Is the medium still the message?

On Twitter yesterday I said:
"@donalynbooks @ruth_ayres @alansitomer all information handling is literacy. Form hardly matters since adaptable #mra11"
and Dr. Troy Hicks responded:
"#mra11 "all information handling is literacy. Form hardly matters since adaptable" Form AND function matter.  http://bit.ly/dKwx3K"

The link is to one of the "information age"s most famous phrases, and to the study of media by the University of Toronto's brilliant Marshall McLuhan. And, yes, I deeply respect both McLuhan's and Hicks' work, so I began to read (that is, to listen to audio conversions of text), and I began to think.

When Marshall McLuhan began writing Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, the book famous for the phrase "the medium is the message," the world of "media" looked a bit different than it does now. The book was published in 1964, a culmination of ten years of research and papers. And so, as McLuhan worked toward publication...

If you read a daily newspaper the ink, still applied by letterpress printing presses in a process pre-dating Gutenberg, smeared off on your hands. And every letter in that newspaper had been set there mechanically via Otto Mergenthaler's Linotype machines.

Television was a black and white medium, shown on screens no larger than 19 inches (diagonal), with programming choice never exceeding New York City's nine stations. News was delivered at specific moments in the day. Only the most momentous events moved television news away from 7:00 am - 8:00 am and 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm time slots.

"Book" was undeniably a physical form. Though paperbacks - "Pocketbooks" in one widely used corporate name - had lowered costs, books were heavy, expensive, slowly-produced items, smelling of wood pulp and the alcohol-dried inks. Door-to-door salesmen moved through North America selling extraordinarily expensive sets of The World Book and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. You could pay more and get yearly hard-bound updates. The World Book even had plastic overlay pages in certain articles which allowed you to see maps and other things "transform."


Radio stations had moved away from storytelling, mostly to specific music formats. A
Top 40" station like New York's WABC - 77 could pull a third of the New York radio audience along with millions more through a "clear channel" signal. The very first "All-News" radio station in the United States, New York's WINS - 1010, would not switch from Murray-The-K rock-and-roll until a year after McLuhan's book came out.

"Records" - those spinning, newly vinyl, discs, held a maximum of three minutes per side (7" 45 rpm) or 17 minutes per side (12" 33-1/3 rpm). Automatic changers which could move you through one side each of up to five records were now common, "stereo" was just becoming available. Consumer grade audiotape players did not exist, though, by 1964, researchers at both RCA and Philips/Norelco were playing with the concept of "cassette audio."

Phone calls over "long distance" could still not be directly dialed in most places in the United States until after McLuhan's book sat on bookstore shelves. The "push button" phone, introduced at the World's Fairs in Seattle in 1963 and New York in 1964, wouldn't be "mainstream" until well into the 1970s.

And film was presented in huge auditoriums in the dark, on newly wide screens, sometimes incredibly wide. Film was uniquely uninterrupted storytelling, and was, in the aftermath of Hitchcock's Psycho and other "spectaculars," switching from a "sit all day, come in when you want, double-feature" format to a "see the show once, then leave" model of ticket sales.

In other words, when McLuhan looked at media forms, and saw the forms constructing as much meaning as the content, he was living in a world of fixed and separated media. Books were books - yes, for the price of a small car you could convert one to Braille but audiobooks were still a thing for the future - and television was television and radio was radio. A "reader" could not pick the films he/she wanted to watch at home (except for those with 16mm projectors and access to "adult" or "educational" films), or pick an audiobook for in-car listening, or time-shift a television program or convert a phone message to print or a printed message to sound. Nor was the concept of these kinds of media-shifting really in the public mind. For McLuhan "media-shifting" meant the difference between Gone with the Windand Gone With The Wind, or, far worse, reading Shakespeare.

1910 France imagining the school of 2000

Not everyone was disconnected from future possibility. The 1910 French illustration above, demonstrating "re-processing" books into audio, seems stunningly prescient, as does the selection of music in Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, or the reading Frankenstein I blogged about a little while ago. Though really, the events at technological change moments, say, the writing down of Homer's poetry after 400 or 700 years, or the conversion of language into dots-and-dashes in the 1840s, surely hinted at a media conversion different from the adaptation of a myth into sculpture.

Thus the question, for me, becomes this: Is McLuhan still really valid? Does television truly link you to a story today in a form very different than "film" (which is really just another high-definition digital image)? Is an audiobook truly cognitively different than decoding inked alphabetic text? Is reading a newspaper on your tablet a fully different experience than reading it on paper? Is taking in the news from the BBC World Service intellectually different than reading The Guardian?

And my answers are, "yes," and "no," but really, "it depends." And it is in the "it depends" that the learning issues for education lie. Suppose listening to a dramatic reading of The Great Gatsbyby a fine actor is different than reading it on paper, is the same true if you pull the Project Gutenberg text and let Balabolka read it to you? What if you hear, but do not see, the local news? Is that different than watching the BBC vs. listening to their radio feed? How so? And how do you teach - how do you help students learn - that difference?

Which all brings me back to what I said at the start, "all information handling is literacy. Form hardly matters since adaptable," and let me agree and disagree with myself. I truly believe that, "all information handling is literacy," but I also acknowledge that Troy Hicks and McLuhan are sometimes right, sometimes the form does matter - as when the picture, for example, overwhelms the words - but also, sometimes, the cognitive processes are not truly possible to differentiate, as in letting Text-To-Speech read Gatsby to you. But either way, our students need to learn what is happening, how to adapt media in these times when that is infinitely possible, and how to operate within these different effects.

Media is not the same, which means that literacy is not the same. If literacy, in your school, looks like the literacy Scott Fitzgerald knew as a Minnesota school boy, then your students will have serious problems negotiating the world they live in. And your school is failing - not faux Arne Duncan failing, but really failing.

- Ira Socol

Assistive Technology: What The New York Times didn't tell you

It is nice that The New York Times occasionally publishes a positive story about technology in education amidst their standard "oh, we're distracted" fare. But it is unfortunate when that information is incomplete and inaccurate in presentation.

Lisa Guernsey works for the Early Education Initiative at the New America Foundation,
not directly for The New York Times

High Tech Help, published on January 7, 2011, has some valid suggestions, but it is outdated, and leans toward that ugly realm of "brand advocacy."

So here is what The New York Times and Lisa Guernsey left out:

Speech Recognition - speech-to-text - doesn't only come from Dragon. It is available at no extra cost on every Windows computer running Windows 7 (or Windows Vista). The Windows Speech Recognition system has some significant advantages over Dragon, especially for "immature" voices and in terms of working across the widest range of web and software applications.

