traian.bruma's shared items
The Mozilla Foundation Badges project has launched a competition focused on building digital badges for lifelong learning. The Digital Media and Learning web site says: “The Competition is designed to encourage individuals and organizations to create digital tools that support, identify, recognize, measure, and account for new skills, competencies, knowledge, and achievements for 21st century learners wherever and whenever learning takes place.”
It is encouraging to see a groundswell in bottom up movements challenging the present direction of educational change. The latest is the University project. The project wiki says: “A whole set of forces are coming together to disrupt higher education as we know it – here in the UK, and all over the world.
Pressures within institutions, economic crisis, staff morale, student debts and graduate unemployment challenge existing models. Out of necessity and out of a desire for something better, these pressures are provoking new experiments around the edges, in pockets within existing institutions, or on the outside.
All of this is taking place at the same moment that we’re discovering the social potential of networked technologies, and seeing the emergence of new kinds of collaborative productive spaces – coworking spaces and accelerators, hacker and maker spaces, fab labs and media labs.
The University Project began with the idea that it might be possible to reimagine and reinvent the university, out of the coming together of these forces.”
The project is planning a weekend of conversations and encounters, exploring the past and the future of the university in London on 16-18 October. More details from the wiki.
a post in honor of the 20th Anniversary of the public launch of the World Wide Web
Every year at this time I do a little soul-searching. I ponder the semester to come – the 400+ young minds I will encounter – and wonder, “What do they really need to learn?” I try to look beyond the textbooks and standard curriculum (i.e. “what I am supposed to teach”) and think deeply about what students really need to be significant, intelligent participants in today’s world. It does not take any miraculous feat of reflexive speculation to find that the question pertains to me as much as it does to them. And so I’m really sitting here wondering, what do *I* need to learn, and indeed, what do *any of us* need to learn in order to lead happier, healthier, richer, more ethical, and more meaningful lives.
The question is all the more pertinent today because our communication tools have dramatically altered how we learn, how we connect with one another, and even how we think. In the past 2 weeks the release of new research on the Internet’s effect on memory has re-invigorated the question asked by Carr, “Is Google making us stupid?” as well as Kevin Kelly’s clever response, “Will we let Google make us smarter?”
But such debates have only hinted at the core issues I tend to think deeply about as I prepare for the semester. The question of “what we really need to learn” has become almost all-consuming for me in the past 10 years since I started teaching, and virtually every research endeavor I have embarked upon during those years has had this question at its core.
In answering this question, I am not interested in what “information” or “skill sets” we need to learn (though that is, unfortunately, how most of us professors feel compelled to proceed due to various social, physical, and mental structures). Skills and information fade into obsolescence . They are the metaphorical fish handed to you by the guy who should have taught you how to fish. More importantly, skills and information alone do not help us lead happier, healthier, richer, more ethical and more meaningful lives.
We need a vision for who we and our students need to *be* – not just what we should know. I’m not sure what that is, but I do know that it would help to know who we are, and to know who we are it would help to know who we were . . . and that’s why I’m sitting in my office reading a bag full of books written in 1991.
Who we were: 1991
On August 6th, 1991, the Web debuted as a publicly accessible service on the Internet. Almost 20 years later to the day, I’m sitting here reading five books released in the year before that momentous occasion: Charles Taylor’s “The Ethics of Authenticity, Kenneth Gergen’s “The Saturated Self,” Harvey’s “Condition of Postmodernity,” Anthony Giddens’ “Modernity and Self-Identity” and Jameson’s “Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” Each of them presents a brilliant perspective on who we were at that moment just before the web was born – and all are (despite their depth and perceptiveness) charmingly and innocently unaware of Tim’s little invention that would start to reshape how we live, work and play.
Even a cursory read quickly dispels certain myths about the effects of the Web. Here are three observations that immediately stand out:
1. We were already distracted.
In 1991 we worried that our kids were narcissistic, disengaged, and not easily impressed … that their attention spans were no more than 4 minutes, the average link of an MTV music video. Our kids (and all of us) were already distracted by what Gergen fancifully calls “invitations to incoherence”. If Gergen were to re-write today he would undoubtedly include in these “invitations” the persistent e-mailing, IM’ing, status-updating, texting, tweeting, etc. that invite us into other worlds and thereby make every moment a bit incoherent. But in 1991 he settled for the ability to receive a call or fax from anybody in the world and instantly be transported into another social universe. Gergen went so far as to suggest that such activities “engender a multiplicitous and polymorphic being who thrives on incoherence.” In 1991 he could temper such remarks by noting that few had taken the leap into this polymorphic state, but followed up such caveats by noting that “there is good reason to believe that what is taking place within these groups can be taken as a weathervane of future cultural life in general … in the longer run … the technologies giving rise to social saturation will be inescapable.”
Gergen prophetically notes that “We enter the age of techno-personal systems,” but he was not imagining the World Wide Web. By “technologies of saturation” he simply means roads, cities, cars, planes, cities, phones, computers, newspapers, radio, TV that collectively “saturate” us with information and connections that surpass our capacity to manage effectively.
2. Our education system was already “in crisis” and out of step with the times.
Drop out rates were high. Psychological drop out rates were even higher. As Harvey notes, the Fordist big business-big labor-big state alliance that had brought decades of prosperity to the West had given way to globalization and “flexible accumulation.” The US de-industrialized and by 1991 nearly half of all Americans were working in “information.” We were already a knowledge economy in a globalizing world, but our schools were not keeping up – still teaching in an industrial model.
And there was no shortage of reformers. Canons were falling. Interdisciplinary was all the buzz. New departments – especially Women’s Studies, African American Studies, Culture Studies – sprung up and took aim at the traditional, stodgy, power-laden, white-male-centered educational system. (i.e. Wikipedia did not invent challenges to traditional models of authority.)
3. We thought our kids were self-obsessed, overly-self-important narcissists.
There were already persistent complaints about our kids being disengaged and narcissistic. Students were feeding off of the revolutionary energy of the reformers, reading the postmodernist challenge to authority as an ally in elevating their own opinions to the status of experts. Alan Bloom voiced the concerns of those who were concerned about these developments in “The Closing of the American Mind,” ranting about the self-obsessed “anything goes” attitude of our youth. The book struck a chord and enjoyed a run atop the Times Bestsellers list. (Lasch’s excellent “Culture of Narcissism,” originally published in 1978, had also come back as a revised edition in 1991).
Familiar Themes
Twenty years later the same complaints abound. Jean Twenge has called our youth “Generation Me” and worries that we are facing a “Narcissism Epidemic.” Nicholas Carr has eloquently argued that multi-tasking is merely distracted thinking and that without adequate awareness of how the Internet effects our brains we are destined for the “Shallows.” And blogs, tweets, bookshelves, and conference programs abound with complaints and proposed solutions to our current education crisis.
If the themes seem familiar, perhaps it is simply because these 1991 authors were perceptive enough to identify fundamental persistent tensions in our culture rather than simply identifying the “trends.” They are not hung up on these three simple observations. They are seeking the roots, and what they dig up is as relevant today as it was in 1991.
Taylor calls it “an act of retrieval.” Most cultural commentators miss the mark by failing to recognize the underlying moral ideal at work that is producing the apparent problems. What appears as distraction, dissolution, fragmentation, and self-indulgent, self-important narcissism is, at a deeper level, an expression of our pursuit of the authentic self.
The ethic of authenticity was born in the late 18th century and persists to this day. Being “authentic” requires us to “find ourselves,” “get in touch with our inner lives,” and act from our “core.” It springs from what Taylor calls “the massive subjective turn of modern culture.” “Identity” is so important to us (and especially our students) because we live in a world in which identity and recognition are not givens. They must be achieved. It is our “core project” as Giddens says.
But there are tensions at work within this quest for identity and recognition. Authenticity demands an entirely original creation – which frequently involves opposition to society. Yet at the same time our creations cannot be meaningful without being open to the meaning systems created and sustained by society. We never quite feel like we have “found ourselves.” Just when we think we know who we are the doubts start to creep in: Is this really the real me? Or have I been duped by society? Or we find ourselves so on the margins that we feel a loss of meaning and purpose. Most of us sway between these poles, always struggling to find who we really are. The “technologies of saturation” only amplify these issues by providing us with countless options, so that each self we portray or become “cries out for an alternative, points to a missed potential, or mocks the chosen action for its triviality … the postmodern being is a restless nomad” (Gergen).
Two “slides” (as Taylor calls them) result from this process. First, like a chinese fingercuff the quest for identity squeezes in on us ever harder as we try to escape it. We start focusing more and more on ourselves and our own self-fulfillment, often to the detriment of deep and lasting relationships. (Note: this is not something the internet created. In fact, some would argue the internet was created as a correction to this (and it has worked and failed in dramatic fashion depending on the person and context).) As a result, we become increasingly disengaged from our communities and public life as we focus more and more on ourselves. (Giddens and Harvey would want to point out that this is amplified by the “disembedding mechanisms” of modernity that hide the many connections and relationships that allow us to survive.)
Secondly, there is what Taylor calls “a negation of all horizons of significance” which is a fancy way of saying that we no longer share the same beliefs and values across the whole society, and that there can be little or no ground on which to stand to claim that your beliefs and values are true while others are false. Society becomes increasingly fragmented.
The two slides feed back into the process itself. The first slide makes us feel more disengaged from society so we increasingly seek meaning, recognition, and identity. The second slide creates more and more options for us to try out on the journey, while taking away the possibility of ever finding the “right” identity or being universally positively recognized because there are too many diverse viewpoints and possibilities.
As a society, we continue trending toward individualism and superficiality even as we value connection, community, and authenticity. We disengage from community, social action, and politics. We amuse ourselves to death. And the most amazing collaboration and creativity machine ever created celebrates its 20th anniversary as a distraction device.
What to do?
Taylor is not shy about noting that what we have here is a “vicious circle.” But he also sees the potential for creating a “virtuous circle.” Successful common actions can breed a sense of empowerment and connection that can spread to other domains. That’s where we come in as teachers. We have an opportunity, not just to teach our students “something,” but to be part of their journey and help them find meaning and purpose in an over-saturated, fragmented, and distracting world full of self-indulgent temptations.
I won’t spend the rest of this blog harping on about how I try to do this, but diving into this work of 1991 has re-invigorated my passion for project-based learning in which students engage in real and relevant problems that excite them, work together to approach these problems as a learning community, and harness and leverage digital technologies while also critically reflecting on how those technologies mediate and change their lives.
I know this has been a long post, but how we understand society, and our capacity to imagine how society might change (or if it can change) can have a dramatic effect on how we teach. In 1968, Warren Bennis and Philip Slater made many of the same observations I have put forth here in “The Temporary Society.” Imagining a radically more flexible social world, they suggested that “we should help our students … (1) Learn how to develop intense and deep human relationships quickly – and learn how to “let go.” … (2) Learn how to enter groups and leave them. ”
While I agree with their observations, and the spirit of their suggestions, I take a slightly different approach. If community, social action, and empathy levels are down (as research shows them to be), then I think it is our responsibility to help create more socially conscious and empathic students/citizens.
I don’t want to help make students for the world.
I want to help make students who make the world over.
 |
It’s interesting to look back at our previous WordPress themes round-ups. It’s almost like looking at a visual timeline not only of WordPress’ advances in theme design, but of the rapid development in functionality of the CMS itself. The themes from year to year clearly differ in style as Web design trends have evolved. As each year passes and more functionality is added to WordPress’ core, these improvements are strongly reflected in the themes developed for it.
Once upon a time, all WordPress themes looked like traditional blogs, with basic functionality and not a heck of a lot more. But as you will see from the themes below, that original “blog” design style is clearly gone, perhaps never to be seen again. It makes you feel nostalgic.
Nowadays, user requirements for WordPress themes are very high. Users expect all themes (including free ones) to have pages for admin options built in, where you can quickly set up your website and personalize it with a minimum of fuss. With the rise of these options pages, niche-specific theme designs (such as for portfolios, blogs or magazines) are no longer required and are, in fact, few and far between.
Most of the themes below can be tailored via the options panel to be anything you want, whether a portfolio, a content-heavy magazine-style website or a basic blog. Setting one up takes only 10 minutes. This actually gave us a few problems when it came to categorizing the themes below. We spend a lot of time researching, collaborating on and writing these round-ups. In fact, it is a Smashing Magazine tradition to publish the top 100 WordPress themes from the previous 12 months (this is our fifth edition).
Portfolios, Galleries And Showcases
Portfolium (Demo)
Portfolium is a clean and flexible WordPress grid-based portfolio theme, designed in a modern and minimalist style. It is ideal for designers, artists, photographers and other creative specialists who require a professional portfolio theme.
Shaken Grid (Demo)
Shaken Grid uses the jQuery Masonry plug-in, which “arranges elements vertically then horizontally according to a grid.” The theme is perfect if you need a gallery or portfolio or just want a unique grid layout.
Big Square (Demo)
Big Square is a stylish photoblog theme with a built-in gallery that is focused entirely on highlighting your creative visuals.
Journal Crunch (Demo)
Journal Crunch is a gallery and portfolio theme with all of the features you would expect from a premium theme: easy set-up via the options page, plenty of shortcodes, built-in pagination, Twitter widgets, AJAX contact form and much more.
Paragrams (Demo)
Paragams is a lightweight theme that is built on a grid and that could be used for various types of websites: portfolios, photoblogs even online magazines.
Imbalance 2 (Demo)
Imbalance 2 turns you WordPress-based website to an attractive blog, portfolio or online magazine. This free template has a strictly modern style with a minimalist touch.
Photoria (Demo)
Photoria is a clean feature-rich theme that would be perfect as a photoblog or portfolio. It comes packaged with a variety of templates and built-in SEO (via its extensive options page), and the theme is internationalized for easy translation.
Muse (Demo)
Muse is a simple gallery theme that can be used as either a portfolio or an inspirational showcase. It comes with custom page templates and built-in SEO, and it can be combined with a ratings plug-in to create an all-singing, all-dancing showcase website.
mimiThem (Demo)
This is far and away the most basic theme in this article. But don”t be fooled: it works effectively as a quick and easy way to get your portfolio online.
Dione (Demo)
Dione is a video showcase theme that uses the custom post type feature available in WordPress 3+.
Business And Corporate Websites
Academica (Demo)
Academica was designed specifically for educational institutions such as universities and schools. It’s a flexible and versatile free theme that can be easily customized and branded for any university, academy or non-profit organization.
Rotary (Demo)
Rotary is a two-column business theme that was built with all of the fantastic features of WordPress 3.0. It is centered on the idea of running your blog as a CMS.
Vanadiumitic (the link was removed due to the suspicious code of the theme)
Vanadiumitic comes with a featured content section, a dropdown menu, subscription buttons (Twitter, Facebook and RSS), an automatic thumbnail resizer, and widgets for popular and featured posts and featured videos, all packed in a powerful framework for easy back-end customization.
Gameliso (Demo)
This one’s a lovely clean theme.
Zincious (Demo)
The Zincious theme comes with a dropdown menu, subscription buttons (Twitter, Facebook and RSS), an automatic thumbnail resizer, a widget for popular posts, a featured content slider and a robust framework for easy back-end customization.
Ikonik (Demo)
Ikonik was designed as an online design store, although no e-commerce system is integrated. It could be used as a simple portal for selling vectors, icons, logos, buttons, themes and pretty much anything else.
Minimalist Themes
Expositio (Demo)
Expositio is a simple portfolio theme for photographers, designers and artists. Its integrated options help you customize the template from font to color.
Sutra (Demo)
Sutra is a minimal theme focused on simplicity, putting the writing front and center.
Extricate (Demo)
Extricate is a clean, minimal theme built on HTML5 and CSS3. The options page allows you to resize columns and specify post information.
Renova (Demo)
Renova comes with two backgrounds (full white or paper), six link colors, jQuery support for hover effects and mobile device support. The minimal style is for writers who need a simple layout without any distraction.
Feijoa (Demo)
This is a four-column layout with a simple sidebar and was designed using the jQuery Masonry plug-in.
Simply Delicious (Demo)
This minimalist theme features big images, a clean style and easy browsing: perfect for modern blogs and portfolios.
Wordfinder (Demo)
Wordfinder is a simple magazine-style theme for users who want to start a blog with a minimal layout. The theme has many layout features, including two home page styles and six colors for links and hover effects that are easily customizable via the options page.
Theophilus (Demo)
This jQuery-based, Cufon-enabled, lightweight and minimal WordPress theme was developed by Timothy Long.
Blogum (Demo)
Blogum is a simple grid-based blog theme, designed with a modern and minimalist style. It supports all WordPress 3.0 features, giving you extra flexibility.
Mini Hyper (Demo)
Mini Hyper comes with a basic options page where you can add your analytics tracking code and change the logo. Other than that, Mini Hyper is widget-ready and works in all browsers.
Min (Demo)
“No bells and whistles, just simple and to the point.” Min’s main content area is set at 560 pixels, and it has two widget-ized footer areas to handle navigation and anything else you feel like putting there.
Papaver (Demo)
Papaver is an elegant, minimal theme. You can set the content to one, two or three columns.
Codium Extend (Demo)
Codium Extend is a minimalist theme that supports all of WordPress 3+’s features and comes with support for smartphones (iPhone, etc.) and tablets (iPad, Galaxy Tab, etc.).
Delicate (Demo)
Delicate is a clean, minimalist theme with a focus on typography and structure.
Melville (Demo)
Melville was inspired by classic literature. It has no distractions; just a simple design that focuses the reader on your writing.
Yoko (Demo)
Yoko is a modern and flexible theme, with a responsive layout based on CSS3 media queries. The design is optimized for big desktop screens, tablets and smartphones. You can use new post formats (such as Gallery, Aside and Quote), choose your own logo and header image, and customize the background and link color.
Hybridside (Demo)
With a minimal design and simple structure, Hybridside allows writers to choose the body background and the color scheme for links. It has full support for thumbnails, WordPress menu navigation, five widget areas and a print-friendly style sheet.
Aqualine (Demo)
Aqualine is a unique and minimalist theme that has an extensive options page. Pick your own color accent, choose between thumbnails and excerpts or the full content for the main page, and more.
The Scoop (Demo)
The Scoop is a four-column minimal magazine-style theme, with a focus on elegant typography. It is ideal for content-heavy websites.
David Airey Theme
David Airey has released his old blog’s design as a free WordPress theme. As you probably know, that minimal design offers the perfect platform for your writing.
The Columnist (Demo)
The Columnist was inspired by the grid structure and typographic techniques of traditional newspapers. It was designed with a grid-based layout, an elegant typographic hierarchy and some CSS3 and jQuery greatness.
Swiss Dessign (Demo)
The four themes below, originally featured on Smashing Magazine in January, are simple yet powerful, with a touch of traditional Swiss design and layout. Their distinct style is what separates them from the other themes. They allow you to select the focus of your work, since you are the artist and should be in control of the visitor’s experience. Each theme comes with a full video overview and support for using and managing it.
Simplest Free WP Theme
This is perhaps the most basic WordPress theme you’ve ever seen. It’s so basic that it’s not even worth showing a screenshot of it. But it is useful. It’s a fully functional theme that would be perfect for anyone looking for a barebones WordPress framework. It has only 83 lines of PHP and 75 lines of CSS.
Blogs And Personal Websites
Spectacular (Demo)
This theme was commissioned by Smashing Magazine and designed by Maleika Esther Attawel. It offers a warm and comfortable environment for personal musings. It comes in two flavors: HTML 4.01 and HTML5. Both German and English versions are included in the download package.
Protean (Demo)
Protean is a WordPress theme from Landau Reece that allows bloggers to customise their website design for individual blog posts.
Skeptical (Demo)
Skeptical’s layout is flexible: you can display “Related posts” next to your latest posts on the home page or have a completely widget-based sidebar. You can also add your Flickr stream to the footer and showcase three noteworthy blog posts with a tag that you declare in the settings.
Graphite (Demo)
Graphite, built by Medialoot from the ground up using HTML5 and CSS3, comes with portfolio post types, two alternative home page image sliders and built-in admin settings.
Harimau Malaya (Demo)
Harimau Malaya was purpose-built as a throwback to when blogs looked like blogs. It is a simple but complete theme, suitable for every blogger out there.
Pongsari (Demo)
Pongsari, a simple and clean theme, was built using the WordPress 3+ default theme TwentyTen as a framework. It comes with support for WordPress 3+ thumbnails and custom menu functions.
Typominima (Demo)
Typominima is a free, minimal typography-based theme that was designed to enable writers and publishers to express themselves online in a clean and beautiful environment.
Edgy Ellen (Demo)
This theme from WP Classic has a stylish design, clean grid patterns and custom typography. It comes with an options panel that will help you set up your website in no time.
Copperific (Demo)
Copperific has a stylish slider to showcase highlights of your portfolio. It also has a built-in Twitter and Facebook button for easy sharing of posts. For monetization, it has four 125×125 banner ads that are integrated in the system’s back end. It has a custom dropdown menu, an automatic thumbnail resizer, a widget for popular posts and a lot more.
Grey (Demo)
Grey is generic enough to be used for almost any kind of blog. Whether it’s a blog about design, photography, fashion or some other passion, the Grey theme should suit your needs. It is built on a simple layout, but with a lot of little touches of subtle details and textures.
Neonsential (Demo)
Neonsential brings a grungy yet elegant look to your blog. The fancy home page slider highlights your featured posts. It is WordPress 3.0-compliant and backed by a robust framework for quickly setting up your website.
Anniversary (Demo)
As the name suggests, Anniversary was built as a celebration of and thank-you to WordPress. It’s a classic-looking theme, with several layout options and a customizable “Thank you, WordPress” banner in the header.
Shopping/Ecommerce Theme
Velvet Sky (Demo)
Velvet Sky is a Prestashop and WordPress shopping theme that was recently released on Smashing Magazine. It features a custom homepage with combo slider, horizontal and submenu menu integration, custom slideshow, it supports one page checkout and guest checkout and is IE7+, Safari, Opera, Firefox, Chrome compatible.
Mobile-Optimized Themes
iPhonsta (Demo)
Offering a mobile version of your website is an easy way to strengthen your visitors’ loyalty. iPhonsta has a fluid layout, it fits most mobile screens (despite its name, it will work on most smartphones), and it configures the font size automatically.
jQuery Mobile
This theme is optimized for mobile devices, such as iPhone, Android and BlackBerry. It is a great starting point for building a mobile website.
Magazine-Layout Themes
Agency (Demo)
Agency is a magazine-style theme that puts your content in a beautiful wrapper, complete with subtle, elegant page elements. It features a custom slideshow, a built-in contact form, custom gallery styles with lightbox functionality, and two widget-ized sidebars.
Nublu (Demo)
This sleek blue theme comes with a configurable slider, drop-down menus and Cufon-enabled headlines. It also comes with automatic thumbnail generation and the WordPress 3+ menu system, and it sports a Twitter bird that sings your latest tweets.
Splendio (Demo)
Splendio has a unique magazine-style design, based on the TwentyTen theme.
Sight (Demo)
Sight, previously featured on Smashing Magazine last November, is a powerful theme that is best suited to magazines-style blogs. It was built on a grid and has a modern minimalist style. Customize the content view using either the standard blog view or the grid view.
Lucky Guess (Demo)
Plenty of CSS3 techniques are used in this theme. You will notice both loud and subtle text shadows in the headings, text orientation effects and box gradients. The theme also makes use of Google fonts, which render much faster than the popular Cufon fonts.
Yellow Magazine (Demo)
This theme could be used for a magazine-style website or, just as effectively, for a corporate or business layout. It comes with a basic options page, built-in pagination, a content slider and integrated social bookmarking buttons.
Suburbia (Demo)
Suburbia is a clean and flexible grid-based magazine theme with a modern and minimalist style. The theme is suitable for most types of websites, including blogs, online magazines and portfolios.
The Morning After (Demo)
At 100,000 downloads, The Morning After is the grandfather of modern WordPress magazine themes. Originally designed by Arun Kale, it was bought last year by WooThemes, which has restructured and modernized the theme with its own powerful development framework.
iTheme2 (Demo)
iTheme2 is the perfect theme for technology- and Apple-related blogs. It uses media queries to target different displays, such as desktops, notebooks, iPhones and iPads, and other mobile devices, without a plug-in. The layout automatically adjusts to the user’s viewing area.
Magazine 1 (Demo)
With its simple, stylish and dark design, Magazine 1 is a professional solution for any blog or magazine website. It features jQuery content sliders, a “Most popular posts” widget and multiple colors for the background and content. It is easy to customize and use.
Custom Community (Demo)
Custom Community is a BuddyPress theme that enables you to easily build a website with all of BuddyPress’ built-in features: the easy-to-use jQuery slideshow, post templates with thumbnail integration, and a powerful options page for customizing every part of the theme.
Aluminiumism (Demo)
The Aluminiumism theme has a grungy watercolor style yet still maintains a classically clean look. It features a prominent content section, a dropdown menu, subscription buttons (Twitter, Facebook and RSS), an automatic thumbnail resizer, widgets for popular and featured posts and featured videos, and a heck of a lot more.
Elegant (Demo)
Elegant is a simple yet professional theme. It has two color schemes (black and white) and is best suited to corporate magazines but is flexible enough for blogs and portfolios.
Amphion Lite (Demo)
Amphion Lite comes packaged with two skins, a home page content slider, integrated social sharing buttons, custom page templates and a lightbox plug-in for image galleries.
“Coming Soon” And Landing Pages
Landis (Demo)
Landis is a simple one-page landing or “Under construction” WordPress theme. It keeps your users informed while you build your amazing new website. The quick landing page simply tells visitors what is going on and when your website will launch.
Timelaph (Demo)
Timelaph is a sleek, dark, spaced-out theme for landing pages and email newsletter subscription pages. It integrates easily with Feedburner to redirect RSS feeds and help build your email subscriptions.
Placeholder (Demo)
This landing page is perfect if your website is in development and you simply need to let visitors know how to get in touch with you. Also, the built-in countdown timer is a nifty way to tell visitors when the project will launch.
Theme Development Frameworks And Bare-Bone Themes
Platform
This is the free version of Platform, a drag-and-drop design framework for WordPress. With this framework, you can design and build your website faster than ever before, entirely in WordPress’ back end.
Roots
Roots is a starter WordPress theme made for developers and based on HTML5 Boilerplate, Blueprint (or 960.gs) and Starkers. It helps you rapidly create brochure websites and blogs.
HTML5 WordPress Shell
With this framework, you get custom templates (including 404 and 503 error pages), the mother of all WordPress body tags, support for WordPress’ new menu system, Modernizr (i.e. HTML5 feature detection) and an HTML5 reset style sheet, @font-face examples, support for iPhone detection, and IE conditional style sheets.
Boilerplate: Starkers
This Boilerplate framework was developed by combining HTML5 Boilerplate and the bare-bones Starkers into a minimally marked-up, HTML5-ready framework. The Boilerplate theme is designed to function as a parent theme to whatever child you would like to add. But you could just as easily use this as a starting point and alter the PHP as your design requires.
TwentyTen Five
TwentyTen Five was originally launched in the Smashing Magazine article “Using HTML5 to Transform WordPress’ TwentyTen Theme.” It is basically an HTML5 upgrade of the default TwentyTen theme, and yet it is much more than that. With its support for brand new HTML5 elements and its compatibility with all modern browsers (although to use HTML5 with IE versions 6 to 8, you need a pinch of JavaScript, which is included), this theme is perfect as a development framework.
Theme Starter (Demo)
This is a starter theme for those who are looking for a starting point in WordPress without having to dissect anything more complex. The theme is WordPress 3+ compatible and uses the new menu navigation and thumbnail functionality.
Constellation (Demo)
This great starting point gives you the flexibility to provide bespoke styles for different devices, totally up-to-date HTML5 code (which is fantastic for SEO) and a flexible grid system, on top of all of the other goodness bundled in the HTML5 Boilerplate.
Bones
This feature-rich bare-bones theme was built using some of HTML5 Boilerplate”s recommended mark-up. It also has a ton of features, such as page navigation, breadcrumbs, a widget for related posts, HTML5 video with fallback and a heck of a lot more. Bones was designed to make the developer”s life easier; it”s meant to be hacked until it fits what you”re looking for.
Skimpy
Skimpy has basic WordPress 3.0 functionality, including custom menus, thumbnails and custom sidebars. A couple of other useful tweaks are commented out, but you can comment them in and do what you want with them. The only style included is a container that sets the width to 900 pixels.
Further Resources
For nostalgia, or perhaps to visually track the development of WordPress themes, browse back through the top 100 WordPress themes from previous years.
Please note that some of those themes (especially the ones from 2007 and 2008) may be outdated and incompatible with the latest version of WordPress. Use with caution.
- 100 Free High-Quality WordPress Themes: 2010 Edition
- 100 Amazing Free WordPress Themes for 2009
- 100 Excellent Free WordPress Themes: 2008 Edition
- Beautiful WordPress Themes You (Probably) Haven’t Seen: 2007 Edition
(al)
© Paul Andrew for Smashing Magazine, 2011.
I've just finished reading Reinventing Higher Education: The Promise of Innovation, a new study of the state of the university sector in the United States. With some distinguished exceptions, it suggests, that "state" is a stasis brought about by the endemic resistance to change in universities.
One contributor, Jon Marcus - in an essay titled Old School: Four hundred years of resistance to change writes that history shows …
"[that] without self-interest or external pressures, existing universities have – not just recently, but for centuries – unswervingly exercised a stubborn resistance to systemic change that can hold off the smallest reforms for years, stretching into decades"
He cites how the Spellings Commission discovered in 2005 just how adept organised education had become at –
"the art of stalling, dodging, and misdirecting until your opponent is too exhausted to be an effective threat".
None of this is particularly new, of course, and it brings to mind the old joke of the education minister, unable to effect significant reforms, who decides to conduct a seance to consult the ghost of the US philosopher of education, John Dewey:
"How do I bring about change in higher education?" asks the minister.
"Do you want the realistic way or the miraculous way?" Dewey replies.
"I prefer the realistic way, of course."
"Right," says Dewey, "I will send a million angels down from heaven to visit every university in the land. They will sprinkle angel dust and, lo and behold, they will be reformed."
"If that is the realistic way, then what, pray tell, is the miraculous way?"
"Oh," says Dewey, "that's when the universities reform themselves."
Ok, it's a cheap laugh but it contains nuggets of truth. Universities – not just in the US, but also including Australia and the UK among others – remain deeply mired in their ancient roots, resonating to the rhythms and routines of a long gone era.
What sort of change do the critics want?
Writing in Times Higher, Cathy Davidson argues that universities are still very much influenced by Taylorism and continue to prepare students as if their career paths were linear, definite, specialised and predictable:
“We are making them experts in obsolescence. We are doing a good job of training them for the 20th century.
“Our educational systems, so far, look as if the internet hasn't been invented yet. Scratch most conventional academic departments and you see little hint of restructured courses, let alone restructured thinking.”
Similar sentiments may be found in the pages of The Economist where Australian universities are described as
"decent and dependable, but seldom excellent …"
We tend to be complacent while countries such as China and India are investing apace in higher education.
India is talking about creating 800 to 1000 new universities while China is channeling funds in a big way into new and existing institutions.
So here's a thought experiment: If you were in charge of the higher education budget of China or India (or Australia) and you had the resources to build a university from scratch, how would it differ from today's typical Australian university?
Would it have faculties, departments, disciplines, and divisions? Would it run to the traditional academic calendar, or operate without break throughout the year?
How would it integrate digital technologies and the resources of the internet? What would be the length of an undergraduate degree program? How would research fit in to your model, if at all? What would be the place of the humanities?
Let me know your ideas – it's your chance to build your own (virtual) university.
* Reinventing Higher Education: The Promise of Innovation, by Ben Wildavsky, Andrew P Kelly and Kevin Care (eds), Harvard Education Press 2011
- Steven Schwartz
Sometime last year, Grainne Conole and I managed to convince Terry Anderson to issue a call for papers for a special IRRODL issue on connectivism. IRRODL is one of the most cited (if not the most cited) journals in educational technology – largely due to the open format of the journal and the efforts of Terry as editor and the behind the scenes work of Brigette McConkey as managing editor.
Today, we’re pleased to announce the publication of the IRRODL Connectivism special issue. From our editorial:
This special issue of IRRODL provides an opportunity to step back and reflect on how these dramatic social and technological changes impact education. In 2004, connectivism was presented as a new theory of learning that addresses learning in complex, social, networked environments. Since that time, numerous articles, open online courses, and online conferences have explored connectivism’s application in education. As articles in this issue reflect, sharp criticism and support have been offered. We hope this issue will help to advance the discussion, to clarify areas of needed research, and to contribute to ongoing debate about the influence of the Internet on teaching and learning.
Earlier this week, Sweden’s public television service, SVT (akin to PBS and the BBC), released a one hour documentary chronicling the history of WikiLeaks, starting with its early leaks of Scientology documents and ending with its recent release of American diplomatic cables. Since July, SVT reporters have followed WikiLeaks, traveling near and far to interview WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and other top members of the whistleblowing organization, some of who have since left the embattled internet site. All in all, a decent introduction to Wikileaks and its controversial mission. Thanks to @eacion for the heads up…
WikiRebels: New Documentary Tells the WikiLeaks Story is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com
Share:
