Indian Epics: books books and more books

So, I really had not planned on getting this amazing grant from Univ. of Oklahoma Libraries to support OER development for my Indian Epics class, and I am still just trying to figure out the best strategies to use! And what a great dilemma that is to have!!! I've got a core of public domain content since that was all I expected to have... but now I've got a chance to go beyond that public domain content to do even more. In this blog post I'll try to summarize where I'm at with that right now and where I'm headed. Plus, since rethinking the content for that class (creating something like the "UnTextbook" in my Myth-Folklore class) is my "subjective" for #Rhizo15, I'm sharing this post with the rhizo world.

COMIC BOOKS

The obvious first choice was the complete set of Amar Chitra Katha comic books, and that is moving full speed ahead. I had already bought a complete set of those comic books for myself in April, and it was that event which actually set in motion the process of getting the grant. I had craved those comic books for years and years, and when the price plunged ($399 for all 300+ comic books, and free shipping from Mumbai... usual price was over $1000), I grabbed a set just for myself. Then, the wonderful Stacy Zemke, OER goddess in our Library, suggested that we could maybe get the Library to buy a set... and that evolved into me applying for the OER grant. My comic books (not shown: the hardback-bound Mahabharata and Bhagavatam which are on a separate shelf).

Meanwhile, the Library's set of comic books will reach Norman this week (it left Mumbai on May 13), and I am happily creating reading guides for the comic books, both to help my students choose the ones they want to read (I am so curious which ones will be most popular!) and also to create OER materials (CC-licensed, etc.). The comic books are not OER, but the reading guides I am writing definitely are! I've been sharing them with the ACK Twitter account and I am hoping to make some real contacts at ACK as this project evolves.

PETER BROOK'S MAHABHARATA?

So, that's $400 for the comic books in the Library, and that leaves $2100 in the grant... which sounds to me like so much money!!! I'd like to get a copy of the 5-hour Mahabharata by Peter Brook for students to watch; let's say that will be around $100 (yes, it's crazy: the 5-hour DVD version is really hard to find and really expensive if/when you did find it). The Library is investigating whether we can get streaming privileges for either the 3-hour or 5-hour version... and I'd be willing to pony up $500 for that (although I am guessing Parabola Media will demand more than that, in which case I am not interested).

KINDLES!

After Peter Brook's film, then there is $2000 or maybe $1600 still left. What to do with that...? What I am thinking is that I would like to buy and equip 4 Kindles for Library reserve checkout, loading them up with Kindle books so that the students' Kindle Library would match up with my extensive Kindle collection of India-related books, and that way they could then choose what they might want to read. Since I try to design reading selections that take 1-2 hours to read and write up, then the Library Reserve option could work perfectly for this, and I am guessing 4 Kindles would be plenty for a class that usually has 30 students and even 40-45 students (since I'd like to start shifting enrollment so that I get equal numbers in India and Myth-Folklore).

I'm just speculating in the dark now since I really don't know how Kindles work in our Library, although I will not be the first person to have done something like this (for example, I found this Kindle-textbook initiative at the Library website).

But just to get the discussion going, I'm guessing the Library would ask me to buy the Kindles; let's say those run $120. So, 4 of those Kindles is appx. $500. That leaves me $1100 or $1500 to spend on books! Right now my wish list would look something like what you see below: about $250 total.

SO THAT WOULD WORK: I could load up separate copies on four Kindles of all the books here! I also need to check and see if maybe we have some of these books in hard copy in the Library already. So, there could be hard copies on reserve also.

THE KINDLE/AUDIBLE WISH LIST

appx. $20 - Audible only:
William Buck. Ramayana. ($15)
Devdutt Pattanaik. Seven Secrets of Shiva. ($4)

appx. $80 - Kindle + Audible 
(I see there are big discounts for Whispersync combos!)
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. Palace of Illusions. ($12 + $5 audio)
John Jackson. Brahma Dreaming. ($6 + $3 audio)
Devdutt Pattanaik. Jaya: Mahabharata. ($10 + $6 audio)
Indra Parthasarathy. Krishna Krishna. ($3 + $5 audio)
Bulbul Sharma. Ramayana. ($8 + $17 audio)

appx. $150 - Kindle:
Ashok Banker. Ramayana. ($10)
Krishna Dharma. Mahabharata. ($8)
Krishna Dharma. Ramayana. ($8)
Maggi Lidchi Grassi. The Great Golden Sacrifice. ($25)
Anil Menon. Breaking the Bow. ($4)
Ramesh Menon. Mahabharata. ($7)
Ramesh Menon. Ramayana. ($10)
Ramesh Menon. Blue God. ($4)
R. K. Narayan. Mahabharata. ($10)
R. K. Narayan. Ramayana. ($11)
Patrick Olivelle. Panchatantra. ($6)
Devdutt Pattanaik. Pashu. ($5)
Devdutt Pattanaik. Book of Ram. ($10)
Carole Satyamurti. Mahabharata. ($20)
Ashwin Sanghi. Krishna Key / Rozabal Line ($9)

STUDENT CHOICES

Looking at that list, WOW, I am so excited: I would love (love love LOVE) for students to be choosing things to read from those books, with me writing up reading guides to help them find what they are looking for... and of course that is on top of the COMIC BOOKS... and it is also on top of the PUBLIC DOMAIN materials I already found (see my Ramayana: Public Domain Edition for a taste of that).

I have lots of questions about just how this works practically speaking with the Kindles, and one of my most important questions is whether the Kindles can be linked to a Twitter account so that students can TWEET THEIR HIGHLIGHTS. Fingers crossed.

Anyway, I'm hoping that I can start coordinating with Stacy and all the great people in the Library to see how this will work. One of the things I like about this Kindle strategy is that, for the most part, these books are not really expensive, so if someone decides they really like a book, buying a Kindle copy for themselves is not a big deal, esp. since there are no textbooks at all required for the course. And a Kindle book you can read on basically ANY mobile device OR on a desktop. I use the Kindle desktop cloud reader a lot!

So, a gorgeous book like Divakaruni's Palace of Illusions is one that would work for four weeks' worth of reading in the class... and if a student didn't want the hassle of going to the Library Reserve room, well, it's just $12 for the Kindle book, or they could get a used paperback for just $5, and that would take them through four weeks of the class. But they can also just read it on reserve in the Library, no problem. (Almost all of my students live in Norman or nearby.)

WHERE'S THE OER?

So where's the OER in all of this? The idea is that I will be writing up the Reading Guides to go with all these materials, helping the students to find the materials that interest them. And seriously, just getting right books in the hands of the right students is a huge challenge, but a fun one. This is all new to most of the students, so I can't just say "choose" without helping them to see what's there!

The Guides also will build up a body of open reference material for the class (and for anybody!) to supplement the abundant materials at Wikipedia. For a sense of how that works, see the Guides to the comic books that I have written so far: Amar Chitra Katha Comic Book Guides.  Some of them are incredibly rich sources for stories that are not easily found elsewhere, like Ancestors of Rama: A Noble Inheritance (a retelling of portions of Kalidasa's Raghuvamsha), or Vishvamitra: The King Who Became an Ascetic, just to take two examples.

I'm publishing the ACK Comic Book Guides there at a blog, and I'll have the Book Reading Guides at a separate blog (my old guides for Buck and Narayan are there already), and the posts at both of those blogs are CC-licensed, which is one of the terms (a good one!) of the Library's OER grant.

Okay, I am clearly getting too excited now. I need to go make dinner, calm down...... and then get all excited again this evening when I do some more work on the guides! Whoo-hoo!!!!!!

The Palace of Illusions:

Free Kindle eBooks: What a Treasure-Trove!

