Pukman @ WinK: the community that time didn't forget

I assumed the Terminator series was over, once the star became Governor of California, but I just found a trailer for a new Terminator movie. Christian Bale, who is also the star of the recent Batman movies, plays the main John Connor role. I'm not sure when the movie is due to come out, still less when it will come to Japan, but I'm looking forward to it!

I've created a new account on LibraryThing to show the PUK Library collection of graded readers, leveled readers, and other readers for students. The account is pukreaders, and you can see the collection here, or navigate there from the WinK People group (click on "_____ members" from the group homepage). I recommend that you make pukreaders a friend, or monitor the pukreaders collection.

Although there are at present 1866 books in the collection, it is not complete yet, and I will continue to add covers and to tag all the books. Please check out the tag cloud.

Note that you need to log in to LibraryThing to use some features.

Do you know Stories of Monsters, from the Usborne Young Reading series? You can see some sample pages here, and listen to an excerpt here. If you like it, why not borrow the book and CD together?

Enhanced podcast episode assembled in GarageBand and exported to m4a, converted at zamzar.com to mp4, then uploaded to YouTube, finally embedded in this post in the usual way from YouTube.
The file has been curtailed with about 20 seconds to go, the photos have become desynchronized from the audio, and the audio has been massively processed to the point of severe distortion. But I count this a success, as I've finally succeeded in getting something out of GarageBand and into the blog.

But one has to wonder: Why, oh why does Blogger allow video uploads but not audio?

Here are the rules on copying that I have already sent to students by email:

Your blog needs to be YOUR OWN WORK. That means not generated by computer, and NOT COPIED from Wikipedia, books, or other sources.

The exception is as I explained in class. If you want to cite (=quote = "inyou suru") something, for example part of a book, you can do that but there are 2 rules:

1. You MUST mark the copied part clearly.
2. The copied part can NEVER be more than 49% of your blog post (number of words).

That means, for example, that if your blog post is 100 words long, a 50-word citation is too long and MUST be shortened. (In general, you should try to keep quotes to less than 30%.)

Please understand that these rules are very important. If you don't understand, please ask. If you break the rules, that will be considered cheating. It might also be illegal.

Have you heard of Kung Fu Panda? It's an animated movie from Dreamworks. I saw the trailer recently and it looks very exciting. I like kung fu movies and I like animation, too, so this is doubly interesting for me. Still not interested? Well, the voices of Jackie Chan and Angelina Jolie feature. Yeah!

Things to do to ensure a pass:

Most of you have the "Orange Book", the 読書記録手帳. The back of the book has a list of books, organized by series and level, with details of the difficulty and number of words. When you note the books you are reading, you should write two figures in the words column, the number of words of the present book and your total number of words so far.

The Orange Book doesn't have details on all books. A book with lots more data is the 英語多読完全ブックガイド. The PUK Library has three copies of this book. How about the KGU Library?

Usually, I make a big effort to see as much tennis as possible during Wimbledon, but this year I haven't seen any. I was very tired after watching Euro 2008 soccer matches, and I couldn't work up any enthusiasm for staying up late.

Things to do in the last few weeks (last two classes plus make-up period):

1. Final essay (1-05): Self-Introduction (10 years in the future)
2. Get your blog assessment up-to-date. (Your final blog assessment will be in the exam, July 25th. It's important that you master how to do it before then.)
3. Check your blog sidebar/footer.
4. Ask any questions or get help with any technical problems.
5. Make sure you have 12 book reviews, 5 "essays", more than 60 posts, and lots of words.
6. Make sure that your posts are your own work. Copying sentences from books or websites is stealing, unless it's done in a specific way. From an educational point of view, it's like cheating in an exam. It's also a legal problem.
7. Add the books you've read to LibraryThing.
   

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