Most conferences do not include us Stimpunks as either presenters or attendees. Conferences are sensory and social overwhelm. Speaking in front of an audience is very stressful due to Exposure Anxiety, Situational Mutism, and Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria. Meatspace conferences never include our “Five Ways to Welcome All Bodyminds to Your Learning Event”.

Conference to Restore Humanity by Human Restoration Project is a wonderful exception because it embraces an online communication environment developed by neurodivergent people.

Design around the accessibility and sustainability of virtual learning. Follow the lead of the Conference to Restore Humanity.

Now we have the opportunity and understanding to move from emergency pandemic remote school and its pantomime of learning to purposefully designed online education spaces that are accessible, sustainable, and representative of the communities they serve. It’s time for the academic conference model to respond accordingly.

Our conference is designed purposefully around the accessibility and sustainability of virtual learning, while engaging participants in a classroom environment that models the same progressive pedagogy we value for our students. Instead of long Zoom presentations with a brief Q&A, keynotes are flipped, and attendees will have the opportunity for extended conversation with our speakers.

And instead of back-to-back online workshops, we are offering asynchronous learning tracks where you can engage with the content and the community at any time on topics like anti-carceral pedagogy, disrupting linguistic discrimination, designing for neurodivergence, promoting childism in the classroom, and supporting feedback over grades.

Conference to Restore Humanity: The Need

The Conference to Restore Humanity is one of our first real chances at realizing Universal Design for Learning for conferences. It brings together important elements of inclusion. It uses virtual space as an asset.

It’s a reimagining of the conference model using virtual space as an asset.

How can we build community and have communion in these digital spaces? What are the strengths and affordances of being able to participate in those virtual spaces.

I appreciated the intimacy it allowed with the presenters and track leaders.

Nick Covington, Human Restoration Project Talks Professional Learning & Progressive Pedagogy

Elements of Inclusion

The Flexibility of Asynchronous Communication, Written Communication, and Intermittent Collaboration of Conference to Restore Humanity allows more people to contribute in a way that allows them to feel seen, heard, and understood. Combine the flexibility of these tools with online Caves, Campfires, and Watering Holes, and you have the communication and collaboration environment created by neurodivergent people over decades of work.

One could make the argument that autistic people created the very computer environment autistic people are most comfortable in.

In fact, there is pretty good evidence that most of the science, technology, and arts you enjoy are the products of autistic minds.

Welcome to the World Autism Made – An Intense World

Online communication is a valid accommodation for the social disability that comes with being Autistic. We need online interaction and this meta-study demonstrates exactly why that is the case.

Autism and the Burden of Social Reciprocity — THINKING PERSON’S GUIDE TO AUTISM

Conference to Restore Humanity understands and builds for this communication environment. It is a model for our times.

Below, we break down the elements of conference inclusion.

Asynchronous Communication

Asynchronous communication allows much needed processing time.

This is a style of communicating which lots of neurodivergent people prefer – including myself. Asynchronous communication is when you send a message without expecting an immediate response. Examples: receiving an email and responding minutes, hours, days later / responding to a text later in the day / getting back to someone / waiting until you’ve got home from work to call someone / sending a response 2 minutes later. There are many advantages to this method but the main one is that the person has time to process the information and plan what it is they want to say. Real-time communication is often rapid and demanding. Executive functioning and language processing differences mean that for neurodivergent people responding quickly can be a huge difficulty.
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Synchronous communication (immediate responses like in a conversation) can cause significant anxiety for an autistic person because not enough time is given for them to process and plan what they want to say. It’s why job interviews are incredibly difficult for autistic people because they have to think on the spot and produce responses immediately.

Communication Features | AutisticSLT

Consider an asynchronous or a hybrid option. The pace of most synchronous (real-time) meetings favors people who can speak fluently. That disadvantages us.¹ Asynchronous meetings (e.g., by email or instant messaging) allow us to take as much time as we need to respond, and don’t require us to be ready to communicate at a specific time, among other benefits. If asynchronous communication can achieve the purpose of the meeting, consider offering it as an option or as an alternative.

