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Very interesting experiment to allow six months of MOOC work to be used in admissions to MIT instead of transcripts of performance from schools that are unknown/untested. If MIT will allow MOOC accomplishment to satisfy entry-credentialing, what about employers?

Blog post by Joe Rominiecki, June 11, 2014, on how staid organization--American Neurological Association--changed admission requirements and found new-"old ways" to engage with younger, newer members in the course of the first year of membership. 300 out of 1,880 at end of 2013 were new, often younger members. ""We have quite a few committees, and the committee work is a lot. The annual meeting programming is extremely scientific, so their participation in our interactive lunch workshop committee or our faculty development committee or our scientific programming committee is critical to the success of the meeting," Smith says." Excerpt: I'm a strong believer that the type of volunteering offered to young members is crucial, too. It has to be meaningful work. If I'm offered a choice between joining a group for young professionals or joining a planning committee for a particular association function (event, publication, education, etc.), I'll take the latter. I'd rather not just be lumped in with other young pros, fenced off in a separate little play area. I want to be doing some real work for the association. And DTV says I'm not alone: In that study, "I can do something for a profession or cause that is important to me" ranked as the most important reason for volunteering in associations, and that was true for all generations.""

Jessica Bennett of the NYTimes writes about how emoji are replacing words in emails. on twitter and other social media, even though it might be less time to type in the words. Although use is skyrocketing, communication by emoji is open to interpretation by the recipient. There are now sites, blogs, and a social network (Emoji.li) that uses only emoji for communication. A nonprofit devoted to emoji standardization across platforms (Unicode Consortium) has been formed. Examples: In their short life, emoji managed to find an exceptional cultural range: One Internet wit put out an emoji translation of Beyoncé's "Drunk in Love," and an emoji-only version of "Moby Dick," called "Emoji Dick," was recently accepted into the Library of Congress. Legal experts have even discussed whether an emoji death threat [gun and face] could be admissible in court. "I'm not sure you can really speak of it as a full-fledged language yet," said Ben Zimmer, a linguist, "but it does seem to have fascinating combinatorial possibilities. Any sort of symbolic system, when it's used for communication, is going to develop dialects."

I am certainly out of the loop on this one! A whole new language is developing - back to cave drawings but in a digital format?

roll back on affirmative action practices