the very first opening moments led me on the most extraordinary path for the next ten years. That path led me to graduate school, where I read and read and read (I was a reading machine for those six years at Berkeley), but since I finished graduate school in 1999, I have not had time like that to devote to my Indian education. Of course, I have been incredibly lucky to teach this Indian Epics class at OU because it means I have learned a lot and read a lot, in bits and pieces, over the past 15 years (and even during my brief stint in the Classics department at OU, I taught an Iliad-Mahabharata course). Now, at last, I get a chance to take a deep breath and plunge into three months of reading.

I cannot imagine a better summer for a bookworm like myself............! And I hope everybody else is expecting a glorious summer as well!