There is also VLingo, for just $20 lifetime, which offers Text-To-Speech and Speech Recognition for Android and BlackBerry.

WordTalk might be the best free Text-To-Speech system. Yes, it is limited to Windows and Microsoft Word, but within those common contexts WordTalk provides word-by-word highlighting with excellent settings control and instant conversion of text to mp3 files.

PowerTalk, which provides text-to-speech for Microsoft PowerPoint, is another free essential tool. And though, yes, we all love Prezi, Prezi is not accessible, and really has no place in public education at this time.

WYNN (from the JAWS people), much less expensive and appropriate for a wider range of ages than Kurzweil 3000, should have been included in the Text-To-Speech paragraph. We should be "brand agnostics" here, looking for whatever works for each student.

I love CLiCk-Speak, and I'm proud that my conversations with the brilliant Charles L. Chen at the CSUN Conference on Technology and People with Disabilities in 2005 contributed to its development from the FireVox platform, but, CLiCk-Speak development has halted and it does not work with all systems. So it is vital to link people to newer answers, notably FoxVox (for Windows) and Speaking Fox (for Mac OS).

There needed to be a deeper discussion of EduApps from RSC-Scotland North+East. Or you might look at our Michigan version, the Freedom Stick, whose new version - coming later this month - includes the screen reader Balabolka. These "carry anywhere" tools represent an exciting way around the bad rules of bad school districts which block access.

Going back to Firefox, there are so many add-ons for accessibility, which should have been discussed. In Michigan we've collected these into two collections - one for PCs, one for Mac OS. You may also want to look at the Bookshare Firefox DAISY Book Reader.

Anyway, I appreciate The New York Times discovering "Assistive Technology" but I wish they had done a bit more research, and written a slightly more useful article.

- Ira Socol

Text-To-Speech to Build Literacy from the Start

At ATIA 2009 in Chicago I presented my argument for using Text-To-Speech systems from the start of literacy education.

Text-to-Speech for Beginning Readers -ATIA Chicago 09

View more presentations from Ira David Socol.

Sure, the favorite (most tweeted) quote was, "if phonics worked it would be spelled differently," but the focus was on strategies which work - on using Text-To-Speech to help bridge the issues of differential home/parental literacy skills, and using TTS to offer access to content before decoding can take over, on using TTS to improve sight-word recognition and new vocabulary acquisition, and perhaps most importantly, using TTS to prove to kids that there is value in books, that there is value in reading, by giving them a chance to get to what's inside the books.

Because reading should not be a school skill. It should not be a task. Reading is learning to take in information and process it for our own use - something schools rarely show students.

Anyway, thanks to the folks from WYNN who helped out (and gave away a software package as a prize!), and thanks to Karen Janowski for coming to visit!

- Ira Socol

CSUN 2009: Text-To-Speech from the Start

(As the CSUN 2009 - Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference goes on I will post my three presentations and add short posts about what I see and hear. You may want to also follow the CSUN Twitter feed at #csun09)

Text-to-speech software is not just an accommodation for struggling readers, it can support primary literacy instruction in ways that prepare all readers for lifelong learning. And it can build literacy skills from the very beginning of school, if only schools would bring these systems in.

There is often a bizarre fear of this. I constantly hear that using text-to-speech systems will, "make students lazy," or "mean they will not learn to read." These arguments make absolutely no sense - if they were true, parents or teachers reading to children would be a bad thing - and yet, we know this is not true.

Exposure to text, through text made accessible - via parent bed-time story, teacher story time, or computer text-to-speech, builds vocabulary, builds comprehension and understanding of literary form, builds an understanding of grammar, and perhaps most importantly, builds an understanding of the value of reading. Computer text-to-speech can do even more, increasing sightword recognition, improving the understanding of the idea of sentence and paragraph, and offering support for the idea of independent reading.

The pressure for literacy success in schools is a worldwide policy event that has as much potential for harm as it has potential to improve human progress. Literacy initiatives, be they national or multinational, the work of governments or NGOs, based in theories of democracy or theories of capitalism, certainly have the ability to transform the lives of millions. But they can do something else: these initiatives can place unrealistic expectations on a wide range of young people – those with cognitive issues, those with dyslexia, those with vision issues, those with attentional issues, and those who, simply are developing, physically, emotionally, or cognitively, in a way different than medically-determined norms suggest.

In addition, there are unrealistic expectations placed on the families least likely to be able to provide in-home support for literacy instruction – families where the parents are English-language-learners themselves, families with all parents working multiple jobs, and families where the parents lack their own literacy competencies.

Text-To-Speech from the Start: A Primary Support for Lifespan Learning

View more presentations from Ira david Socol.

If you are teaching in a primary classroom, you are be faced with students with literacy issues. You are faced with students who are failing to master literacy as expected. And you have students who will be blocked from many forms of educational and social success because they are struggling with this single skill.

In some US states a student who might be on top of his class in every other measure of academic achievement may be retained in third grade simply because of reading test scores. In EU nations students with high potential fail to achieve sufficient scores on secondary school entrance exams because of literacy issues. In classrooms everywhere students who fail to master effective literacy are isolated, fail to progress in other subjects, suffer with significant self-esteem issues, and within a few years, are far more likely to find themselves as drop-outs, and even as convicted criminals.

Sophisticated text-to-speech systems are often thought of as accommodations for readers who have already fallen behind their classmates, and these systems are rarely employed with students in the primary grades, yet these are the very supports which might make massive differences in school success, right from the start.

Software such as Freedom Scientific’s WYNN (chosen for its ease of use with even very young readers) can dramatically increase "read-to" time, can enhance the connection between word shape and word sound, can offer content, information access, and sophisticated story access, can support student writing, and can assist in effective student evaluation.

Bringing these text-to-speech systems into primary schools, from the start of the literacy learning process, is an idea whose time has come. Combining the sophisticated tools in premium software such as WYNN with free web-based and computer-based home supports, will create best early literacy practices which can support most students.

Time-stretched teachers may build “read-to” time for students by converting any type of book into a WYNN document, and creating custom toolbars and settings which provide the best starting points for young students.

Teachers needing effective tools for evaluating reading comprehension and content knowledge may use the interactive structures within WYNN to bypass decoding problems.

Teachers with students struggling with sight words may use the bi-modal (see/hear) text-to-speech system to build these essential skills. They may also use WYNN’s dual-highlighting system to emphasize sentence and/or paragraph structure.

Teachers with students whose decoding capabilities lag behind their cognitive and academic capabilities may use WYNN to make content (book or on-line) accessible, and through WYNN’s voice notes can allow interaction even if writing and keyboarding skills are minimal.

