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Preventing the Re-Ghettoization of the Uneducated and Untrained Deaf in America

Educating the Deaf in America is an expensive proposition — especially in a modern mainstream setting with Hearing students and interpreters are required.  Educating the college-capable Deaf is an even more daunting project because of the massive amount of money it takes to educate just a single Deaf student.

The Americans with Disabilities Act is now 22 years old, but that Act still doesn’t begin to really protect the rights of the disabled.  All the Act does is try to level the playing field of fair play by mandating equal access and opportunity but, in many cases, if you want full and verified ADA protection, you have to hire a lawyer and sue.  That’s an expensive proposition for any disabled person to conjure.

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What's in a Deaf Sign Name? Hunter and his Gun!

The last week of August caught a firestorm in the Grand Island, Nebraska Public Schools system as administrators scrambled to recover from banning a three-year-old Deaf child named Hunter Spanjer from using his sign name because his fingers “looked too much like a gun” — and any sort of suggestion of a gun, even as a sign name, is verboten.

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When Fluency No Longer Matters

There’s an infuriating move afoot in several major universities to “dumb down” graduation requirements by removing foreign language fluency from the core program of study.  Some schools incredibly want to make a mere semester of a foreign language an elective and not a hard requirement for earning a diploma.  When I was in college, we had to take four semesters of a foreign language in order to graduate.  Soon, that minimal forced fluency that formed many generations of students will no longer be important to a college education.

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Steve Jobs Replies from the Grave: From iBoles to iPad to iAuthor

When the iPad was originally introduced, I was already an Apple fanboi with iBoles and iJanna and a couple of Apple books in the pipeline — and I was especially interested in the iPad as a book publication vehicle.  At that time, Steve Jobs was still alive and randomly replying to email inquiries, and on March 23, 2010 at 8:29pm, I decided to take my shot with Jobs and I emailed him my iPad Book Publishing Query:

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Using Google+ Hangouts to Communicate in ASL Group Video Chat

I was finally able to get into Google+ this morning.  I think my invitations to the service from my friends and associates were getting caught in my Gmail trash from what I can tell in my postmortem investigation.  Today, I just tried to login to the service, and I was finally met with this Join screen:

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Did Sign Language Save the Ukraine? Ten Sentence Story #133

There is a story on the internets telling how Sign Language helped to save the Ukraine.

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Teaching American Sign Language with a Stick

In the History of Bad Idea the — the worst one, in my humble estimation, is the practice of teaching students of American Sign Language with a stick.  Yes, a stick made of wood.  In some ASL programs, instructors use a stick during class to manipulate — and intimidate! — their students.

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