OK, one resolution I can make and keep

Compliments of the Season to you, and many more!

So I have a small collection of news outlet typos and odd juxtapositions, and this year I pledge to share them with you. By "typos" I mean spelling, grammar, or usage errors; by "odd juxtapositions" I mean items that really shouldn't be placed next to each other on page or screen. In the print world, this can be something like a Macy's underwear ad on the same page with an article about invasive search procedures at airports. (Why are those models smiling?) On the Web it can be more extreme, because stories and ads tend to rotate often, with little or no human supervision. This can cause a picture of boxers (the dogs, not the underwear) in a Humane Society story to appear next to an offer to find "your perfect match" via an online dating site.

Usually such occurrences appear on the outlet's home page, which is to me a greater offense than appearing on an internal page which may get fewer viewings. Although no stranger to typos myself, I think it's worth noting when a bunch of writers, readers, and editors can't keep on top of this. Or when an intern who pulls an extra shift on a holiday is left to his or her own devices and decides to have a little fun. Sooo...

To start the New Year off right, at the top of this post is an example from the home page of the L.A. Times of January 1, 2010. My comment to the Times: Sorry, folks, but that doesn't look like Sully at all!

California's Master Plan didn't allow for this

This is, I think, first in a series...

Background reading:

Predicting an unaffordable UC system
(LA Times editorial from 2004, not 2003 and I hope they fix their typo)

The UC strike: A teaching moment
(Op-Ed by Susan Straight*)

Tomorrow (Thursday, September 24) promises to be a busy day in the microverse of California higher education. Across the UC and CSU systems there will be walkouts and protests, some better organized than others. (The people who cut their teeth on the rabble-rousing of the 1960s are all over 60 themselves. Some still have the mojo, no doubt, while others just talk a good game.) But you can expect that something will happen on September 24 on most of the state university campuses, including the one where I teach.

My system is on a rather complex schedule of furlough days for its employees and several days of full campus closures. It makes for a confusing fall term, in which students are not always sure which prof is present on which day. For example, I will be in a long-scheduled learning theory workshop on September 24, and my empty office will imply I've either walked out in solidarity, or I'm on furlough and nowhere near the campus. Really, though, I'll just be in the conference room around the corner.

Meanwhile, you can expect media fodder aplenty, but we in academia have been thinking about all this for a while. Some employees (I include the faculty) are just worried about whether they will have a job next year. Others are worried about just how broken the system might be and what it means for the state (and by extension the rest of higher education).

I've been thinking about the California Master Plan for Education in this context, though it's rarely right up front in the conversation. If you didn't know there was one ("you can observe a lot just by watching" as Yogi Berra said, but this isn't one of those cases) here is a link to it, and make yourself some coffee: Current (2002) California Master Plan

If you're an, ahem, old-timer, or you just want to follow the trail back to the original 1960 Master Plan, visit the University of California's "Full Monty" mini-site on the topic.

There's an article in the July-August 2009 Change magazine, "Does California's Master Plan Still Work?" [subscription site] I will comment on it after I've read it.
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* Those who were around on the African-American e-mail listservs of old (10 years ago) may recall a kerfuffle over Susan Straight's fiction. It was deemed by many to be "just too good" to be written by a white person about black people. I tend to save my e-mail, so don't deny it. ;-)

Looking for the next curb cut

While at the hospital last week waiting for a family member to come out of surgery, I had a lot of time to just sit, read, and think. I staked a claim in a comfy chair right outside the coffee shop. The door to the shop was rather noisy, but only in "automatic" when someone hit the big rectangular button for disabled/wheelchair access. Manual operation made essentially no noise. So I was distracted a bit whenever someone hit the button.

After a few minutes of traffic, I noticed something. A lot of people were using the button. I mean a lot. I needed a mini-project anyway, so I did my best to multitask, reading while informally keeping track. No formal tallies, but over the two hours I sat there, more than half the people approaching the door used the button. Many had hospital badges or were in scrubs, but quite a few were "civilian" visitors such as myself.

I tried to figure out why this would be so. Yes, I'm aware that many people have invisible disabilities, but I also frequent public libraries and other spaces with the same doors, and this usage was over the top of any other location I'm familiar with. (Exception might be little kids messing around until a librarian or security guard comes along to shoo them off.) Here are several theories:

• It's a hospital. Of course there are a lot of people who need the button.
• It's a hospital. Staff are trained not to touch things, and the button minimizes contact. (Though this would seem to be offset by the sheer number of people who smack the button with bare palms.)
• People who do a coffee run several times a day have picked up on a way to save effort.
• Employees are used to swiping cards in slots for access, this is just a natural extension of that.
  

Whenever advocates do presentations on accessibility or universal design, they almost always mention "curb cuts," those slopes on corners that allow people in wheelchairs to cross streets without assistance. Someone usually also mentions closed captioning, which visually displays the audio portion of TV programming. (The last time I heard both were in a presentation by the Sonoma State team on Universal Design for Learning.) These examples are de rigueur in presentations as they support the theory of unintended consequences in a good way.

The target audience for the above examples is people who may wonder "what's in it for me" when it comes to accessibility, besides bare-bones ADA compliance, which translates to "not getting sued." There is no need to reiterate this with an informed audience. So the presenters describe how curb cuts have come to be used by young mothers (never fathers) with strollers, skateboarders, inline skaters, and so on. And they describe the joys of closed-captioning in loud bars and restaurants, serving the raucous hearing population as well as the hearing-impaired.

I think the automatic button-activated door is the next cultural curb cut. Watch for it.