The Sound of One Hand Typing

Working in the the "assistive technology" field you find yourself on some strange missions. Once, a colleague and I spent an hour searching a used office furniture warehouse, turning every office chair upside down. We were looking, as we explained to the confused staff, for a "left-handed chair."

Yes, they laughed.

But a left-handed chair is a real thing. It is a chair which can be adjusted (height-wise, etc) with the left hand - an important thing when your client is a young man who works in CAD design and has lost all use of his right arm in an accident.

We found the chair, but we needed other things. An appropriately left-handed mouse device. A numeric keypad we could move to the left side of the keyboard, and a keyboard where he could type efficiently with just one hand.

In other case, helping a hotel pool maintainer, also without the use of his right arm, move up to desk clerk, we needed to find a left-hand typing solution. In this case, unlike the one above, this would be a multi-user computer. At busy times up to three or four employees would jump on the same keyboard in quick alternation.

There are lots of reasons to seek keyboard alternatives. First, text entry systems should be chosen for comfort and function, and not left to the crap delivered with most computers. Second, people have unique needs and preferences. Third, my guess is that more people are injured by their keyboards than by any other workplace device: The way the human wrist is forced to bend to type on a flat-straight keyboard buts terrible pressure on certain arteries, causing permanent pain. Fourth, we already know that many of us now type faster on phone keypads than we do on the 'old' keyboards. Finally, not everyone has two working hands.

So when a question about one-handed keyboards recently arrived on a list serve, I watched the options offered with great interest. So what if this question comes to you?

As is often the case, Charlie Danger is a good place to start. He begins with the free re-mapping of your Windows computer keyboard with downloads from Microsoft.

I've had great experiences with the Half Keyboard (or here), a mini-keyboard that merges the left and right halves of the traditional QWERTY board into a 'single half.'

The Half QWERTY (or here), though much more expensive, has the advantage of functioning as a 'regular' keyboard when multiple users are on the same machine. (This proved the perfect solution for a one-handed hotel desk clerk I worked with - there just was not good room for multiple keyboards.)

The Frogpad (or here), which began the conversation, is great for those who can learn it, and who have the necessary multi-finger dexterity.

OATS has a couple of great solutions, the "phone keypad" based Dkey with phone-type predictive spelling, and the gesture driven Qwriting. Both completely free, of course.

Tapir is another free phone keypad based solution.

For a physical version of the phone keypad, the Cre8txt system is a wonderful solution. "[T]his device [claims the website] captures the writing skills that so many young people have developed themselves using their mobile phones. It probably isn't going to surprise you to know that most young people can touch type at phenomenal speeds without even looking at their mobile phone."

And just to suggest - Speech Recognition, either Dragon or within Windows Vista (or simply using Dial2Do) - is always another solution.

The trick is - as always - that we have a flood of choices. Choices we hardly ever see in workplaces and never see when schools begin to teach "keyboarding." Choices which enable rather than disable or frustrate.

The way you "type" simply does not matter. The words, the ideas, the communication - that's what matters. Using two hands, or one, or none.

- Ira Socol

Re-imagining Ability

When I taught my class last semester (“Special Education Students in the Regular Education Classroom”), I ran across a roadblock. The future “Special Education” teachers who filled the room clearly saw a bright line between “able” and “disabled.”

This is not surprising. The field they are entering exists because of this perceived difference.

Early in the course I suggested that I could “disable” any of them. That I might speak in a language they did not know (I asked them to read and pronounce Irish, for example), or that I might speak using words they did not know, using, for example, British educational jargon rather than American, or that I might ask them to choreograph and perform an interpretive dance as their second paper.

For some these concepts got the point across, but not for most.

So I decided to try to get them to “re-imagine ability.” I gave them a series of possible “tasks” and asked what “assistive technologies” they would need to complete them. One was getting from a neighborhood on the Atlantic coast of Brooklyn to Midtown Manhattan (near the United Nations). Another was bringing a refrigerator from a store into their kitchen. A third was getting from the street to a meeting on the 88th floor of the Sears Tower.

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Many of the students responded with comments about maps and map reading, about reading directories, about measuring doorways, but none understood the basic concept. They were all completely unable to perform any of these tasks without massive technological and human assistance. And the amount of assistance needed varied greatly across the student group.

But I pointed out to them even those they probably at least needed some kind of shoes/clothing to cross Brooklyn, at least some kind of assistance or at least a strongly woven cloth strap to carry the refrigerator, and if not the elevator, at least the stairs (a vary early assistive technology) to climb the Sears Tower. Not to mention a bridge to avoid swimming more than half a mile across a wild tidal strait in New York, or a truck for the refrigerator. Some, I'm sure, could have swum the river. At least two or three might have been able to, given enough time, have jumped and pulled and climbed up 88 floors without stairs. One guy might have been able to lug at least a fairly small (full-size) refrigerator from Sears to his house, and yet...

If they needed help would they be "disabled"? And what of the other four dozen?

This began to work on their thinking. Yet, every day they spend in our College of Education reinforces their traditional thinking about “ability.” “Ability” is everything “they” (the kind of students who go into education) do well. Reading, writing, speaking like a middle class protestant white person, answering questions with definite answers. “Ability” is not being able to attend to 25 things in a simultaneous mode, or entertain a class with jokes and stunts, or dream up really exciting fictional worlds, or a million other things that kids can be great at. No one is sent to the Resource Room because they throw a ball badly or can’t tune a violin or are unable to navigate an urban street scene effectively. I need special permission to turn some paper documents into electronic versions but the Dean of the College prints out her emails for reading without having to declare herself “disabled.

I'm not suggesting that individual differences in capabilities don't exist. I'm not very tall. That makes some things more difficult than if I was. Tom Shakespeare is right. It is not "all social" - we are born different, we end up different. Some of us struggle with things in ways others don't. Reading sucks for me. I wish it was easier. This month so does walking. And I sure wish that was easier. Still, I can fix my own computer (some of the time), and if you can not, do you need a government affixed label?

Back in May 2008 (on "Blogging Against Disablism Day") I suggested on my blog that we not allow anyone into an elevator without a note from a doctor, that we require that people with eyeglasses get special permission to use them, that we not let anyone ever convert digital text to paper, just to expand the realm of disability. Because as long as we think “disability” exists, it does indeed exist, and it limits who we are and what we can achieve

- Ira Socol

Hope and Commitment...

...sure beats fear, division, and the belief that government cannot do anything.It is a day to believe in the possibilities of our shared future.

Why "Standards-Based" and "Accountability" are dirty words

Who wants to be against standards in education? Who wants to be against "accountability"?

I do. And you should want to be as well. Especially now, as a new American administration wrestles with altering No Child Left Behind, and the rest of the world tries to meet the expectations in the United Nations Article 24 on the Rights of Disabled Persons.

Really? Don't I get angry when a state like Texas lies about it's graduation rates and discipline and gives fourth grade reading tests to twelfth graders to make their scores look better? Don't I despise bad teaching? Don't I have high expectations for every child? Don't I want schools to be properly equipped, and staffed with well-trained professionals, and operated with diverse and advanced curricula?

Yes I do. But, none of that is what these words mean in our political contexts.

When people say, "standards-based" they mean that their goal for school is to homogenize students. The "standards" - after all - are nothing but a set of metrics by which an industrial product is rated. "Accountability"? That's how well teachers homogenize their students.

And these two awful, anti-human strategies lie not just behind Teach for America and Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein and KIPP Academies, they lie behind every bit of the legislation known as NCLB, and far too much of the exam-based British education system.

As long as all students are expected to have, essentially, the same "outcomes," we will never have "Universal Design," we will never have "Inclusion," we will never have actual "equality," because equality requires that we accept and embrace human diversity in ways "schools" just cannot imagine.

Not every human can move the same way, hear the same way, see the same way - we sort of know this though we really struggle building classrooms which treat even these differences with any level of equality. What "we" can't quite wrap our minds around is that not every human will ever learn the same way, read the same way, write the same way, discover Argentina on a map the same way, or understand time the same way, and that every time we create a "norm" in our classroom we make those who are somehow "away from the norm" somewhat less than fully human.

And every time we speak of "age appropriate goals," "grade level expectations," and "academic standards" we force students into a two-tier system. We create disability, and rob people of their human right to develop in the way that serves them best.

So when President-Elect Obama's future Education Secretary Arne Duncan calls education, “the civil rights issue of our generation,” he is absolutely right, but I'm not sure that he understands that this civil right begins with individually appropriate educational support for every student, and not the "evidence based practice" which is code for treating education the way a steel mill treats iron ore.

Inclusion, real inclusion, means abandoning our notions of "standards," of "accountability," of "evidence." It means abandoning many of our basic conceptions of what schools look like. It means embracing the individual learner and not the group.

So what would I put in a new national education law? I might start with asking every teacher and administrator to embrace the "Whys" on Inclusive Education as stated by the Centre for Studies on Inclusive Education.

Why Inclusive Education?
- Valuing some people more than others is unethical.
- Maintaining barriers to some students’ participation in the cultures, curricula and communities of local schools is unacceptable.
- Preserving school cultures, policies and practices that are non-responsive to the diversity of learners perpetuates inequalities.
- Thinking that inclusion mostly concerns disabled learners is misleading.
- Thinking that school changes made for some will not benefit others is short-sighted.
- Viewing differences between students as problems to be overcome is disrespectful and limits learning opportunities.
- Segregated schooling for disabled learners violates their basic human right to education without discrimination.
- Improving schools only for students is disrespectful to all other stakeholders.
- Identifying academic achievement as the main aim of schooling detracts from the importance of personal and moral development.
- Isolating schools and local communities from one another deprives everyone of enriching experiences.
- Perceiving inclusion in education as a separate issue from inclusion in society is illogical.

Then I might make some specific regulations. Yes, regulations. This my own "ECRE" - Every Child has a Right to Education:

1. Every student will have an Individualized Education Plan which considers the best ways, times, and places for that student's learning needs.
2. Every student will have individualized curriculum and individualized assessment strategies based at the intersection of current individual capabilities/needs and lifespan needs.
3. Every student will be placed with faculty members most appropriate for their learning needs.
4. Grade level or age will never be used as a primary guide to a student's learning needs - neither holding a student back nor making impossible demands.
5. Student interest will always be considered as a gateway to curricular knowledge.
6. Subjects will be integrated, learning will not be considered an isolated academic exercise.
7. All staff will be fully trained in human learning diversity.
8. Every student will have appropriate technology available to allow maximum participation in curriculum and maximum access to their own learning and communication opportunities.
9. All curricular materials and all school information will be available in formats which may be altered to meet specific student learning needs.
10. Every student has a right to group instruction and individual instruction as appropriate - technology which allows for individual instruction will always be available.
11. Every student has the right to fully participate in the academic, extra-curricular, and social activities of the school.
12. Schools will be judged according the individual growth of their students, and their ability to meet the widest range of student needs. Aggregated scores or grades will not be collected.

