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Hi all,

Given the happenings in the past week of our nation in distress (and evidence of extremist groups fomenting violence* and a president who is advocating for an authoritarian state**), I’ve decided that we will not have a regular class meeting this week but instead treat both days as optional open time in case any of you want somewhere to hang out and talk things over or have questions or whatever, whether related to this course or not. 

Final Assignments
As far as the final assignments, please do as best you can in finishing up and documenting what you did. Help each other as a team where you can. If you need more time, just let me know, and, if you cannot finish, that’s okay; just write about your intent and what you’d do if you had more time.

Discussions
I’ll be looking at who participated in this week’s readings so definitely do so if you can, but, if you cannot, I’ll extrapolate from previous weeks and give you credit if you’ve consistently been participating.

Personal Learning Reflection
At this point, the thing I care about most is this assignment due at the end of the quarter where you write some thoughts on how well you think you did, what you struggled with, where you think you should go from here, how the course could be improved, etc. So, please, still do this.

Also, course evaluations are live, and I treat them fairly seriously, so do it for this course if you can.

thanks,
mark

*https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pkyb9b/far-right-extremists-are-hoping-to-turn-the-george-floyd-protests-into-a-new-civil-war
**https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-calls-governors-facing-unrest-weak-fools-urges-stronger-police-n1221116