Best Practices for Online Meetings with AAC Users

Written Communication

“Written communication is the great social equalizer.” It allowed me to participate and be a part of things bigger than myself. As I reflect on my life and career in light of a mid-life autism diagnosis, I realize how much I was driven by the desire and need for written communication. I became an engineer who helped build the infrastructure that would allow me to socialize with the written rather than the spoken word. Consciously and unconsciously, I helped create technologies and culture that suited my neurotype.

⌨️ Written Communication Is the Great Social Equalizer – Stimpunks Foundation

The use of text to augment all other media (i.e. text description, alternate text, tags) is widely used and, in some cases, it is essential or a legal requirement. Indeed, the use of text is necessary for archiving, retrieving media, and for accessibility by both humans and machines.

The Future Is Text: The Universal Interface, The Future of Text

Text and reading have never been as pervasive and central as today. We live in a stream of digital revolutions pushing reading at the centre of our lives and activities. The result is the emergence of a new role for text as the all-purpose interface. This trend leads to a future made of text, where everything is mediated by text and in which everybody is directly and indirectly involved in the production and consumption of more text.

The Future Is Text: The Universal Interface, The Future of Text

Intermittent Collaboration

The best solutions come from “intermittent collaboration” — group work punctuated by breaks to think & work by ourselves.

Daniel Pink

Our cave, campfire, and watering hole moods map to the red, yellow, and green of interaction badges (aka color communication badges). The three-level and three-speed communication flow used at Automattic and other distributed companies reflects the progressive sociality of cave, campfire, and watering hole contexts and red, yellow, green interaction moods. All of these facilitate intermittent collaboration.

Intermittent Collaboration – Stimpunks Foundation

Groups whose members interacted only intermittently preserved the best of both worlds, rather than succumbing to the worst. These groups had an average quality of solution that was nearly identical to those groups that interacted constantly, yet they preserved enough variation to find some of the best solutions, too.

Problem-solving techniques take on new twist: For best solutions, intermittent collaboration provides the right formula

Flexibility

Flexibility makes a big difference in inclusion.

Disabled People Have WFH For Years. Companies Catch Up

There is no one size fits all when it comes to accessibility. Instead of choosing who to prioritize and counting tradeoffs for certain choices like universal high contrast mode, the obvious solution would be to let the user choose.

Similar approach can be taken with any accessibility work at a large scale. There is no blanket ‘accessibility mode’ or ‘accessibility setting’ (save for basic compliance) that will fit everyone’s needs. Giving the user full control to set up what works best for them is always the better choice.

Twitter’s new font and Last of Us 2: an accessibility lesson to be learned | by Anna 4erepawko Mészáros | Aug, 2021 | UX Collective

The varied and dynamic nature of learning environments – too many variables to isolate one out, the way norm-referencing is leveraged to discount outliers, and the lack of applicable research on neurodiverse students – necessitates a more flexible and holistic approach.

Beyond Pavlov’s Perfect Student | Human Restoration Project | Nick Covington Michael Weingarth

Caves, Campfires, and Watering Holes

Futurist David Thornburg identifies three archetypal learning spaces— the campfire, cave, and watering hole—that schools can use as physical spaces and virtual spaces for student and adult learning (bit.ly/YvRuWC)

Australia’s Campfires, Caves, and Watering Holes: Educators on ISTE’s Australian Study Tour Discovered How to Create New Learning and Teaching Environments where Curriculum and Instructional Tools Meet the Digital Age, UNCG NC DOCKS (North Carolina Digital Online Collection of Knowledge and Scholarship)

About 11 years ago I wrote a book called Campfires in Cyberspace that explored the idea that humans have always occupied one of four primordial learning spaces at any given time, ranging from the Campfire (home to the presentation of information by a teacher) to the Watering Hole (the domain of social learning from peers), the Cave (home of reflective construction) and Life (home to the construction of artifacts based on what we have learned). We explore the idea that, in an ideal setting, students will move between these spaces on their own and that computer technology has a positive role to play in each of these learning spaces.

Holtthink: Where Interwebs and Edtech Combine on Tumblr: Interview with David Thornburg author of “From the Campfire to the Holodeck: Creating Engaging and Powerful 21st Century Learning Environments.”

Campfires are a way to learn from experts or storytellers; Watering Holes help you learn from peers; Caves are places to learn from yourself; and Life is where you bring it all together by applying what you learn to projects in the real world.

 The Language of School Design : Design Patterns for 21st Century Schools : Nair, Prakash

At an online conference, Cave spaces can be implemented with a quiet room in a Zoom breakout room. Everyone in the room mutes their mics and hangs out with their video on or off.

Campfires can be implemented with breakout video rooms and text rooms where chattiness among small groups is encouraged.

Watering holes are larger video and chat rooms/channels, usually one big room for the entire conference.

Cavendish Space

Cavendish Space combines all of the above.

Cavendish Space: psychologically and sensory safe spaces suited to zone work, flow states, intermittent collaboration, and collaborative niche construction.

⛺️🔥 Cavendish Space: Caves, Campfires, and Watering Holes for Dandelions, Tulips, and Orchids – Stimpunks Foundation

“Campfires in Cyberspace” explored the idea that humans have always occupied one of four primordial learning spaces at any given time, ranging from the Campfire (home to the presentation of information by a teacher) to the Watering Hole (the domain of social learning from peers), the Cave (home of reflective construction) and Life (home to the construction of artifacts based on what we have learned).

In Cavendish Space, learners move between these spaces on their own, and computer technology has a positive role to play in each of these learning spaces.

When students have developed a little bit of metacognitive language around their learning spaces, they are also able to take control of their learning and their learning spaces – they can move to the space that best fits the type of learning that they are doing, and be able to explain exactly why this space is going to help them in achieving their learning goals.

Re-imagining Learning Spaces to inspire contemporary learning – Part One: Models for Change – Linking Learning

Canvendish Space provides caves, campfires, and watering holes so that dandelions, tulips, and orchids alike can find respite from an intense world designed against us.

Go Online

As a disability organization operating in the trenches of a mass disabling event, we recommend everyone use the tools above and get good at virtual. Your conference should at least have a backchannel.

At the beginning of the pandemic, schools reacted to the needs of communities in much the same way as other institutions: by building a plane in mid-flight whose purpose was to navigate us to a post-pandemic normalcy. Teachers leaned into new dual roles as viral mitigators and classroom educators, preparing safe learning environments for kids attending in-person instruction and navigating new remote learning environments, often simultaneously. 

But as one headline observed in June 2020, “The coronavirus didn’t break America. It revealed what was already broken.” As we saw how the impact of the pandemic fell hardest on communities of color, disabled people, and children ineligible for vaccinations, so, too, did the coronavirus reveal the same disparities in accessibility and sustainability of our instructional models of school. This temporary, on-the-fly response to the pandemic, characterized by hours of camera-on Zoom lectures, breakout rooms, and lockdown browsers, has now incorrectly become solidified as our mental model for “remote school” that was exhausting and dehumanizing for students and teachers alike. 

But the early lockdowns forced another realization: “With millions under lockdown, many non-disabled people are experiencing, for the first time, how it feels to have external barriers preventing you from participating in everyday life.” Public and private spaces overcame years of unresponsiveness to disabled people to broadly and quickly accommodate pandemic life. Tens of millions of workers transitioned to work-from-home, with 91% wanting to retain remote flexibility. Online shopping options proliferated to support local businesses. Telehealth visits safely aided overburdened health systems. And entertainment moved in-home, as Broadway stage shows, musical acts, and Hollywood blockbusters streamed online to support artists and performers. There’s even evidence that reduced travel temporarily curbed carbon emissions and reduced air pollution in early 2020.

Now we have the opportunity and understanding to move from emergency pandemic remote school and its pantomime of learning to purposefully designed online education spaces that are accessible, sustainable, and representative of the communities they serve. It’s time for the academic conference model to respond accordingly.

Conference to Restore Humanity: The Need | Human Restoration Project | Chris McNutt Nick Covington