And it is time to stop supporting educational research which treats students as if they were a mass production item. Instead, we need to support research into tools, techniques, and strategies which support individual human learners. This would be a 180 degree switch from the Bush Regime's research agenda.

So, if we're to make 2009 the Year of Universal Access, we need to begin by saying "no." "No" to the catchwords of this past educational decade. And we need to start saying "yes." "Yes" to students as individuals. Not labels, not groups, not cohorts, but humans.

- Ira Socol

artwork Inclusion/Exclusion by Michael Hager of Washburn University (c) Michael Hager

Accepting Technological Change

Nicholas Negroponte is many things, good and bad I am sure, but one thing he may not be becomes obvious from the following quote: He may not be someone who can see beyond his own understanding of technology.

"Learning is many things," Negroponte says in GOOD Magazine, "one of which includes reading. Another is the ability to control, create, and collaborate. Books have sizes for reasons. Keyboards have a size, too. Surely we are not going to force children into literary expression with their thumbs. A laptop is a window, a contemplative experience, nomadic not mobile. The cell phone is a point of contact, a burst medium, interruptive in both good and bad sense. It is a lifeline in any sense. The device itself, however, should not be confused with connectivity. Laptops need to be connected too. Would I want an unconnected laptop over a connected cell phone. No. No more than I would want to be driving a car with brakes and no steering wheel."

"Books have sizes for reasons"? "Keyboards have a size, too"? Could these statements somehow be true?

There was a time when "books" were carved into stone tablets. Later they came as scrolls on papyrus or a very thin lambskin, written without punctuation or even space between words. At some point they became large leather bound "books." Or small pamphlets. Or the original "pocket" poetry books young swains carried with them on walks in the fields with the lassies they romanced. Mass transit created the desire for the contemporary paperback (something to read on the streetcar, el, underground, subway) and the "tabloid" ("Berliner") size newspaper (because turning pages of The New York Times on a rush hour Lexington Avenue Express train requires an advanced degree in origami). Along the way, each new variation seems to have opened reading up to more people.

Keyboards have, in their short lifespan, moved from steeply-sloped narrow configurations to the flat, wide keyboard I'm typing on now, to the semi-QWERTY of my Blackberry Pearl to the miniaturized virtual form of the iPhone or Storm. How we use them has changed as well. "Typing" - as we know it, that is "touch typing" - was created for secretaries to quickly convert the boss's handwriting, or shorthand, into a "typed" form. If you notice, those who "write" - that is create - on a keyboard are often much less exact in their typing techniques and often do need to look at the keys. Now half the population types with their thumbs. We type different things than we used to, in different ways, on keyboards unthinkable just a few years ago, with amazing new technologies (predictive spelling). Again, the more the "fixed" notion Negroponte sees has faded, the greater the variety of people who can join the party.

Negroponte is committed to a "form" for his technology. Yes, he's invested years in the OLPC computer, and yes, it is a brilliant thing. But while he and his team were hidden away working, technology changed, and the mobile phone grew up, and whole new visions and understandings of how information flows developed.

We do this all the time. We mistake the thing for the reason. The "reason" in Negroponte's case is global access to information, communication, and education. But the "thing" is a computer form that he is comfortable with - even if the mobile phone that every family already needs might be the more logical system for the users he wants to help.

The "reason" behind learning to read in school is to offer students a gateway to the information and culture they need. The "thing" is the bound book with alphabetic characters printed in ink - even if other delivery systems have arrived which might make more sense for many students.

The "reason" behind learning to write in school is communication and creativity... well, I could go on and on.

Technological change is difficult. A professor of mine commented last semester on his confusion when he collects student phone numbers these days. "There used to be just two or three area codes in a class," he said, "but now your phone number is more likely to say where you came from than where you live now." There are many people still confused by the fact that more than half of our phone calls are made to people, not places. Or that text messages have replaced many calls, and have morphed into something different entirely.



A New York Times article on the "death" of the Polaroid Photograph brought these issues together for me. As did Karen Janowski's blog on Obsolescence.

Information technologies only last until a new technology supersedes it. The first cave painting probably dealt a blow to those early human artists who drew only in the dirt, and it has progressed from there.

So, it might seem odd to someone under, say, 25, but there was a time when people really wanted to see their photographs right away, not wait 3 to 5 days after dropping them at the drugstore. So Edwin Land developed the Polaroid, and it changed many things - from parties to asking for that part at the hardware store (now you carried a photo of the broken plumbing piece in) to, yes, amateur pornography (which no longer had to be placed in the hands of that kid in the FotoMat). Whole art forms sprang up in response.

Polaroid never displaced traditional film because it couldn't do "everything" film did. Duplicates and enlargements were expensive and difficult. There were limits to the cameras. We might think of this in the same way we'd say that cassette audio books couldn't fully replace print. But digital photography swept away both "film" and Polaroid - and most photo stores - because it did everything both could do. Not at first, of course. I remember my first Sony digital camera which recorded its images on a floppy disk. Great Zeiss lens, but... you understand. Beyond that, digital photos have changed, fundamentally, the way we take, see, and share photographs.

Some may miss film, darkrooms, all those photo albums and shoe boxes crammed with pictures. That's legit. Still, if we "bring pictures" to a share at a family gathering these days we are most likely to plug the camera into the TV and show them, or we have already posted them on Flickr. The experience is different. It has changed. But it is not necessarily worse.

Photography no longer means "film" or silver oxide or physical prints. You no longer have to sweat for years with an enlarger and trays of chemicals to be a photographer. Hell, now you can be a photographer with nothing more than that phone you've got. But this has not destroyed photography, nor has it invalidated the work of those old artists of film. If anything, it expands the audience and opportunity.

The same is happening with "written" communication. It too is becoming unbundled from the "thing." And this bothers people. Someone in a class last semester said that listening to a book was not as legitimate a way to read because it was "easier." The National Endowment for the Arts still doesn't think you are reading right now - whether you are using your ears or your eyes to take this text in. Others talk of the smell of paper, of holding the book, in ways reminiscent of those lamenting the vanished photographic darkroom.

And Nicholas Negroponte thinks a phone is just a phone, and won't give up the specific size and weight of his laptop computer. And that writing with thumbs is somehow not "writing" but typing on a QWERTY keyboard is.

But the world keeps spinning. And it is essential - in this Year of Universal Access - to remember the reasons why we want children to read, to write, to listen, to see, to understand. And for us to focus on giving them those operational, comprehension, and analytical skills they'll need to work with the flow of information coming their way. And then we have to prepare them for a world in which the delivery and interactive systems for that information will be ever changing, and ever expanding, so that they can grow up into learners able to make the best decisions for themselves - given the world they will live in.

Technologies change. Yes, they even change reading. That's all right. Reading is something apart from the technology. Helen Keller read one way. I read another. You might read a third way. Who knows what your students will do.

- Ira Socol
who is finally starting to recover. thanks.

2009: The Year of Universal Access - Part Two

"But this vision works only if experience — we’re back to that word again — is redefined. If what you do, and think, and produce, and change all count — even if none of your activities take place in an office, where you enjoy a title and a salary. Hillary Clinton made that argument when she ran for the Senate. Voters agreed that a multifaceted life filled with experiences, if not experience, made her ready to serve. Barack Obama presented a version of that argument as well. His was hardly the traditional résumé of a presidential candidate, but his potential employers (the voters) gave him credit for a fierce intelligence and lessons learned from life."

Lisa Belkin was talking about the Senatorial hopes of Carolyn Kennedy when she wrote this in The New York Times last week, but her argument represents the second essential part of making 2009 The Year of Universal Access. Belkin, making a woman's rights argument, and speaking about lawyers, corporate execs, and other 'white collar/white female' situations, frames it this way:

"In the past, you would start at Point A — the mailroom, the associate level, the boss’s assistant — keep your head down and your nose to the grindstone and make your way toward Point B, putting in hours and getting your ticket punched along the way. A few people jumped the line because of luck or connections. (Those who aspire to serve in Congress sometimes “pay their dues” by playing for the N.B.A. or the N.F.L. or starring on “The Love Boat,” which are all less relevant qualifications for the job than financing city schools.) But there was a recognized path, a defined progression, a road map from here to there."

In my last post I wrote about the technology and the technological rules which must be present if we are to have Universal Access. But as Lisa Parisi commented there, those technologies must be available as needed, as desired, and without the labelling of students.

Belkin says, "If what you do, and think, and produce, and change all count, even if none of your activities take place in an office." I'll say it differently: "If what you do, and think, and produce, and change all count, even if none of your activities occur in the classroom, or are accomplished in ways prescribed by your schools or teachers." This is the fundamental change we need. This is the fundamental switch which our contemporary technologies have allowed us to make. And this the fundamental alteration in attitude which allows us to take advantage of all the access technologies in the last post to create real liberation education.

I decode on a below first grade level, but I've read Ulysses three times and a hundred critical writings about Ulysses. I can not write with a pen on paper. It is either so slow that I can not record my own thoughts or it is completely unintelligible, but I have written books. There are a million tests out there that I - if forced to 'take' them in 'traditional' ways - would fail, yet those tests would keep me out of jobs that there is no doubt I could do, and do well.

So in this Year of Universal Access we have to break through the barriers of 'labellism,' of 'credentialism' that is really just a hazing process used by those in power, and through that biggest barrier in education - the privileging of the instructor's preferred method.

Labelling: It accomplishes nothing. It is always arbitrary. It is always destructive. It is aways limiting of legitimate human choice. Which is why we don't call those wearing eyeglasses "special needs." And why we don't send those who throw badly to remedial classes while other students get to visit the library. And why we don't tell those who can not sight read and perform symphonic music that they can not graduate from high school. And why we let just about anyone take elevators in tall buildings - not just those who have documentation proving that they can not climb stairs. Students need to be shown the tools available, and they should be helped in learning how to pick the best tool for their specific situation.

Credentiallism: There is nothing wrong with asking someone to prove that they can perform a job. There is something very wrong when people are told that there is only one narrow path to that job. Telling a student that he/she can't do sixth grade science because he/she reads at a first grade level is a classic example of credentiallism run amuck, as is requiring "good" handwriting when the assignment is to tell a story or prove knowlege. This goes all the way up. If I can prove my unique level of knowledge, the formatting of my PhD thesis is just nonsensical credentiallism.

Method Privilege: So much of school is about method, not knowledge gain. It makes no difference whether I've read Ulysses in ink, or via audiobook, or via computer file. But almost every third grade teacher thinks this makes a huge difference. There is no study anywhere which suggests that decoding alphabetic symbols of ink on paper is the world's best method of transmitting information. Likewise, a handwritten note is only superior to a text message if the receiver chooses to think of it that way. Writing with a computer (or mobile phone) spell-checker is not, in any way, inferior to having your college educated mom "look over" your homework. There is nothing wrong with looking things up on Google or in Wikipedia that isn't also potentially wrong with looking in the library (pick the first book you see) or opening up Encyclopedia Britannica (might be wrong or at least out of date). Method is often best left to personal choice. The end result - learning, sharable knowledge, discovery - that's what matters.

