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 at the class wiki. 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 the posts pop up from all the classes, since you might see something - an image, a title - that gets your attention and provokes your curiosity. Starting on Friday, you'll be able to do the official Read & Respond assignment, reading and responding to the blogs of people in your blog group (more about that in tomorrow's announcements), but feel free to leave comments on anything at the Ning that happens to get your attention!
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:
