BOOKS!

Yes, I was always the kind of kid who loved books far more than school ... and with the same nerdy excitement I always felt buying my books early for college classes, I just had a fun romp through Audible.com and Amazon buying some books for the Coursera Fantasy class with Eric Rabkin. One of the main selling points for me was that most of the readings are public domain books that are freely available online - but I am also a huge fan of audiobooks, so I was delighted to find lots of audio versions at Audible.com also. Reading, listening... FUN. I am so excited about this course.

I tried another MOOC back in May (the Curtis Bonk course offered by Blackboard Course Sites) - and in every way, it was the wrong course for me; the readings put me to sleep and the software made my brain hurt. For this MOOC, the readings themselves are reason enough to take the class, and surely the software can be no worse than Blackboard, right?

Since keeping up with the class will be a real challenge for me, esp. as I get my own classes ready in August, I am going to try to do as much reading in advance as I can. So, I'll be blogging here at random about the books as I read them over the next month in advance of the class. I'm hoping to find other people doing the same - so, if you are planning on taking the course and setting up a blog, let me know and I'll add your blog to a blogroll here. I'm not sure what the "official" hashtag will be for this course, but I'm using #courserafantasy for now.

Meanwhile, thank you, Coursera, and thank you, Eric Rabkin, for what looks like a very intriguing course! And thanks as always to Google for the chance to blog with Blogger... :-)