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.
Your Ning Settings. A few of you still have the default Ning "blue question mark" 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. If you have any other questions about using the Ning, please let me know.
You can call me Laura. As you've probably seen, I sign all my emails to you as "Laura," which is definitely what you can call me. I'm actually not a professor (just an instructor) - and since I'm going to be calling you all by your first names, it makes sense that you just call me by my first name also. :-)
Early Storybook assignments. As those of you who are working ahead turn in your Storybook assignments, I will get those back to you either that same day or the next day at the latest. You can check at this webpage to make sure I have received your assignment: Storybook stack. For each Storybook assignment you turn in, you'll get comments back from me by email and that is also when I will record the points for you in the Gradebook.
January 20: Vasant Panchami. Today, January 20, is the date in 2010 for the celebration of the Hindu holiday Vasant Panchami, held in honor of the goddess Saraswati, who presides over music, art and wisdom. You can read more about Saraswati in this detailed Wikipedia article. Below is an image of Saraswati, showing her with a vina (a traditional stringed musical instrument) in one hand as she strums it with another hand; in her two other hands, she holds a book (a symbol of learning and wisdom) and a string of beads to be used in meditation (symbolizing spiritual practice and dedication). Her traditional animal vehicle is the swan, so you can see swans swimming around her feet, as well as a peacock in the background. Let's hope the goddess of wisdom will help to make this a good new semester!