As I mentioned in my post yesterday about daily class announcements as class content, one of the items I include every day is a free Kindle eBook. I am so lucky that there are lots - LOTS - of wonderful books relevant to my classes which are in the public domain and available in lots of different digital formats, including free Kindle eBooks.

I am really happy recommending ebooks to students in this format since Kindle books work well on so many devices - on a Kindle, obviously, but also on a handheld or tablet with a Kindle app, or on a laptop browser using the Kindle Cloud. It was the introduction of the Kindle Cloud that prompted me to start collecting Kindle ebook titles to share with my students; this is a format I am sure can be useful to every single one of my students. As for myself, I read a lot of Kindle books using the Kindle app for my iPad and my iPodTouch, but I also access Kindle books on my laptop and Chromebook using the Cloud. So, from personal experience, I have learned that someone can be an avid consumer of Kindle books without even owning a Kindle!

Although not all the public domain books I would like to share with my students have free Kindle versions, most of them do! This summer, I will do another round-up and see if I can expand my listing to include some more free books. As it is, I have almost 200 books that I can recommend, and of those I selected 105 to use for the daily announcements (one for each day of the semester), coordinating with the reading topics for the classes and making sure to include at least a couple of India-related books every week.

To support my use of the books in the daily announcements, I made a blog post for each book that I found; you can see the blog posts here: Myths & Folklore for Young & Old. That's another blog I have which may or may not turn into a book one of these days (I wasn't kidding about using blogs for everything!). Meanwhile, the blog's a handy place to list the books, including the table of contents for each one so that people can learn more about each book before they decide if they want to grab the free copy.

I also created a widget (and I'll have plenty to say in other posts about RotateContent.com, the free tool I use to create my widgets) which allows me to feature the Kindle books in the sidebar of my class announcements blog. Here's the widget; every time the page refreshes, you'll see a new one of the Kindle books at random. Each listing in the widget contains an image and a link to the Amazon book, plus the blog post which provides more information.

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Blogging: Class Announcements as Class Content

Yesterday, I wrote about how I use blogs to develop content that has evolved into book form, with the blog providing a space for the development and re-iteration of the content, thus allowing it to improve with each iteration. In this post, I want to talk about how I use a blog to develop class content in the form of daily class announcements.

I've used daily class announcements since I first started teaching online courses over ten years ago. At first, I did announcements for Monday-Friday, but now I do new announcements every day, including Saturday and Sunday, because most of my students do course work over the weekends. I remember showing my announcements many years ago to another online instructor, and she was baffled. "How could you have something to say every day?" That question really surprised me: how could I not have things to say every day, and how could I miss such a valuable opportunity to communicate with students? I rely on the daily announcements not just to reinforce the immediate goals of the class but also to educate students about the Internet as an infinite learning resource, a space for learning that I hope they will continue to use long after the class is over.

So, before you read any further, take a look; here is my class announcements blog: Online Course Announcements.

It's a Blogger.com blog, and I've been using the same blog for over five years now (although, as I've said before, I'm platform-neutral; any blogging software will do, and I used different blogging platforms before setting on Blogger). With blogging software, all my previous announcements are accessible to me. That means I can build and grow the content from semester from semester, and from year to year, both recycling AND improving the contents of the announcements along the way. So, I do a lot of copying-and-pasting, but I also do a lot of editing, while gradually adding in new kinds of content every semester and removing content that I am less satisfied with. In terms of course content development, I consider doing the announcements one of the most fun aspects of the class. In-between semesters, I look forward to developing new content, and each day as I write the announcements during the semester, I enjoy seeing how it all fits together.

Overall, I would say the announcements have a big impact on the class. At a minimum, it shows the students that I am aware of the flow of the class from day to day, every day. I am never checked out (even if I myself don't do schoolwork over the weekends), and I want to make sure they have the information they need, no matter what personal schedule they are on as they do the work for the class. I don't expect that any student would or even should read the announcements every day, of course, so I do repeat important news items if I need to make 100% sure every student in the class is aware of them.

Beyond that bare minimum of checking in and basic reminders, the best part of the announcements is all the other "stuff," the class content that comes through day by day, showing that there is an endless supply of things to know and learn about the topics of the classes I teach. The two classes I teach - Mythology & Folklore and Indian Epics - are interrelated enough that it is easy to do combined announcements for both, and I am actually really glad that the students in Myth-Folklore get to see the content related to the Indian Epics class, and vice versa.

So, as of Fall 2013, the "extra" content which appears in the form of my class announcements consists of the following items:

• Reminders and Procedures: These are what most people probably think of when they think of class announcements - reminders about due dates, answers to questions students have asked, etc. 
• Online Resources and Tools: Since I am an avid consumer of online resources and tools, it's exciting to share those with students. Some of the items are specifically course-related (like great websites to use for research), while others have a more general purpose (such as browser-based tools for working with text, editing images, etc.). Since my classes are writing-intensive, I also feature a lot of writing tips here.
• Featured Storybook: This allows me to feature wonderful student work, both from past semesters and from the current semester. At the start of the semester, I feature past projects, and then as the new projects for the semester get underway, I feature a mix of both past and current Storybooks.
• Free Kindle eBooks: I have collected a list of free Kindle eBooks with mythology and folktales from around the world, including India too of course, so that there is a new free ebook every day. I like the Kindle format because it is very device neutral; I'll say more about that choice in another post.
• Proverbs: Proverbs are one of the most important folklore genres in the world. I include proverbs from many traditions, making sure that at least two of the proverbs each week are from India. (I build these with the Automotivator tool I wrote about last week.)
• Indian Epics Images: We read the Ramayana and the Mahahbarata in class, so I have a new image from the image, aligned with what the current reading assignment is in class. Indian art is a beautiful tradition, and it is often new to students in the class. I am really happy that the students in Myth-Folklore get this exposure to Indian art, in addition to the material they are covering in that class.
• Campus Event: I look for some kind of campus event to include every day. This is not easy because our Campus Events Calendar is badly underutilized and I think, in fact, it may be broken (on the day of Homecoming, not a single event was listed; I haven't gotten any really clear answers from the people in charge of the calendar about just what is going on). Luckily, the students help me out by sending me items to include from events they are involved in, and I am now using Twitter to learn about campus events, too.
• Date-Related Item: I try to close with some kind of holiday or other date-based observance to call attention to the calendar date. I include all kinds of items under this heading: religious and secular holidays, the dates of historical events, the birthdays of famous artists and writers - anything at all that is prompted by the actual calendar date.

So, that's how my announcements are working for this semester. Next semester, it will be mostly the same... but also different, as I continue iterating, improving the content every semester. In upcoming posts, I'll say a bit more about how I developed all this content and the specific tools that helped me to do that. As I've already mentioned in a previous post about my new #foreignwordsinenglish project, I should be adding a word etymology to the announcements every day next semester (with a focus on words that English has borrowed from India, but from other languages around the world also).

While I'm sure that for other types of classes textbooks are a great content-delivery vehicle, I am convinced that for my classes and my style of teaching, it is actually the daily announcements that are a better way for me to share content with the students, offering them something of myself, my interests, my knowledge, and my goals in teaching these classes. Moreover, even in a specialized course with a much more narrowly defined content focus, I still think there is a role that daily announcements can play, helping to make students aware of the issues that are important in a given academic discipline, sharing with them news of scholarship and important discoveries, alerting them to whatever resources are available online for them to deepen and broaden my studies, etc. etc. etc. With daily announcements, it is all about etc. in fact!

That's how it seems to me anyway. I cannot imagine an online course that does not take advantage of the communication channel made possible by daily announcements for a class. If everybody learns even just one new thing every day, what a wiser world this would be!

Every day a person grows more wise.

Polish: Co dzień człowiek mędrszy.
(more information about this poster)