Happy Friday ProfHackers!
Perhaps the biggest news of the week: The Getty Museum has opened up it’s digital content. Here’s the original announcement. Digital Trends reports on the announcement as well.
Also unveiled this week is a new project by our friends at the Roy Rosenweig Center for New Media: History of the National Mall. Here is the announcement and project description.
Earlier this week, the college board announced that in 2016 the SAT will get, in the words of a Miami Herald reporter, “a major overhaul.” Among the changes: the essay will be optional, the scoring will return to the 1600 point scale, and the vocabulary requirements will be recalibrated to focus on words “widely used in college and career.” The Atlantic also has a piece on the new SAT format. TIME breaks the overhaul down into “9 Things Changing on the New SAT.” The Chronicle reports on mixed reactions from college counselors, admissions officers, and others.
Elsewhere on the Chronicle, Kelli Marshall weighs in on the discussion of Trigger Warnings triggered (sorry) by a piece in The New Republic which argues that “the trigger warning signals not only the growing precautionary approach to words and ideas in the university, but a wider cultural hypersensitivity to harm and a paranoia about giving offense.” Many other academics have weighed in on the discussion, and Kelli links to both recent as well as older posts on the subject by Paula Teander (Feb 2012) and Melissa McEwan (March 2014) among others.
If you find yourself with spare time or idle hands (or both), apparently, penguins need sweaters.
For the traveler’s among us, it’s worth pointing out that United will start cracking down on their carry-on regulations. The story ran in Newsday and elsewhere earlier this week.
Rebecca Schuman’s post for Slate “PowerPointless:Digital Slideshows are the Scourge of Higher Education” makes a provocative case against PowerPoint, Prezi, Keynote, etc.
For our weekend video, I can’t help but share this one-second short film that has been making the rounds on social media. It’s heart-breaking and tragic and all too common in other parts of the world:
On a happier note: puppies!
[Creative Commons licensed image by Flickr user Bre LaRow.]