And teachers concerned about preparing any students for lifelong learning may use WYNN’s tools, and it’s web browser, to help young students learn to interact effectively with digital text.

WYNN is not the only software capable of these supports. Text Help’s Read-and-Write-Gold and Kurzweil 3000 both offer similar support structures, but WYNN was chosen for the case studies which underlie this research for its simplicity of interface. This interface seems the easiest to learn at a young age, although the software remains a lifespan learning tool.

There is not enough current research on utilizing these newest reading and writing support technologies with very young students, a failure of both academic imagination and proof of the limitations of traditional research "rules" as applied to a rapidly developing field, but research into literacy issues raises the likelihood that high-tech accommodations can provide significant and effective support.

[Warning! A few paragraphs of insufferable academic-type writing follow...]

Florida State University's Joseph K. Torgesen, in Individual Differences in Response to Early Interventions in Reading: The Lingering Problem of Treatment Resisters (2000), stated, "What is the best method, or combination of methods, of instruction for these children, and how much special instruction will they require? At this point in the development of our field, we have the beginnings of a consensus about the first question but are still far from a consensual answer to the second. For example, we know that approaches featuring systematic, explicit instruction in phonemic awareness and phonetic decoding skills produce stronger reading growth in children with phonological weaknesses than do those that do not teach these skills explicitly (Brown & Felton, 1990; Felton, 1993; Foorman et al., 1998; Hatcher, Hulme, & Ellis, 1994; Lovett, Borden, Lacerenza, Benson, & Brackstone, 1994; Torgesen et al., 1997; Torgesen, Wagner, Rashotte, Rose, et al., 1999; Tunmer & Nesdale, 1985). It also seems clear that these phonemically explicit approaches should include careful instruction to help children apply their phonetic decoding skills to real words and that they should provide many opportunities to read connected text for fluency and meaning (Foormanetal., 1998; Gaskins, Ehri, Cress, O’Hara, & Donnelly, 1997; Lovett et al., 1994; Vellutino, Scanlon, & Tanzman, 1994)."

Russell Gersten, Ph.D., and Scott Baker, Ph.D., in Reading Comprehension Instruction for Students with Learning Disabilities: A Research Synthesis suggest that, "Finding ways to help students generalize their newly acquired reading comprehension skills is essential. It's important to learn how these skills can be transferred to other academic areas and what needs to be done to make sure that students either continue using the specific strategies they've learned after the instructional intervention ends or internalize the essential parts of the strategy so that improvements in reading comprehension continue." They also say the following, "Students with LD often show signs of giving up too quickly when faced with a difficult passage. This so-called task persistence, a skill that must be acquired by all readers, is especially important for successful reading of expository text, such as history and science textbooks, newspapers, and voter pamphlets." They continue, "Children with LD, who have a history of academic difficulties, have documented gaps in grade-appropriate knowledge of history, geography, and other subjects. These knowledge gaps interfere with their understanding of material they encounter in new texts and compound their reading comprehension problems."

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's James Gee speaks of research indicating that a kindergartener's spoken specialized (non-vernacular) vocabulary correlates with 3rd/4th grade reading comprehension levels, and that "The only realistic chance students with poor vocabularies have to catch up to their peers with rich vocabularies requires that they engage in extraordinary amounts of independent reading."

Faced with these facts, and a classroom of between twenty and thirty primary students, how can a teacher start to compensate for hours of missed parent-child reading sessions, or at-home exposure to specialized learning? How can a teacher make sure that struggling readers stay engaged with content learning so that students do not fall behind in every subject area? How can teachers provide extra phonological support, writing skill support, and reading support without cloning themselves and providing one-on-one work with a dozen students at a time?

It is the need to meet these needs for these students which drives the need to bring Text-To-Speech into early primary classrooms, and to integrate these systems into the very start of literacy learning. Put WYNN in your primary classrooms, and if you can not afford to send WYNN home, develop a dual-system with WordTalk and CLiCk-Speak, DSpeech or NaturalReader, or just PowerPoint Books linked to PowerTalk providing out-of-school support.


Microsoft PowerPoint:How To Create A Talking Book In Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003

If your students begin to read, they will have reason to continue reading, to work on reading, and they will learn the value of written human communication. If not, they may become that typical 'book hating' fourth grader.

- Ira Socol in Los Angeles

CSUN 2009 - Writing Tools - Supporting All Writers

(As the CSUN 2009 - Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference goes on I will post my three presentations and add short posts about what I see and hear. You may want to also follow the CSUN Twitter feed at #csun09)

If you could offer your students technologies which would support their writing skills, and could do it for free, would you?

Suppose your students could slip past small muscle control issues to begin getting their thoughts onto “paper?” Or that they could read and edit their words without struggling with decoding? Or could effectively spellcheck their own work no matter how much accent or first-languages impacted their initial spelling attempts?

What if you could watch – and support – your students as they wrote collaboratively, while tracking every change? Or if students could collaborate on homework without being in the same neighborhood? Or could track and record sources without the difficulty of writing complicated notes?

CSUN 2009 - Supporting Writing: Text-To-Speech and Spellcheck for All of Us

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slideshare powerpoint has links if you download

When Englert, Manalo, and Zhao wrote I Can Do It Better on the Computer: The Effects of Technology-enabled Scaffolding on Young Writers' Composition, documenting the success of computer supports in 2004 most of the solutions studied had to be purchased by schools and students. Today free downloadable and online software allow us to offer every student technology which can improve the core elements of their writing: spelling, organization, editing, and understanding of authorial voice.

Text-To-Speech systems allow students to independently listen to their own writing while editing, even if they are weak readers. This not only helps them to identify wrong words, repeated words, and omitted words, it offers a way for them to compare their phrasing, descriptions, and explanations with their intentions and their aspirations.

Content-based spell-checking with word definitions allows struggling readers and writers of English to find the right word and the right spelling without losing their thoughts during long, frustrating trips to a print dictionary.

Online document software allows peer collaboration and teacher support of the writing process.

And online graphic organization tools and notebooking systems support writing organization.

Up to two years worth of functional research with WordTalk, Firefox with CLiCk-Speak (and other add-on tools), Ghotit, Google Docs, Google Notebook, Webspiration, and Microsoft Vista’s Speech Recognition in both educational and job training situations underlie this presentation which will look at best practices for using these free tools across student environments.

Particular emphasis will be placed on how to combine these tools to support the writing process, focusing on carrying students from engagement through persistence to editing and production for audience, all with software that is already on most school computers or which can be accessed at no cost.

These are the critical issues in creating and supporting emerging writers. Students must have ways to begin writing which do not generate massive frustration. They must have ways to complete writing which do not exceed their ability to persist in the task. They must have effect ways to edit even if their reading decoding skills are week. And they must discover that writing has a purpose beyond teacher-defined school success: without this feedback, engagement and persistence will inevitably wane.

In their 2004 article Englet, Manalo, and Zhao state, “Without access to these functions, the memory or cognition of a problem solver might be overwhelmed (Pea, 1993; Stone, 1998). In this manner, technology serves as a type of social actor or intellectual partner. Together the individual-operating-with-the-mediational-technology can participate in a process that, barring this support, might lie beyond his or her attainment. (Pea, 1993; Salomon, 1993; Wertsch, 1998).” Five years later we can provide this functional support on any internet-connected computer, and on many “smart” mobile phones. Offering our students the opportunity to use their cognitive efforts for the learning of writing skills, rather than overcoming capability differences.

- Ira Socol in Los Angeles

Englert, C.S., Manalo, M., Zhao, Y. (2004) I Can Do It Better on the Computer: The Effects of Technology-enabled Scaffolding on Young Writers' Composition. Journal of Special Education Technology. Volume 19 Number 1.

Why Roy Blount Jr. is evil...

Can Amazon's Kindle 2 read books to you?

Many of us who work in the field of literacy have been waiting for this moment. We've been waiting for Text-To-Speech to go fully mainstream, because, as this happens, access to information, to our culture, is no longer limited to the elite, to those with excellent alphabetic decoding skills, to the recipients of high-quality education.

I, as an author, refused to make my book Kindle-available before, because it was not an accessible format. I opted instead for an accessible PDF version available through Lulu.com. But now, I'll probably find the time to make a Kindle2 version possible.



But other authors feel differently. A group of self-appointed "copyright defenders" called the "Authors Guild" deeply objects to the expansion of reading. Led by their president, an author of the kind of books which lie near toilets across America (we might call this "second rate blog quality") named Roy Blount, Jr. they are insisting that Text-To-Speech systems violate their copyright. And while doing that, Mr. Blount decides that he is an expert on disability - and will (I guess personally) diagnose those worthy of assistance.

Let's "read" what Mr. Blount had to say in The New York Times:

"In fact, publishers, authors and American copyright laws have long provided for free audio availability to the blind and the guild is all for technologies that expand that availability. (The federation, though, points out that blind readers can’t independently use the Kindle 2’s visual, on-screen controls.) But that doesn’t mean Amazon should be able, without copyright-holders’ participation, to pass that service on to everyone.

"The guild is also accused of wanting to profiteer off family bedtime rituals. A lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation sarcastically warned that “parents everywhere should be on the lookout for legal papers haling them into court for reading to their kids.”

"For the record: no, the Authors Guild does not expect royalties from anybody doing non-commercial performances of “Goodnight Moon.” If parents want to send their children off to bed with the voice of Kindle 2, however, it’s another matter."

So, hear the Authors Guild clearly, despite their "denials": If the Authors Guild decides that you are "disabled enough" you can have Text-To-Speech. And if your parents are literate and able to read to you in English the Authors Guild will allow you access to bedtime stories. That is quite nice of them, isn't it?

Soon, we can expect, Roy Blount, Jr. will oppose libraries, because, if you can't afford the book, you can't have it either. Don't think so? This is a guy who who'll pull the bedtime stories away from kids of parent's with reading problems. He's quite capable of doing anything.

Listen. I wish my book was making a lot of money. I really do. But what I wish most is that people were reading it. That's why I wrote it - because I had a story I wanted to tell.

Yes, I'd like to get paid for it. But even if I did, sorry, I don't expect one piece of creation to support me forever. So copyright is a good thing, but it should never be a lifetime thing or an absolute thing. Right now Roy Blount, Jr.'s Am I Pig Enough for You Yet? already enjoys far more legal protection than medicines which take billions of dollars and years of research by thousands to create. Now I'm no fan of "big pharma" but medications get far less patent protection time than books get copyright protection time, and pharmaceuticals are passed out for free far more often than books are.

If we believe that books are important, and I think all authors should think that, then we want people to read. And it should make no difference at all how that book is read. If someone wants to buy The Drool Room, on paper or by download, or - if I get it together - on Audiobook or Kindle2 sometime this year, I don't care whether they decode the printed words, or listen to it on an electronic device, or have a friend read it to them, or touch Braille with their fingers. I don't care if they pass the book to a friend when they're done, I don't care if six people are in the car while it is being read, and any author who does is no artist in my mind, and is no supporter of literacy.

Access to information is one of the most important social justice issues of this century. And access is constantly being threatened by short-sighted, money-deperate people like the RIAA and the Authors Guild. So here's what I'd like you to do: Obviously, boycott Roy Blount, Jr.'s books. And someone, please, find and post an Authors Guild membership list so we can expand the boycott and increase the pressure.

Because if we can't even have authors united in supporting universal access to literacy, we'll never convince educators.

- Ira Socol

here's a shorter blog argument.

A Primer - Text-To-Speech

A raucus debate on a national (US) list serve regarding the use of Text-To-Speech software included much argument about whether digital reading was actually "reading." But that's for a post coming soon. But one thing which surprised me was how little the literacy educators who argue that this software is either ineffective or bad actually know about the systems they oppose.

So I posted a "starter list," which I'll re-post - with a few additions - right here.

Let me try to present, in relatively short form, how some of these reading technologies operate, from the basics of Click-Speak to the sophisticated literacy and study support of WYNN.

I don't want to try to offer a definitive list, rather, a few systems that I tend to use the most, including - hopefully - a small sense of why this or that has worked for the people - youth or adult - who I have worked with.

I emphasize that I use multiple technologies myself, and that most of those that I have worked with have chosen to do the same. This is a big part of what I describe as "Toolbelt Theory" - a learned-centered, Task-based, specifically ordered, reworking of Joy Zabala's "SETT" Assistive Technology choice protocol.
A Toolbelt for a Lifetime
Toolbelt Theory for Everyone
"Toolbelt Theory" is based around the idea that as humans we are tool users, and that we choose tools most effectively when that choice begins with the Task at hand, and then considers the Environment in which that task must be performed, the Skill set of the individual (the tool chooser), and the Tools which are available (Thus the acronyn TEST).

So, we have different literacy solutions based on the variety of challenges we face, just as we have different screwdrivers and different saws.

With that said, here are some of those tools:

Click-Speak

Click-Speak is a free Firefox add-in created by Charles L. Chen (who also created FireVox for the visually impaired). Click-Speak can read any text which appears in your browser, including, of course, anything in on-line software such as Google Docs or any email. Click-Speak has its own "toolbar" (which I do not use) which puts three square "buttons" in the upper left corner of your browser screen - White for "Read Selected Text" - Green for "Automatically Read the Whole Page" - Red for "Stop Reading." It is that simple. You can also, as I do, put those three buttons into your Firefox Bookmark Bar, cleaning up the look of your window. Or you can access these functions by right clicking anywhere on the page or on any selected text.

"Click Speak Options" - in your Firefox tool menu - allows you to choose 5 diffeent speed settings and five different voice pitches. It uses "robotic sounding" synthesized speech. Click-Speak does not highlight individual words as they are read, but does highlight sentences when reading automatically and does scroll the page.

I use Click-Speak for short web reading. Newspaper articles, emails, information I'm looking up. I also use it extensively with email and Google docs to check text I have typed or dictated, since I am much more likely to catch missing words or badly structured sentences if I listen to my writing rather than try to re-read it.I really never mind the voice, though "actor read" audiobooks have spoiled me, and I'm unlikely to try to read much 'great literature' - say, books from the Literature Network, this way.

In schools, as I've mentioned in earlier messages here, I've seen this used in many ways. Some students simply highlight unfamiliar words and right click to "read selected text" so they can hear it - significantly improving their chances of recognizing that word the next time. Other students have used it for reading whole pages of digital social studies texts, etc. We have used it to support the independent editing of student writing with Google Docs and seen dramatic results.

Among adults, I personally know about 50 people who use this as their primary reading tool, at work and at home, including things like bills now digitally sent to them. It is highly effective in employment situations because it is perfect for short readings - such as instructions, supervisor messages, time schedules, etc. It can easily be added to the free AccessApps usb stick system, and can this be carried with you.

Microsoft Reader

This is a Windows only system (many free solutions are, it is much, much harder to build third party accessibility solutions for Apple O/S than for Microsoft or Linux), and it is not widely promoted, but I love it, and so do many of those who have tried it. Microsoft Reader gives you a 'book-looking' page on your computer, reads with word-by-word highlighting, allows you to place bookmarks, to highlight text, to take notes (linked to specific places in the text, which thus allows its use as a testing system), you can even draw pictures, and, if using it on a tablet PC, draw on the page itself (a feature that we're starting to see has interesting impacts on ASD users and some dyslexics).

MS Reader has a somewhat clunky install. You have to download the basic program - for Desktop or Laptop - or - for Tablet PC - then download the Text-to-Speech (TTS) software - then the Dictionaries (the Encarta if you want right-click word definition) - and finally, right-now for Word2000 or Word2003 only, the "RMR" tool, which puts a toolbar icon in your Microsoft Word which allows instant conversion of any text into the E-book format - Microsoft folks assure me that a Word2007 version is on the way.

MS Reader puts your books in the "MyLibrary" folder in your Windows "My Documents" folder. There are thousands of books already available in this format, all the classics are at the University of Virginia - but with Word2003 it is incredibly easy to put any text (with or without pictures) into this format, and even very young kids seem to love it (they can read over and over again even if mom or dad isn't available.).

It does have, again, the "robot voice," but you can control speed, the pitch, type size, make the page full-screen, have it speak all the controls (or not).

I use this for books. I use it for some academic papers. Many teachers use it for accessible testing (because it is free), and I use it for assessment at Voc/Rehab. In employment we've put employee handbooks, etc, into this form. We've put training manuals into this form. We've even put social service agency intake instructions into this form.

It is not very "flexible" - but it is a wonderful accessible system.

Adobe Reader 8 or 9

The speech function ("Read Out Loud") in Adobe Reader 8 or 9 has been great for me and others faced with the flood of Acrobat Docs. Even if we do not use it for reading vast amounts of text we use it to see if the article is worth the time, or to grab chunks of text in classes or meetings. To use Read Out Loud, opeen your document and go to the View Menu. Go down to "Read Out Loud" then choose "Activate Read Outloud." (this takes time on long documents, so it is something you want to do in advance) The go back to -View- Read Out Loud - and choose "read entire page" or "read to end of document" (from your cursor location), then "stop" when you are done. Free.

Dial2Do

Dial2Do allows non-readers to send text messages. For free. Sign up at http://www.dial2do.com/ and then call their number and speak your text and tell them where to send it. An essential employment tool for those who struggle with print, also for anyone who drives. (see SpinVox in the UK, also available with most US cellphone systems)

AbbyMe

AbbyMe is the reverse of Dial2Do, it allows "you" (or a boss) to text a voice message to a non-reader. For free. Sign up, or just use the service, at http://www.abbyme.com/ You type the message, AbbyMe calls the person and speaks it.

Mobile Phone Camera Text-To-Speech
Yes, Nokia and Kurzweil have an expensive and wonderful joint effort, a phone which takes a picture of a document and converts it to text which is then read aloud. It is great stuff but it also costs something north of $1,500 (US). There are, however, three free solutions:

Take a picture of a document or whiteboard with your 2mp or better camera phone, send it to ScanR, and for $3 or $5 a month, get accessible text sent back to your phone or email.

Or do the same with Qipit.

Or, for the more tech savvy, add TopOCR to your phone and do it yourself.

WYNN

Freedom Scientific's WYNN - is a full-featured literacy and study skills solution which (finally) made university possible for me (on try number 4) and which gets me through grad school. Because it completely changed my life when I found it early in 1997 I can't sound "neutral" about it, but it is a system I have used with four year olds and a system which has allowed - just in my personal experiences - hundreds of students to succeed in college and hundreds more in advanced post-secondary career training.

WYNN is not free. There are great deals on school network or multi-user purchases, but the retail price for the scanning version is almost $1,000. I refuse to say this is expensive. $1,000 is very little for, say, one student I worked with who has an "ink-on-paper" reading level of <1.0, but who also now holds a masters degree in history.

WYNN allows you to bring any text into it. You can import digital text or just paste it into a blank document. Or you can scan materials in from your scanner, or "virtually scan" in documents such as old, non-accessible, Acrobat docs. When you scan something in (real scan or virtual) you get a magical choice - you can see "text only" or you can see the page in "exact view" - exactly as it looks, which does great things for textbooks, for books with tables, diagrams, etc.

In either view, WYNN has "two-level highlighting," you see each word highlighted as it is read and you see the sentence, line, or paragraph highlighted as well. In either view you can right click for definitions, word spelling, or to insert notes by typing or speaking. No software anywhere does a better job of reading diagrams than WYNN which makes it a fabulous STEM solution and, in my experience, has made it the perfect solution for vocational training.

You can edit the text within documents (say, if scanning has made an error), but instructors can lock out that feature (or use the specific Test-Talker version). You can also write in WYNN with full word processing features including predictive spelling if you choose. It has bookmarks, highlighting, etc.

WYNN is incredibly flexible. Everything about the text - size, font, color, background colors, space between letters, words, lines, is hugely variable. Speed of speech, pitch, choices of much more sophisticated voices, are all massively variable. You can alter word pronunciation within a document (to, for example, speak names accurately).

WYNN also has a full Internet-Explorer-based web browser which gives you all the same choices.

The one "knock" on WYNN has been that its interface does not "very adult." It is icon-based. (You can choose all kinds of degrees of verbosity - whether instructions and button names, or even typing, is spoken by the software.) But I have found this to be an advantage. WYNN is a lifespan solution, simple enough (especially if you build a simplified "custom" toolbar) for pre-schoolers who don't have reading parents at home, and completely at home in universities, because of all the supports.

The WYNN voice is still - obviously - synthesized, but the sound is much more natural than that in either of the above. It does take some significant "play time" for users to make their choices among all the settings, but one can "set" those, and any computer (or network) can hold onto an almost unlimited group of user settings. I find that I have actually created more than one user profile for myself. I have "easier reading" settings, and "harder reading" settings for those arcane journal articles I read so often. The "harder" settings put fewer words on a line, and read a bit slower.

Of course there are many other choices, from Read-and-Write-Gold to Natural Reader, from the Reading Pen to the free WordTalk and DSpeech, but I hope this suggests a few places to start.

- Ira Socol

Learning to give up...

Siobhan.

I gave my class a group activity. Part of the assigned reading for the week had been a very small segment of Mark Haddon's brilliant book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. In the segment the narrator Christopher had mentioned his tutor, Siobhan.

So I put "Siobhan" up on the screen. "How is this pronounced?" I asked. "See-oh-ban" one student said. A number of others agreed. "Anyone disagree?" One woman raised her hand, "I think it's 'Shee-vahn,'" she offered. "That it is," I said. And now I turned back to those who had "sounded it out" incorrectly. "Imagine that I had come into class, pointed to you, and asked, "Tell us your view of Shee-vahn's attitude toward education?" You would have thought, "Who?" You would have been embarrassed. You would feel that the class was unfair."

Then I pointed out the obvious. Teachers do this to their students every day.

I continued. I gave them a series of Irish names (place and person) to sound out:
Baile Atha Cliath
Cobh
Aoife
Brighid
Comhghall
Cuchulainn
Dun Laoghaire
Laois
performing a simplified version of a simulation used by Florida State's Joseph Torgeson (who uses Hebrew).

Most of the students tried Baile Atha Cliath, none found their way to the pronunciation. One woman got Cobh by applying the lessons learned from Siobhan, but instead of encouraging the others this seemed to frustrate almost everyone else - they just could not see it. By the time we got to Comhghall, the entire class had given up, though one student, having been to Ireland, knew Dun Laoghaire, which brought looks of contempt from others not blessed with prior knowledge.

An unfair test? It's a different language after all, with different rules, the students couldn't be expected to be familiar, it's very hard.

Which, of course, was my point. It is very hard. And if we do not use every means possible to help students build their sight-word vocabulary, if we do not help level the field for those lacking certain resources (parents with knowledge, parents who can afford to supply resources, native skills for learning these tasks, etc), we make the teaching of reading not just something extremely difficult, but incredibly unfair.

This is why text-to-speech operating in a fully interactive, web-linked environment, is so essential from the very start of the reading process. It is incredibly important to connect spelling and the visualization of the word to the sound, and the sound to the meaning, because if we don't, reading becomes a worthless activity of assembling nonsense. And people do not put much effort into worthless activities. Instead, they give up.

So, stop asking, "When is it appropriate to 'give up' and give a student text-to-speech software?" Text-to-Speech software is an essential tool at every level of building reading skills. It is an essential tool for almost every student, making new vocabulary accessible, and helping students through the bizarre maze that is English language spelling.



- Ira Socol

Click-Speak is Back!

A quick post to say that Click-Speak is back! It now works with Firefox 3.
http://clickspeak.clcworld.net/downloads.html
Now you can upgrade.

Regular post below...

When to "give up"

I get asked this question a lot. Most recently by commenter Vera on my post about Peter Høeg’s book Borderliners. "...at what point (what age and what reading level) do you think a teacher should give up trying to teach a struggling student to break the alphabetic code and instead have the student rely on technology to read to them for the rest of their lives?"

Let me make it a metaphor. "At what point should a teacher give up on trying to teach a struggling student to walk everywhere and instead have that student rely on technology to move them for the rest of their lives?"

I do this switch not to mock anyone, or to sound derisive, but to point out that we often forget that alphabetic decoding is one skill for the purpose of getting recorded information into our heads. It is a convenient, effective skill that is very helpful to most people, but it is just one skill in a whole "toolbelt" of skills we need, and depending on the person it will be used more or less or not at all.

Just as walking is one way for a human to move from place to place. There are lots of ways, and there are lots technologies that can (a) replace walking (cars, elevators, wheelchairs, bicycles, trains, buses, airplanes), (b) enhance walking (canes, walkers, skateboards, skates), or (c) combine with walking (escalators, moving sidewalks - even ramps and stairways). And if we are good "teachers" we help our students to pick the most effective way to move based on lots of criteria, beginning with the students' individual needs and capabilities.

For accessing information, "literacy" includes decoding voices as well as alphabetic texts, comprehending images, understanding films and television, making sense of graphs and charts and music. It involves the comprehension of lots of sensory inputs - aided and unaided by technology, delivered in person or delivered by technology (and books, print, the alphabet are all technologies).

So we teach what is appropriate and what is helpful. For your typical two-year-old we don't waste energy on alphabetics but they still take in a great deal of information - via sound and sight and touch and taste and smell, and they learn what a McDonald's sign looks like and what "home" looks like and what books sound like and what an electrical outlet looks like and maybe even about dangerous smells. But we don't say, "you can't eat and you can't be safe until you know how to read."

Just as, if we have a child who is learning to walk or who is having a problem with walking we don't leave them in the middle of a room. Sure, we keep helping them work on walking, we might even bring in technology such as an infant walker, but we also provide alternatives that make it possible for them to get from here to there. We don't leave them in the field - Christina style - and hope that they can drag themselves around.

So, there is no timeline. as long as we think a person can possibly learn to walk we keep the efforts up, we keep going with physical therapy. But we also get them a wheelchair or a walker if that's what they need. And even if they can walk, but, let's say it is hard for them to walk five miles to school, we drive them or provide a bus. We do that even if they live a half mile from school and the walk might be difficult. And we do that even if the walk wouldn't always be difficult - if it would be fine if it was a nice day and they had little to carry but today it is - raining, snowing, freezing, way too hot, or they have to lug in their science project.

With reading, we need to realize that we cannot lose by embracing technology. Text-to-Speech, especially the best Text-to-Speech systems which highlight the word being read (be they paid like WYNN, Read-and-Write, or Kurzweil 3000 or free like WordTalk or Microsoft Reader), can only improve sight-word recognition while demonstrating the value of reading. Text-to-Speech cannot hurt but it can help, and it can surely provide access - and providing access - proving that there is something in those books that the student will want or need - might be the only way to provide students with an incentive to keep trying to decode. After all, if you had no interest in moving from the couch, you wouldn't learn to walk either.

At some point, of course, you let your student judge his or her own progress. Reading via technology is slower - in most cases - than reading via ink-on-paper. It is typically more cumbersome as well. But if the student is not gaining on the decoding in a way which promises its utility, it is OK for them to stop, to use that time differently. To get better at using the technology which is useful, and to get better at making technology choices.

Want another metaphor? My father always told the story of how he went into the Army needing glasses. But after just a year of commanding a tank - and doing all that artillery spotting (essentially doing eye exercises all day) - he didn't need glasses at all. If the child in front of you needed glasses, but might benefit from eye exercises, you'd provide the technology (those eyeglasses) and you'd encourage the exercises. You probably wouldn't take the glasses away from her because she wasn't doing well enough with her exercises. And if, after, two or three years of doing the exercises there was no functional difference in her vision, you'd accept the fact that technology was the primary solution.

Because I've dealt with adult learners a great deal in my work, I meet hundreds of people who have worked on decoding for decades, with no appreciable result. Sometimes, whole years of their education have been devoted to doing nothing but working on decoding. And while they've been doing that they've never learned one thing that was in all those precious books, and they've never learned the information acquisition skills they need to survive. Do you doubt that? Go down to any employment centre in the US or UK, and you will find the place filled with these victims of an education system which refuses to "give up."

The solution, the way decisions are best made, lies in empowering teachers and students to make choices. Any systemic or institutional decision made for "all kids" or "most kids" or based on quantitative research will - guaranteed - be the wrong decision. Any decision based in "miracle narratives" ("I was blind but after taking these vitamins I can see!") will be at least as bad. We are not discussing "the average child" or "the average dyslexic" (neither of which exists), nor are we going to base policy on the exceptional case.

Instead, we will "solve this" by making individual decisions with individual students. We will help students get to the reading technologies they need, and we will stop forcing formulas on humans.

Because some school administrators can run marathons, and others need to drive to the shop six blocks from home, and a few might need some technological help to get from the kitchen to the bedroom. And the students in their schools? They are every bit as diverse in their needs.

- Ira Socol

Blog Round Up - Ewan McIntosh on Unleashing the Tribe. Unlocking the Classroom on Deficit Theory. Lon Thornburg on "the one." Prone to Laughter on student failure.

The Drool Room by Ira David Socol, a novel in stories that has - as at least one focus - life within "Special Education in America" - is now available from the River Foyle Press through lulu.com

US $16.00 on Amazon

New! Digital version available through lulu.com

Look Inside This Book

Toolbelt Theory for Everyone

How will your students communicate when they leave school? How will they gather information? How will they say what they need to say?

How will they make phone calls? Leave messages? Read books? Do research? Tell their boss they are stuck in traffic coming back from that meeting? How will they get their news? Check their bank records? Pay their mortgage? Arrange their vacation? Sell their services? Sell possessions they no longer want? How will they learn the things they need to learn? How will they tell the stories that they need - or want - to tell?

Schools - in the old days - were interested in these kinds of skills. Schools taught things like how to read books, how to read newspapers, how to read stock tables. They taught how to find books in the library and how to write business letters. Even (sometimes) how to write cheques, read classified advertisements, compare prices in display ads, address envelopes, read maps, type, write legibly. Yes, maybe some of this training came to me because I wasn't always in those "top" classes, but I think most students received significant trainings in the communications technology of the age. At least the "apparent" technologies of the age.

But in the time when most of our teachers, school administrators, government officials, and legislators went to school, little changed on the "apparent" side of ICT. Newspapers and phone calls may have been produced in radically different ways in 1990 as opposed to 1960, but the end-user did not see much difference. So these people have been trained in complacence. They grew up in a world of little technological change (as it touched them) and they now resent change. They're often still angry that we want them to be able to program their VCRs, and VCRs are almost history.

So they don't want to teach about tools. The tools they know are gone, chucked to the curb with the card catalogues and 8-track players. The tools which are essential now - the tools which are essential everywhere outside of a school building - are outside of their realm of knowledge. This is why school today is so divorced from any reality.

Tools matter though. They are the most basic thing about being human.

We are many things - human beings - but above all we are tool users. Unlike most other species, and far more than any other species, we have defined ourselves by crafting tools which allow us to control our environment and overcome our limitations. Can't run as fast as a horse? Climb on the horse. Can't fight one-on-one with a Mammoth? Invent the spear. Can't remember everything you need? Create writing.

So tools matter. They matter most for those who lack the highest capabilities - a very old person and a very young person needs a car more often than a 20-year-old might - a short person needs a ladder more often than a tall person - a weak swimmer needs a boat when a great swimmer might not - but still, tools matter for everyone.

And everyone needs a properly equipped Toolbelt to get through life.

Toolbelt Theory

The thing about toolbelts though, is that no two people ever really need the same one. When I worked at one university and part of my job was being a cable stringing "tech monkey," three of us all began with the same toolbelt. Scissors, wire strippers, pliers, wire cutters, punch-down tool, screwdrivers. Within a week all three toolbelts were different. Within a month, very different. Screwdriver choices varied. Pliers were added and subtracted. I added a fish tool for dragging cables through walls, another added a device from Fluke that read network connections, and then I grabbed a quick-check tool that confirmed my wiring order because, you know, I'm not great with order. The belts changed as well. One was worn as a belt, mine was almost always slung across my shoulder. When I was a police officer, I watched a similar process operate on the gunbelts of cops coming out of the academy. They began all the same, and ended up as radically different collections of tools. Of course those tools changed as the world and technology changed. Drop pouches for revolver ammunition vanished and clip holders for automatics appeared, as one example. Then we needed to carry latex gloves. Flashlights changed. Radios changed. Mace came and went. Etc.

So the trick to tool use is to learn to evaluate tasks and environments and your skills and the tools themselves as they change and determine what works best for you. I call this the "TEST" - Task - Environment - Skills - Tools, a specifically ordered reframing of Joy Zabala's "SETT" protocol. A specifically ordered reframing designed for self-determination.

"Disability" has little or nothing to do with this. Everybody needs this skill set. Imagine your eyes getting weaker as you are faced with graduate school reading or long-distance truck driving - and you've never heard of eyeglasses and have no idea where to go for help. Imagine needing to rip up an old driveway and having never heard of a jackhammer, nor had any idea of how to get one. Imagine needing to get to your home's roof with nothing but a step ladder. Imagine needing a book but being unable to use a map in order to find the library.

In every case you need the TEST idea. Whether you are choosing the right saw to cut that piece of wood in that location or whether you are trying to find the map that will get you to the hospital you need in Paris or whether you are trying to find the academic article you need.

You need to know what you need to do (the specific task: cut 20 sheets of plywood or cut down a Christmas tree, find a book to buy or find a book to borrow). You need to know where you will be doing this (the specific environment: in a forest, in a workshop, in a town with a university library and four bookstores, in a place with neither). You need to know your own capabilities (your skill set: I am strong enough to cut down a tree with a hand saw, I am experienced enough that I can cut a straight line with a hand-held circular saw, I can walk to the bookstore, I know the Dewey Decimal System). And you need to know what is available to you to help you, and how to use those devices (your toolbelt: My neighbor has a chain saw, I can rent a table saw, a bus will get me to the bookstore, if I go online and reserve that library book it will be waiting for me at the counter).

This all sounds logical, but it is hardly automatic.

Choosing the right tool takes knowledge of yourself and the tools which are available. It takes practice in assessing the task and the environment. And in school we don't help students toward any of that. In school we prescribe methods and we require specific tools (the dreaded middle school planner, just as one particularly stupid example - the teacher-determined notebook style as another). In school we tell students what they can and can't do and we get very nervous when they really try to analyse their environment.

And on top of this, the tools most schools are devoted to are antiques which serve few functions anywhere outside of school. It is as if you were learning to build homes but were allowed to use only tools invented before 1940. You'd be close to unemployable when you finished that training.

Letting the world in

The only way to allow students to assemble this essential toolbelt for information and communication is to to throw open your classroom and let the world in. How will your students know which calendar works for them - the one on their phone, Google Calendar with SMS appointment texting, Microsoft Outlook, or any of a dozen paper systems unless you allow them to try them out? How will your students know whether they 'get' a novel better by listening to an audiobook, or reading it on paper, or using text-to-speech, if you don't let them experience all repeatedly and help them decide? Will their choice be the same when they are reading history texts? Math texts? Again, how will they know? How will they know which is the best way for them to write, by hand (either on paper or on a tablet system), by keyboard (and which keyboard), or by voice, if they do not get to try out all the kinds of writing they need to do with all these tools?

They won't know. And you - the school, the teacher, the education system - will have deprived them of these essential skills.

It matters for all students, of course, but- as always - if you are "rich, white, and normal" it matters a bit less. You will have fewer needs, your parents will buy you more supports, you will be surrounded in your daily life by sophisticated tool users. So not bringing Toolbelt Theory into your classroom just exacerbates inequity - yes, of course - as school does in most things.

Real differences in survival

This is not a matter of success in school. This is a matter of human survival. A couple of years ago I sat in a resource room in a suburban American high school and watched an 18-year-old high school senior try to fill out a job application. His writing was "not good." You might be able to make out most of the capital letters, but the small letters were just meaningless squiggles. I asked him, "Why don't you just print that all-caps?" But before he could answer the teacher interrupted. "We've been working on his small letters for four years now," she said, "we want him to keep trying."

Four years my friends. Well, surely longer. I bet they've been torturing this child since he was five-years-old.

I started to ask whether the teacher thought he'd get a job with an application that looked this way, but there was no real point. School is about school. It is hardly ever about anything else. So instead I grabbed a blank copy of the same application, I pulled my laptop and my Canon LiDE scanner out of my backpack. I scanned the application in, converted it to a "form fillable" Adobe Acrobat document, and told him to type his information in.

He was a slow typist. A painfully slow typist. And yet, his typing was about three times as fast as his handwriting, and, in the end there was a perfectly completed job application.

Might speech recognition help? Or typing on a smartphone keyboard with iTap word prediction? That would have been too much to suggest. The school district had just built a massive brand new high school. All the bells and whistles, yet, number of accessible computers in the district? Zero. Zero, despite three meeting I'd had with the school superintendent, two days spent with district's large tech staff, and meetings with special education teachers and school psychologists and social workers. Zero. They simply do not care.

So their students graduate not knowing how to fill out a job application. They graduate not knowing how to access library resources online. They graduate not knowing how to stay on schedule, or how to listen to their own writing if no one is around to help them edit, or how to send an appropriate text from their phone to an employer or professor if they are running late, or how to collaborate with other writers on a Google Document, or how to most effectively use spellcheck and auto-correct in Microsoft Word, or even - and I see this every day - how to search online for a job or a university course.

They simply do not know how to function in the 21st Century. They will not understand the tools that they need to function. And unless they are lucky, they will be doomed to a life on the margins.

When I wrote "Not Getting to Universal Design" a number of people objected to my thought that encouraging students to fail was a deliberate thing. I don't think that I really suggested that individual teachers deliberately sought student failure. It happens - I can think of a number of university faculty I have known - but that is rare. It is the system - the system which includes the training of teachers and the design of schools - which has, in my opinion, made the decision to encourage the failure of the majority of students. If they have not done that consciously, my only other thought is that they are unbelievably stupid, because they do the "wrong" things continuously. But, I don't think they are stupid because, well, somehow, their kids seem to do OK. Of course their kids have their laptops and iPhones and Blackberries and Wii. Their parents listen to audiobooks and dictate messages for others to type, and get emails on their phones all day long. They see Google Maps and GPS in use every day. Hell, daddy can even talk to their new Lincoln and tell it what to do.

Now all those education leaders can probably quote that old saying, "Give a man a fish and he'll eat for day. Teach a man to fish and he'll eat for the rest of his life." So I wonder, why won't we teach our students how to fish? And why won't we help them to learn the best way for each of them to fish?

- Ira Socol

The Drool Room by Ira David Socol, a novel in stories that has - as at least one focus - life within "Special Education in America" - is now available from the River Foyle Press through lulu.com

US $16.00 on Amazon

New! Digital version available through lulu.com

Look Inside This Book