By George Williams. Like many blogs, ProfHacker runs on software called WordPress, and we’ve written many posts over the years about this software. WordPress is a great tool for creating a variety of different kinds of digital resources. An important issue to consider when creating a digital resource is how accessible it is to a diversity of users — including, but not limited to, people with disabilities. (For a consideration of the various reasons why, read “Why: The Case for Web Accessibility.”) However, if you’re not especially skilled in what might seem like highly technical web design requirements, the issue of accessibility can seem overwhelming. Fortunately, the WP Accessibility plugin — developed by Joe Dolson — can help non-expert blog owners correct a variety of technical accessibility issues within many WordPress themes. More...
Make Your WordPress Site More Accessible
Preserve Peace of Mind on Twitter by Disabling Retweets
By Jason B. Jones. Imagine, if you will, a family member or close friend. You care about this person, and value them for their perspective on the world. Except, as it happens, on that *one* subject. Maybe their political views are lifted wholesale from Fox or MSNBC. Maybe they parrot talk radio’s outrage of the day about sports or celebrity culture. Or during Premier League games they shout at the TV as if they were at a pub. Or perhaps this person loves to get your goat by telling you what other folks are saying about you, and then when you get mad backing off and saying, “hey, I’m not the one saying it!” (Or, in Twitter-speak: “RT != endorsement”.) Read more...Disability and Accessibility Edition
By George Williams. Here in the United States, another week of extremely cold weather has passed, but at least the days are getting longer, providing us with more sunshine. (Okay, I like to tell myself that this makes a difference…) Below I’ve provided you with five interesting reads for the weekend, all of them related to issues of disability and accessibility. More...
‘To Be or Not to Be’—in Spanish
By Ilan Stavans. Spanish has two verbs for “to be”: ser and estar. The difference between them is dramatic, not to say existential. Ser refers to the condition of being as a whole, whereas estar places that condition in a temporal context. We say soy feliz to describe a person’s character: I’m a happy person. Instead, we say estoy feliz to refer to a passing mood: I’m happy now, but who knows about tomorrow? Of course, there are multiple, at times unexplainable, nuances to this dichotomy. For instance, it’s hard to explain exactly how, but the discrepancy between estoy feliz que soy feliz and soy feliz que estoy feliz sums up the complications Spanish speakers face when explaining what life is about. More...
Put Undergraduates to Work, for Their Own Good
By John A. Fry. Despite an improving economy, eager and talented new college graduates are still encountering significant difficulty in securing jobs. The fallout has landed squarely on colleges. Parents are demanding higher returns for the significant investment in their children's education, and the government is backing them by increasing its efforts to collect and publish postgraduation employment and income data.
These demands are not without merit. As a university president, father of a college student, and former higher-education consultant, I value accountability. More...
Newest edX Member is Dartmouth
By Lawrence Biemiller. Dartmouth College said on Thursday that it had joined edX, the massive open online course provider established by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dartmouth will offer its first MOOC this fall, and three more are planned, but the university did not say in what disciplines. At a meeting in November, members of the nonprofit edX consortium discussed a possible expansion of the group, in part because it is currently too small to offer as many courses as there appears to be demand for. Including Dartmouth, the consortium has 31 members. More...
Netflix-Like Algorithm Drives New College-Finding Tool
By Jonah Newman. As an admissions counselor at Valparaiso University, Daniel Jarratt noticed that few high-school students really knew what they were looking for in a college. For all the talk about the importance of college choice, most students Mr. Jarratt spoke to knew of a few colleges they wanted to attend but couldn’t articulate exactly why they wanted to do so. So on his nights and weekends, Mr. Jarratt, now a first-year Ph.D. candidate in computer science at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, started working on a tool that would direct students to the right colleges even if they didn’t know what they were looking for. More...
‘Concern Trolls,’ Passives, and Vultures
By Geoffrey Pullum. “Concern trolls thrive on passive constructions the way vultures thrive on carcasses,” says Alexandra Petri in a Washington Post blog. My attention was captured not so much by the weird vulture comparison (she really hasn’t thought that through), but by the question of whether she had correctly diagnosed the “passive constructions” to which she refers. I’ll answer that question shortly. (In the meantime you might like to guess.)
But first, some context. Petri is commenting on a New York Times article by Bill Keller about Lisa Bonchek Adams, who blogs and tweets about her cancer. Petri charges Keller with adopting a “concern troll” tone in his discussion of her. More...
Why Are American Colleges Obsessed With 'Leadership'? What's wrong with being a follower? Or a lone wolf?
By . Earlier this month, more than 700,000 students submitted the Common Application for college admissions. They sent along academic transcripts and SAT scores, along with attestations of athletic or artistic success and—largely uniform—bodies of evidence speaking to more nebulously-defined characteristics: qualities like—to quote the Harvard admissions website—“maturity, character, leadership, self-confidence, warmth of personality, sense of humor, energy, concern for others and grace under pressure.”
Why are American colleges so interested in leadership? On the Harvard admissions website quoted above, leadership is listed third: just after two more self-evident qualities. More...
New firm to offer free online course on “Digital Badges”
By Melissa Ezarik. Digital badges — the new industry model for issuing, displaying, and verifying an individual’s educational and professional credentials — are the subject of a free online course that will begin on January 27, 2014. Titled “Badge 101: The Discovery of Badging,” the course will be presented in a MOOC (massive open online course) web‐based learning format. Badge 101 will be open for four weeks, and attendees can participate on their own time and set their own pace for learning. Registration is free, at https://www.accreditrust.com/news‐events, and will remain open until Saturday, February 8. More...
