Class announcements. You should be reading the class announcements every day. If you miss a day, you can read the previous announcements at the Announcements blog. You can also subscribe to the Announcements by email if you want.
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.
Ning blog posts. Thanks to everybody for the great Introduction posts! I think I've responded to all the Introductions posted, except for the ones posted on Tuesday evening - I'll get to those later today! 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 just for fun, 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 first thing on Friday morning.
Technology Tips. A couple of people have asked about the Technology Tips - yes, they are extra credit, not required. My goal is just to introduce you to some online tools that I use in my online work, and which might be useful to you for this class or other classes you are taking. You can do as many of them as you want now, and declare them, one by one, the first one you do in Week 1, then in Week 2, and then in Week 3, and so on. All 15 weeks are available to you at Desire2Learn right now; you don't have to wait until next week to declare a Tech Tip for Week 2. They are just one point each, but those points add up - and having some extra credit accumulated will allow you to take some time off from this class later in the semester, like during mid-terms, when you are super-busy in your other classes.
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:
