Grace period WARNING. Some of you are already getting in the habit of treating the Grace period as if it were the "real" due date for your assignments. Please don't do that - if you treat the Grace period as the deadline, then you do not have any Grace period left! The Grace period is there for real emergencies, totally random things that happen which prevent you from finishing your work on the day that it is due. So, if the weekly assignment list says that an assignment is due on Thursday, that means it really IS DUE ON THURSDAY, and you need to finish that assignment on Thursday. Or even better, finish the assignments several days before they are due, so you are not having to stress about the deadline at all.
Ning FAQs and Tips. I want to call your attention to the list of Ning FAQs and Tips which you will find here: Ning Tips. You will find information there about managing your Ning blog and also about your profile page. If there is something you want to find out which is not answered there already, please let me know and I'll add to the list of tips!
3 classes = 1 Ning. As you have noticed, all three of the online courses I teach are combined into one Ning. There are a couple reasons why I did that. One reason is very practical: I am paying out of my pocket to have the Ning be ad-free, so I preferred to pay just once, instead of having to pay for three Nings. The other reason is that it can be fun to see what is going on with the students in the other classes; you might even know some people in the other classes. So, there are about 100 students in all three of these classes combined - and you are all posting there in the same Ning, which makes the Ning a busy place, especially on Thursday evenings each week when probably the most blog posting takes place. I hope you will have fun with it!
January 21: George Orwell. Today, January 21, marks the anniversary of the death of the English writer, George Orwell, in the year 1950. He is the author of and also of Nineteen Eighty-FourAnimal Farm, which are both truly amazing novels; they are books that I make sure to re-read every few years or so, and I always notice something new each time. The image below is a poster advertising a movie version of Animal Farm from 1954:
