We could do away with 90% of “special needs” today, and instead make all those tools and resources available to every child to use every time “this way” would make education work better than “the old way.” Stigmas would drop away, as would the self-limits of low-expectations. Student interests would create groupings rather than measurements of single abilities.
Ira has a fantastic couple of posts over at SpeEdChange at the moment on Universal Access {part 1 and part 2}.
In the Disability Office here, our mantra is that we are trying to make ourselves redundant by making the university environment inclusive to all from the outset, effectively making the category of ’special needs’ redundant.
Ira explains it far better than I could, so the posts are very much worth your time if you are involved at any level in the delivery or consumption of content in education. Staff at NUIM might like to take a look at some of the resources in our staff area or have a look through our links in delicious.
A fellow student sent me this clip on youtube this morning. It shows a person with cerebral palsy explaining how she uses Second Life as a way of socialising. In the clip. She goes to a nightclub in SL called Wheelies and meets Simon, the man who started the club.
At the moment in H809, we are looking at the developing research on Second Life. As fledgling researchers, we are to look critically at the material published. Is it from a peer-reviewed publication? Is it adding anything new? What methodologies are being used? What are the theoretical frameworks? And so on.
Much of the little I’ve found so far comes from Computer Science or other technical fields, but a trend is emerging for papers concerning libraries in Second Life. Quite a few libraries have been ‘built’ there and looking at the clip above, it’s not hard to see why. Cheap, ubiquitous technology is facilitating access to resources previously restricted by geography and time.
In Ireland, we have seen a 50% increase in the number of students with specific learning difficulties such as dyslexia attending university. Many of these learners are tech savvy and quickly take to the tools that we are embedding in the university environment. In fact, at NUIM we expect not to have much dealings with students with milder forms of dyslexia in the future as, through technology and good practice, the environment becomes less hostile.
So, great work has been done to get this far. Persuasion, legislation, reason (and some manipulation and cajoling!) have been used to get educational institutions to take accessibility seriously and to take teaching and learning seriously. The traditional chalk ‘n talk model has its dogged adherents. Maybe they could be persuaded to spend an hour in Wheelies to talk about that?
