Syllabus: About Me :-)

Hi! As you have probably figured out by now my name is Laura Gibbs - please just call me Laura. Okay, some students call me Dr. Laura. Go figure. But I'm not a professor (I'm an instructor), and you certainly don't need to call me "doctor" anything... :-)

I've been teaching online at the University of Oklahoma since 2002 - so that makes me a seven-year online veteran. In the world of fully online courses, that is a long time! The first time my Mythology-Folklore Online course was offered online was back in Fall 2002. In addition to Mythology-Folklore, which I teach every semester, I regularly teach two other other fully online courses: Frame Tales in World Literature and Epics of India: Ramayana and Mahabharata. I have also taught Biblical Greek and Medieval Latin online.

I used to teach in a regular classroom, but I don't think I could do that again - I like teaching online so much more than teaching in the classroom! Being online allows me to be a far better teacher, and I also think that it brings out the best in the students too. Have you heard of The Cluetrain Manifesto? This is a book/website that expresses many of my personal beliefs and hopes about how the Internet can help bring people together. Internet technology has given us a way, at last, to realize the ideals expressed almost one hundred years ago by John Dewey in his book Democracy and Education, published in 1916. This is the book that had the single greatest influence on my decision to become a teacher - and you can read the book online at ILTWeb, if you are curious (it is a truly a great book!).

You can find links to some of my other web projects at MythFolklore.net.

In the course evaluations from past semesters, I was asked to provide something more like a biography profile on this page, so here it is if you want to know about my life offline...

• Growing up. I was born in Austin and my parents live there now (they are retired), but we moved all around when I was a kid - I lived the longest in Tucson and in Nashville. I graduated from high school in Nashville in 1980 - and yes, that means I had graduated from high school before most of the students in my classes now were even born. Life in olden times: no personal computers, no internet, no CD's or DVD's or VCR's, no cell phones. But somehow we managed... :-)
• B.A. from Berkeley. I got my B.A. in Classical Languages (Latin and Greek) and Slavic Languages (Polish and Russian) at the University of California in Berkeley. That was a really great time to be a student there, and one of the things I am most proud of is that during my senior year I was the director of an office called DECal: Democratic Education at Cal, which helped to students to create and offer their own classes, for regular university credit. And DECal is still going strong, 20 years later, as you can see at the DECal website!
• M.Phil. from Oxford. After graduating from Berkeley, I did a Master's degree at Oxford University. My main interest then was in Polish literature, and I wrote my master's thesis on a Polish Renaissance poet, Jan Kochanowski (1530-1584), who wrote poetry in both Polish and in Latin. At Oxford, you only had to be in school for 24 weeks during the year. So I was actually away traveling a lot of the time! Since Kochanowski had gotten his education at the University of Padova in Italy, I used that as an excuse to go to Italy as often as I could, while also spending a lot of time in Poland.
• What to do? After finishing my degree at Oxford, I had no idea what I wanted to do. Bilingual Polish Renaissance poetry does not indicate a clear career path! I lived in Poland for a while, and left just before the communist government fell in 1989. Then I came back to the United States, and lived in Nashville, working at various jobs (interesting jobs! I learned a lot about computers), while taking classes at Tennessee State University to get a high school teaching certificate in English. And then... I discovered Aesop! I started doing a lot of research on my own, trying to understand all the complicated connections between the fables of Aesop and storytelling traditions from India and the Middle East. I decided it was time to go to graduate school and get a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature.
• Ph.D. from Berkeley. I ended up doing my Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Berkeley, with an emphasis on Greek, Latin and Polish, but I also learned Sanskrit, plus I studied some Persian, Hebrew and Arabic also. I wrote my dissertation on Aesop's fables and did research work with a professor at the University of Siena in Italy, which meant that I was able to spend a lot of time in Italy again. I also translated one of his books into English: The Portrait of the Lover by Maurizio Bettini. And in my very last semester of graduate school, I learned how to publish webpages!
• Oklahoma. After finishing my degree at Berkeley, I came to the University of Oklahoma. I started out teaching in the Classics & Letters department, then I went to work for OU's department of Information Technology, so that I could gain the professional IT skills I needed to achieve my personal goal to become a designer of online courses. Now I am back teaching again full-time, but I'm teaching online, working with the Online Education program in the OU College of Arts and Sciences (although I no longer live in Oklahoma - in summer 2007, I moved with my husband to rural North Carolina, where you are most likely to find me on our back porch enjoying the benefits of wireless Internet surrounded by trees).
• Books. In 2003 I published a collection of Aesop's fables translated into English from Greek and Latin: Aesop's Fables: A New Translation (part of the Oxford's World Classics series). I've also published two collections of Latin proverbs and sayings for beginning Latin students: Latin Via Proverbs: 4000 Proverbs, Mottoes and Sayings for Students of Latin and Vulgate Verses: 4000 Sayings from the Bible for Teachers and Students of Latin. My latest book is a Latin reader based on the 17th-century edition of Aesop's fables illustrated by Francis Barlow; it came out in the spring of 2009: Aesop's Fables in Latin: Ancient Wit and Wisdom from the Animal Kingdom. Now I am working on a book that I hope to publish in the summer of 2010, which will contain 1001 Aesop's fables in Latin prose and verse. You can see my progress at the Ictibus Felicibus blog. If all goes well, I should have 1000 fables ready to edit by the time summer begins! :-)