On the last post Lisa Parisi said, "I had a conversation with my 13 year old this week. "Do you know who the classified students are in your class?" I asked. "Yes." And she starts listing them. "How do you know?" "They get to use calculators and computers, they get extra test time, they get asked constantly if they understand what is going on." "Do you ever get to use any of those? Do your teachers ask you if you understand?" "Only when they ask the whole class. If I don't raise my hand, they don't ask." My frustration is over the fact that 1. she knew all the classified students as if they had labels on them and 2. she was not able to use any extra tools, whether she needs them or not. Christine and I work constantly make sure that tools are available for everyone so no one feels isolated and everyone gets what they need. And, as you said, it is not so difficult to do so today. So what is the hold up?"

What is the hold up? 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. Students would find lifespan methods to support their learning.

2009. In the year we inaugurate a president with few of the conventional resume checkpoints, a president who defined his own way to campaign, to fundraise, to reach out to voters, we ought to accept the same from our students.

In this year of Universal Access, pull off those labels. Let the "LD" kid read the hard book. Let the "smart" kid use the calculator. Let anyone who struggles with a word's pronunciation use text-to-speech to figure it out. Let even the calmest kid have a fidgit toy if he needs it that day. Let everyone choose their way of demonstrating knowledge. None of this means that you can't encourage kids to try new things, to test out different ways to communicate, but it does mean that you no longer make your preferences the only routes to success.

After all, you have no idea what communication tools will be essential ten years from now. Nor do you know how any particular students needs will align with the jobs or learning environments in their future.

Yes, we need to re-think our definitions of experience to liberate many. And we need to re-think our definitions of what 'success in school' means to liberate many, many more.

- Ira Socol

2009: The Year of Universal Access

It is time to stop making - and stop accepting - excuses. It is now 2009. The tenth year of the 21st Century, and more than a dozen years after court and US Department of Ed decisions made it clear that everyone has a right to information and communications in real time and in 'equivalently effective' forms. 25 years after the Macintosh PC appeared and 15 years after "Windows95" created standard, accessible, computer platforms. All the reasons, all those "we wish we coulds" have now fully expired.

It is time to make 2009 the Year of Universal Access: in education. in employment. in communication.

Because I, and so many of us, are tired of still fighting the old fights - over and over. Because so many are still left out because people in power are lazy or intentionally uninformed. Because we will not start digging ourselves out of the huge mess we are in without the contributions of everyone who could contribute if we'd grant them their basic human rights.

Let me tell you a story:

Back in 1997 I was a student at Grand Valley State University, struggling in my fourth (or so) attempt to get a Bachelors Degree. I was also working for GVSU, for "Academic Computing/Instructional Technology" and had just shifted from being a "Tech Monkey" (pulling and terminating network cable) to being a network programmer/troubleshooter - back in the days when you had to program "PROM" (Programmable Read-Only-Memory) chips on network cards if you were going to build sophisticated connections.

As a student I was battling with those old proprietary RFBD books-on-cassette. Remember those? You could only play them on a specific, really embarrassing looking cassette players that screamed "RETARD" if you carried it. The books were usually read onto cassette by very bored minimum-wage work study students who not only routinely mispronounced everything, they literally fell asleep at times while reading.

These experiences had two lasting affects on my thinking - I despise specific text formats - even Daisy Readers - because all I wanted back then was a book-on-tape I could listen to in my car or my walkman - something "universal." And I never knock computer voices in text-to-speech, because I know that the alternative was often much worse.

For writing I was totally dependent on the kindness of professors, along with careful scheduling to avoid taking classes requiring in class writing assignments.

Then I signed up to participate in a research project for ADHD college students. And I met a wonderful person and brilliant researcher, Dr. Elizabeth Schaughency, who started to ask the right questions. Her questions lead her to ask me two things: First, she said, "There are computer software programs that read to the blind, so there might be things that will read to you." Then she said, "Tell your boss to give you an old laptop that you can use for notetaking and writing in class."

Those questions lead me to Ray Kurzweil and Jim Fruchterman, to WYNN 1.0, and to a conversation with my boss who looked at me and said, "If there's stuff out there that will help you I bet it will help a lot of other students. Take the year and see what you can find that we can bring to campus."

Remember. This was 1997. To get big monitors we needed massive CRT displays that weighed a hundred pounds. To get text-to-speech sound we needed super-premium sound cards. To run speech recognition we needed very expensive RAM upgrades. To swap keyboards without restarting the computer we needed special "hot-swap" boxes that the BigKeys keyboard people made. To even plug headsets into the front of the computer we needed special add-on boxes that we purchased from Andrea.

At the end of the year I came back with a flood of solutions: Zoom-Text, WYNN, ViaVoice, Dvortyboards and BigKeys, and all sorts of other things. "Should we build a special lab here?" my boss asked, indicating the computer center. "No," I told him, "I'm too old for a resource room, I want at least one fully accessible station everyplace we have computers." And so in every lab, on every campus, we installed adjustable tables, giant monitors, scanners, fully equipped workstations, and created boxes of "check-out-able" alternative keyboards, mice, and headsets. Then we created web and paper-based instructions for all this. Then we trained every computer lab worker. Then we met with every freshmen English faculty member, discussed "learning disabilities" with them, and explained how these new tools in their writing labs might help. Then we created an email newsletter about accessibility that went to every department chair in the university.

In 1998 this was all quite difficult. I made hundreds of phone calls, thousands of pre-Google web searches, bought scores of products and tested them myself, sat through dozens of meetings with reluctant administrators. Not many obvious traces of our efforts - create@gvsu - remain, but the access - to a large extent does. Hundreds of students with disabilities have succeeded at GVSU in the decade which has passed, often, to a significant extent, because the right tools were available. But it was expensive. It required much "original" research." It took a massive amount of effort. And it required my luck at having, "the best boss ever."

So, again, here's why 2009 must be our year of universal access.

Because now, it is really quite easy. Now the information is all out there, free and available (though if you want to pay me, or anyone else, for a bit for advice, I'm sure we can make a deal). Now Windows Vista comes with Speech Recognition. Now a $60 scanner will convert text to digital form and free text-to-speech solutions will read it. Now you can download an entire suite of AccessApps for free. Now Adobe Acrobat Reader 8 reads to you for free. Now all kinds of free software turns mobile phones into access tools. Now, if you need to buy the "expensive stuff" you'll pay less - in actual dollars (or Euros) - for fabulous software and hardware than we had to pay a decade ago.

So, again, there are no excuses. No excuses for inaccessible web sites. No excuses for school computers without text-to-speech, speech recognition, screen magnification, and text-converting scanners. No excuses for computer environments anywhere without choices of keyboards and mice (including on-screen - including scanning switch-access - keyboards). No excuses for employers, or schools, requiring "keyboarding" on specific keyboards. No excuses for teachers or employers who will not text their students or workers - allowing media conversion for messages. No excuses for rules against - or network blocks on - important access tools, whether those be web sites or installed software or mobile phones. Security can no longer be an excuse to deprive people of their civil rights. Of course we are long past excuses for physical barriers, including adjustable computer desks.

So I'm asking you to act in 2009. To act every time you see an inaccessible school or public computer. To act every time you notice a rule which blocks access (no phones in school, for example). To act every time you see any government agency or public institution (banks? schools?) fail to provide alternative ways to access content. To act every time you see a barrier.

Act: Say something. Complain. Follow up. Lecture. Demand answers. Get in "their" faces. Be clear: "The time for excuses is past." "The time for "I didn't knows' is long past."

Universal Access is not a pipe dream. It is a real thing which now is there for the taking, if in 2009 we will simply start demanding that we take it.

- Ira Socol

Narrative and Literacy

Stephen Dedalus is not really James Joyce. We know that, right? A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a work of fiction. So is Ulysses. Surely the facts of Joyce's life inform the characters in his books, but Joyce is not asking the reader to become involved because he is a celebrity or has lead a strange life, he is asking the reader to become involved in a great narrative - fictional tales which contain truths far greater than the miniscule details of one person's life.

Nick Carraway is not F. Scott Fitzgerald. Nor is Dick Diver. Pip is not Charles Dickens. Clarissa Dalloway is not Virginia Woolf.

We know these things because we know how to read. Really read. That is, we know how to take in a narrative as the author offers it, and we know how to seek the truths we might find therein. We know what storytelling is - an act of framing the world in a specific way. And we know what good storytelling is - an art of framing the world in new ways, in ways that create more questions than answers.

"We" know these things, but sadly, many do not.

Pity Oprah Winfrey, The New York Times, the book publishers of the United States, the agents, the ghost writers. Pity them all. They lack these skills. No wonder so many of those 'in power' are so threatened by something like Wikipedia. If your literary analytical skills are so poor that A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man would have to either be "all true" or "all fiction" you surely cannot separate the accurate from the questionable in a Wikipedia entry.

So, let us give a decent burial to the idea that those who consider themselves the best readers in America are actually, effectively, literate. And let's accept that burial as a sign that most of what we know about teaching literacy has been proven completely wrong.

Take these two quotes from today's New York Times article about the latest "memoir hoax": '"I believed the teller," Ms. Hurst [the agent for the book] said. "He was in so many magazines and books and on 'Oprah.' It did not seem like it would not be true."' And, "Susanna Margolis, a New York-based ghost writer who polished Mr. Rosenblat's manuscript, said she was surprised by his description of his first blind date with Ms. Radzicki. "I thought that was far-fetched." she said. "But if somebody comes to you, as an agent and a publisher, and says, 'This is my story,' how do you check it other than to say, 'Did this happen?'"

All those completely fooled by the narratives of Kaayva Viswanathan, Margaret Seltzer, Misha Defonseca, James Frey, and now, Herman Rosenblat, are not just greedy, and they are not just lazy and sloppy. Instead they are tied - by failed or out-of-date educations - to antiquated notions of cognitive authority, and thus antiquated notions of literacy. And because they are tied to these antiquated concepts, they can no longer function in the world.

Agent Andrea Hurst is completely dependent on "publisher" authority. This is the notion that certain sources need not be questioned because of their basic authority. So, if Oprah is the source, "it must be true." You know this theory. You see it in teachers and professors who accept a citation from, say, The New York Times or a book published by Cambridge University but not, say, Wikipedia, or a self-published book.

Susanna Margolis is dependent on the "personal recommendation" authority. Someone she respects sent this author to her, and "how do you check it"? she asks.

Both are, of course, victims of a society that no longer knows how how to interpret fiction, or narrative at all. There is significant evidence that ancient Greeks knew that both their Olympic God myths and their Homeric Legends were both important and fictional (why did Bronze Age warriors fight with Iron Age weapons?). And there is significant evidence, from Creationists to Oprah, that many 21st Century Americans can longer make these intellectual leaps. Those fooled by Herman Rosenblat's concocted Holocaust romance are drawn to 'memoirs' for the same reason many American readers are, they do not read well enough to process the many complexities of narrative without being told in advance that something is (simplistically) "true" or "false."

But these publishing industry leaders also lack basic literacy and knowledge skills. They are victims of the "straight line" reading the National Endowment for the Arts so prizes. I might read Ulysses with a map of old Dublin open here, and a Joyce biography open there, but this kind of 'multi-tasking' is considered 'distracting' and 'dangerous' to many of those who control and teach reading. So no one involved in publishing Angel at the Fence or Love and Consequences or Misha could 'distract' themselves for the four minutes necessary to doubt and look up even the most basic facts.

Might you doubt that - in reality - outsiders could throw gifts to Death Camp inmates over a fence? Or the idea of a girl being raised by wolves? Could you stop and check a high school graduation record? Could you simply put a passage or two into Google to check for plagiarism.

These are among today's basic skills. We need both the ability to understand that "narrative is narrative" - and every bit of every form can be doubted without devaluing it - and the ability to check out what we are learning in order to provide context.

When I read a highly proclaimed "reading study," for example, I investigate who the authors are, looking for the lens they see the world through. But even if the study is highly biased, I still look for observations which I find of value. When I read a novel I still check out what might be 'real' - Gatsby's Valley of the Ashes is a wonderful description of Flushing Meadow in Queens, NY before Robert Moses got his hands on it, and I take in the author's deep cynicism about the "American Dream" without expecting him to be some kind of distinguished social historian.

This is reading fully contextualized into our world. It is not the old blind allegiance to genre or publisher or position in the Dewey Decimal System that formed the knowledge structure of the past two hundred years.

Instead it is a new structure which understands that everyone who tells a story is telling that story from a point of view and for a reason, and a structure which gives us the power, through contemporary technologies, to add those vital contextual clues to our reading.

Narrative is that essential human "thing." And the collection of narratives we absorb builds our sense of the world. Yes, for example, I've read biographies of Huey Long, and I've read Robert Penn Warren's All The King's Men, and I've read enough articles about Robert Penn Warren to know that his novel is "half Long and half Mussolini," and I've looked at other histories of Louisiana and FDR - and all construct my knowledge of that moment in American history, and nothing distracts me from the brilliant poetry of Penn Warren's opening chapter as I heard it read on Audiobook, the stanzas built to the rhythm of the tar joints of an old southern highway being traversed at a hundred miles an hour.

How is reading being taught in your school? Is it a disconnected set of skills? Is it divided into "truth" and "untruth" (non-fiction and fiction)? Or is it taught within the contexts of how we can build our knowledge? Is it taught as a "task" (decoding, phonics)? Or is it taught as an intellectual process of joining new information to old questions?

I think reading is a precious thing. I think it is an essential thing. I just wish our schools would recognize why it is precious, why it is essential, and would help our students learn to really read, rather than fumble phonetically in a "fluent" straight line to a simplistic answer, checkable through multiple choice.

- Ira Socol
still struggling with pain-med induced incoherence, but trying to keep my brain going anyway.

Happy Christmas to All

It is difficult to get things written these days. The fog of pain meds, a lack of stamina, writing from bed, which has never been my comfort zone. But I did want to say a "Happy Christmas to All" to all of you in this corner of the Blogosphere. I think, every day, how lucky I am to live in these times, when simple tools like blogs and Twitter, email and list-serves, Skype and Google Chat, can bring so many of us together, in such vital ways.



I think about all I learn from blogs and Twitter everyday. All the tools I discover, strategies I find, resources I can add to my toolbelt, and I feel like we have arrived at someplace profoundly new in human education.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus

And then I think how many are left out of this new world. Just as Dickens' described the horribly uneven acquisition of weath in Industrial Revolution England when he wrote A Christmas Carol in 1843, so today we might describe a situation where those most in need of the empowerment that these new learning modes bring, are most likely to be denied access.

Harry Harrison's Classic Monologue

I meet students every day who languish in the back of 19th Century classrooms, while something as simple as the right mobile phone could allow them to join any number of remarkable, interactive, learning communities. I meet students every day who sit frustrated because their teachers and schools refuse to provide them with reasonable access to information. I meet students every day who attend schools which refuse to teach the essential skills of contemporary communications these kids will need to survive. And on many days, I get angry.



But today I am not angry. Today I am hopeful. Today I look out and see all of you working incredibly hard to change these facts. And I see all of you experimenting, collaborating, sharing, trying. And I see us at a moment where the technology and the intention of Universal Design have come together.

So, Happy Christmas to All. Thanks to all of you for all that you do.

- Ira Socol

A Week in Hospital: Constructing Disability

Last Friday night I walked out of my "not-quite-in-laws" home and walked around my car to put something I was carrying in to the trunk. It had started to snow while we had been visiting inside, and the temperature had begun to fall rapidly. As I reached for the trunk lid, my feet went out from under me, there was a panicked moment as I tried to juggle what I was carrying, and then I hit the pavement and an explosion of pain went through my body. I reached out to touch my right knee, but found no kneecap there. And then I just struggled to stay conscious, to stay out of shock.

It is now about seven days later, and I'm finally back home. Surgery has scraped together as much of my shattered patella as was possible, cleaned out other bits that were pressing badly on certain nerve endings. I've been locked into a knee immobilizer, fed a steady and massive stream of painkillers, been taught (once again) to move with crutches and (for the first time) a walker, and I've discovered how difficult many of life's most basic tasks can be.

I've discovered something else as well. I might have been deeply foggy for the past week, but I kept observing. And one of the things I observed was how professionals construct disability while working with their patients-clients-students.

1. Not bothering to know who you are.
When the police arrived at the driveway, their mission was to hurry the ambulance and keep me talking. I know this drill. I have worked in emergency services - even emergency medical services. My 'friend' mentioned that I had done that job, and so I might be able to answer questions more clearly than most. The paramedics took that information and ran with it, asking me about morphine dosing, using more "professional" vocabulary. That kept me engaged, attentive, and less focused on the rather remarkable pain level. They treated me as "me," and not as a "patient."

Later, at the hospital, most of the nurses and aides never considered these facts, or asked any questions which might have uncovered them. I became such a "non-specific patient," just a "diagnosis" and thus uninvolved in my own care. This became so extreme on a few nursing shifts that I actually wanted to resist their efforts to treat me.

With the ambulance crew I was a person with a somewhat unique knowledge base who needed help. With the hospital staff I was simply disabled.

You know the parallel: Every time we reduce our students to a label, discard the essentials of who they are, ignore their 'backstories,' we dehumanize them, take them out of the process, almost force rebellion. We also create dependency because we eliminate the contributions of the student. And we typically don't know what to do to help at that point, because we have stopped listening to the best information source.

2. Not really listening.
"On a scale of one to ten, with one being no pain and ten being the worst pain you've ever felt, what's your pain level right now?" I was asked this fifty times. Maybe more.

What's wrong with this question? You would have to make sure you know the patient's prior pain experience. You would have had to really listened before. Because, obviously, if one patient has previously, say, been shot, and another has never experienced anything more catastrophic than a sprained ankle, the two scales will be wildly different in size.

Just as in special needs education we've reduced something very personal into a codable scale that leaves us knowing nothing. Just as I didn't want to be measured against "Third Year Standards" when I was struggling to read when I was eight, I didn't want my pain scale measured against some nurse's arbitrary understanding. (I've had some massive injuries, but this was, without a doubt, the most painful, with the highest "baseline" - always there - pain level.) And because the hospital staff was not really listening, they never could quite get my pain under control.

And I lay there - in pain - and thought how often I hear educators referring to "mild" and "severe" disabilities. And no matter how often I challenge them on this, no matter how often I say, "how do you know what is severe to this student?" They keep using these terms as a way of disabling their students, of turning them into chartable diagnoses.

3. Assuming that "you" can't hear.
Two nurses stand by the edge of the bed and talk about you, assuming that you are not hearing. They stand just outside your door, talking. They give each other 'looks' as they are working on you. They talk to your family without including you in the conversation. They throw open the door, turn on the lights, write something on a chart, and leave without acknowledging you - leaving the lights on and the door open.

Nothing creates disability faster than pretending that the person in question cannot function in the most basic ways.

In the class I taught this past semester we read a bunch of "first person voices" of "disabled"students. Many of the soon to be teachers expressed surprise that the students seemed "so aware." I told them that we are all very aware. We know what every head shake means, what the big words imply. We know that when the person examining you writes a bunch of notes, you've done, or said, something wrong. We even know what you say about us in the Teachers' Lounge, because we see the results. What we learn from your attempts of ignore us is that we are worthless, that we truly are "disabled."

What a difference you might make if you treated us as fully human. If that nurse had said, "Excuse me, I just had to put something on your chart. Do you still want the lights off and the door closed?" She might have handed me a bit of power, and dignity, and allowed me to think of myself as 'as human as' she was. Again, a person in need of help, rather than a person with a disability.

4. Infantilizing.
This is simple. Making it easy for someone to ask for help enables. Assuming a person can not do, or can not make choices, disables. "Would you like to get cleaned up? I can bring you things or I can help if you want me to," enables. "Now we'll get you cleaned up so you'll feel better," disables. It reduces anyone to the status of helpless infant.

Just as, "That's a great book, you know we also have that as an audiobook or as text set up to run in WYNN," enables, while, "That is a great book, but I think it will be too difficult for you," disables. Which is why most classroom reading groups (those based on reading "ability") disable.

5. Making it look easy.
My physical therapist was great. He really was. If I look at the previous issues he was on the right side every time. But there was one moment.

He was helping me practice stairs. To do this I had already walked further than I previously had, to get to a stairwell. And I struggled up four steps - feeling dizzy, unbalanced, exhausted. It is very difficult to go upstairs when one leg can not be bent at all. You have to swing this incredibly heavy, non-responsive thing, out to the side, hold your balance, keep it out of the way of the crutch on that side... you know.

I came back down. He said, "Let me show you again." And with that he slowly climbed the stairs, with his unencumbered right leg bent at a 30 degree angle.

I could have done that too.

We do this so often in education. We act as if the task is easy or simple, all that's missing is the effort. And then, yes, people who can't do even the simple and easy things, are disabled. We forget that many of these tasks are extremely difficult and complex. We forget that our demonstrations are laughably distant from the way a "beginner" would approach this. And we forget that "we" - educators - might be built radically differently from the students we are trying to help.

Don't suggest "ease" or "simplicity" - admit that things are difficult. That won't discourage, as long as we celebrate every victory over every component process.

So, coming home was dramatically liberating. Here, I may not have all of the supports, but I'm much less disabled. Here, no one is working hard to disable me.

- Ira Socol
who hopes this is readable, I'm still fairly 'foggy'...