Day 2: Glad I have the books to read... system down?

Okay, here we go! I can already tell this experience is going to renew my empathy with my students who are often getting around to their online class work at the end of a very long day. That is the case for me... but I have vowed to do my half hour every day, so here I am, about to log on to janux.ou.edu on the first official day of the class and see what I can learn! I'm using Safari to do this since I did not have good luck with Chrome over the weekend.

Uh-oh...

Is it server overload? I'm getting an error message. I heard that there were load problems earlier in the day, but I was hoping to be able to log on tonight. Let me try Firefox and see if that makes a difference.

Hmmmm, it looks like I am going to get timed out because it is grinding... and grinding... and grinding... ha ha, which is pretty much how I feel today myself. No luck in Firefox. I'll try Chrome just in case. I get the little green man doing his dance in Chrome, but nothing more:

But I did buy the books this weekend, so I will read for a half hour and hope for better tomorrow! I'm assuming I can't go wrong in reading! :-)

UPDATE: I had a great time reading... and I guess that goes to validate the "all the eggs in one basket" danger of these types of learning management systems which want to be your one and only learning space (something I have very carefully avoided in all my online classes). So, thanks to Kerry's email of Sunday, I had the three class books on my Kindle and I read the opening pages of each one. They were all very stimulating, although I definitely had a clear favorite among them: give me more David Lindberg! The way he began with a consideration of orality and oral ways of thinking was so congenial, and that is a theme I will definitely want to watch for as the class gets under way: how do those oral expressions and oral ways of thinking persist in our own lives  (we are still users of oral language after all!), even as we also acquire new habits of thinking that are indeed foreign to traditional oral cultures...? Man, I love that stuff. Reading Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy was a very momentous event in my own understanding of the world, and so I read the opening pages of Lindberg's book with much pleasure and excitement. I am really looking forward to seeing how these books will relate to the other materials Kerry wants to share with us in the class. Plus, I already have so many ideas for things I would like to study and research as part of this class, questions to answer, things to learn. Especially after having gotten a glimpse of the material in the books, I am very much hoping there will be some kind of class project that we will each be doing and then sharing with the other students.

Meanwhile, I will look for a happier Janux tomorrow!