Ning blog posts. Thanks to everybody for the great Introduction posts! Your second Ning blog post (Aesop's fable) is due today, Wednesday. Then, you will have your final Ning blog post for the week (Storybook Favorites) due on Thursday. After that, the "Read and Respond" assignment will be available Friday-Saturday-Sunday, when you will be reading and commenting on the blog posts of other students in the class. If you want to leave comments for other students now, please feel free to do that - you can comment on the blog posts themselves, or you can leave comments for people on their Comment Wall. Meanwhile, the official "Read and Respond" assignment will be ready for you on Friday.
Your Ning Settings. A few of you still have the default Ning "smiley face" as your image. You will need to change that to something else - either a picture of yourself, or some other picture (a picture of your pet, as some people have done), or an image (cartoon characters are great!), or anything at all really - whatever you want to use to represent yourself here at the Ning. Also, if you used your dotted-name OU email address for your Ning account and want to change that to your regular OU email alias (or any other email address you prefer), you can do that! Just follow these instructions for Updating Your Ning Settings. You can find other Ning tips and FAQs in the left-hand column of the main page of the Ning. If there are tips or questions you'd like me to add to that FAQ list, just let me know!
My Wednesday schedule. I do most of my work during regular business hours on Monday-Tuesday and Thursday-Friday, while scheduling my out-of-office commitments on Wednesdays. That means I may be a bit more slow to respond to your emails on Wednesday than on the other days of the week - but if you send me an email during the day on Wednesday, I'll definitely get back to you by the end of the day.
WhiteHouse.gov: The online transition. I'm sure many of you watched the inauguration festivities yesterday! One of the things I was interested to see was how the "virtual transition" would take place. And sure enough, right around noon, the old WhiteHouse.gov website was replaced by a new WhiteHouse.gov site, featuring President Obama. Back in 2001 when Clinton left office and Bush was inaugurated, I had not really paid attention to the website transition but now, with the increasing importance of the Internet in communication, I was very curious to see what would happen with the website - and the online transition went very smoothly indeed. You can visit the new website at WhiteHouse.gov - the address stays the same, but a new president has moved in to the White House online!
