Friday, October 3 - Sunday, October 5

HAPPY WEEKEND! You have reached the end of Week 6! The Week 6 Read and Respond assignment (blog commenting) is available now, and so is the Week 6 Internet assignment (Storybook commenting), along with the remaining Week 6 assignments that are due on Friday or on Saturday or Sunday - please make sure you get started on those assignments soon. If you have not turned in your Week 5 Storybook assignment yet, you may turn it in BY FRIDAY AT NOON for partial credit. Also, Friday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you forgot to do any of the assignments that were due on Thursday.

Friday drop deadline. Today, Friday, October 3, is the last day to drop the class with an automatic grade of W on your transcript. For more information, see Wednesday's announcements.

Storybook Stack. I'm still working my way through the large stack of Storybook assignments that people have turned in. My goal is to get comments back to everyone by the end of the day Friday for assignments turned in before Friday at noon. Friday noon is also the deadline for turning in a late Week 5 Storybook assignment for partial credit. If you want to check and make sure your assignment is in the stack, you can see the contents of the stack here. Anything you turn in after noon on Friday will be in the stack on Monday. The sooner you turn in your Storybook assignment, the sooner you will get comments back from me next week.

Technology Tips. Right now the Technology Tip extra credit assignment is available for Week 6, Week 7 and Week 8. Here are some tips I would recommend for your attention if you have not done them already: organizing your Ning page, adding a YouTube video to your Ning page, resizing images with Picnik.com, or using the WordCountPlus plugin for Firefox.

October 3: Gore Vidal.
Friday, October 3, marks the birthday in the year 1925 of the great American author, Gore Vidal. You can read more about Gore Vidal in this Wikipedia article. My favorite of his novels is without doubt his amazing historical novel Julian, about the 4th-century emperor Julian, nicknamed "Julian the Apostate," the last of the pagan emperors of Rome (although I am also a big fan of another of his historical novels, Creation, too). Here is the cover of a recent edition of Julian: