Grace Period. Tuesday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you forgot to do any of the assignments that were due yesterday, on Monday. So, if you forgot to do the Declaration for an assignment that was due yesterday, or if you just plain forgot to do the assignment, you have a "grace period" - until noon today - to make it up. So, if you did not finish the assignments that were due on Monday, make sure you finish them up on Tuesday morning before noon! You will see that the Declarations in Desire2Learn for the assignments due yesterday are still available until noon today. After noon, those Declarations will no longer be available.
Ning blogs and comments. One of your Tuesday assignments will be to post an Introduction about yourself in your blog at the class Ning. You'll be doing two more posts at the Ning later this week... and then, after the posting assignments for the week are done, you'll have a "Read and Respond" assignment where you'll be assigned some specific blogs of other people in class to read and comment on. That's one assignment you cannot do early, since we need to wait until everybody has had a chance to finish their blog posting assignments for the week, which will not be until the end of the day on Thursday. As a result, the "Read and Respond" assignment will be available starting on Friday - I'll let you know more about that later in the week.
Storybook Stack. Some of you are already working ahead and turning assignments that I need to read and comment on for you. I do that in the order that the assignments are turned in, and the stack can get pretty big! If you want to check and make sure that I received your assignment, I keep a list of assignments in the Stack, which I've received but have not read yet. So, if you want to make sure that I received your assignment in the email, just take a look there and you should see your name listed. If not, please check with me!
Week 4. Yes, several students have finished all the work for Week 1 and Week 2 and Week 3 already! Wow! So, for those of you working way ahead, the Week 4 assignments will become available on September 2, the first day of Week 2. At any given time, there are up to three weeks of assignments available. Right now, Weeks 1, 2 and 3 are available. When Week 2 begins, Weeks 2, 3, and 4 will be available. You can see how that works if you scan down the list of Declarations and quizzes in Desire2Learn - along with the stop date for each item, there is also a start date which shows you when it will become available. That's a bit confusing this week (since I opened up the class a week before the "official" start of classes), but it will settle down into a regular schedule now that the semester has officially begun.
August 26: Mother Teresa. Today, August 26, is the birthday of Mother Teresa, who was born in 1910 to Albanian parents in Skopje, a city which is now the capital of the nation of Macedonia. She left home at 18 in order to become a missionary and arrived in India in 1929, at the age of 19. In 1950, she received permission from the Vatican to found the Missionaries of Charity, in order to care for "the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers, all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society, people that have become a burden to the society and are shunned by everyone." You can read more about Mother Teresa and her life in this detailed wikipedia article. The image shows Mother Teresa visiting the Gandhi memorial in New Delhi:
