Themes: Teams, Technology, and Help
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
Purpose
Most conferences do not include us Stimpunks as either presenters or attendees. Conferences are sensory and social overwhelm, and speaking in front of an audience is very stressful due to Exposure Anxiety, Situational Mutism, and Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria. Conference to Restore Humanity is a wonderful exception because it embraces a communication environment created by neurodivergent people. Let’s use day 1 to appreciate this communication environment and what it can achieve.
Introduction
Communication in all forms is necessary and yet the tools to enable all people to do so in a way that allows them to feel seen and heard. To this end, many neurodivergent people have had to find other ways to add our voices to the conversation. In this track we will look at how written communication, technology, and collaborative spaces facilitate our communication and connections with others.
Reading
- Written Communication Is the Great Social Equalizer
- Our Technology: Open Source Communication and Indie Ed-Tech
- Bricolage, Remixing, Constructionism, and Pastiche: Behind Our Punk Rock Research-Storytelling
- Online: Bringing Safety to the Serendipity
Written Communication Is the Great Social Equalizer
Main Takeaways
- Written communication is the great social equalizer.
- The revenge of the nerds was taking shape as a society in which anyone who had access to a computer and a modem could feel less disabled by the limitations of space and time.
- The kids formerly ridiculed as nerds and brainiacs have grown up to become the architects of our future.
- Disability is an engine of innovation simply because no matter what their limitations, humans have such a relentless drive to communicate that they’ll invent new ways to do so, in spite of everything.
- Backchannel is the practice of using networked computers to maintain a real-time online conversation alongside the primary group activity or live spoken remarks.
- This kind of technology supports the shy user, the user with speech issues, the user having trouble with the English Language, the user who’d rather be able to think through and even edit a statement or question before asking it.
- Online communication for autistics has been compared to sign language for the deaf. Online, we are able to participate as equals. Our disability is often invisible and we are treated like humans. It provides much needed human contact otherwise denied us.
- Online communication is a valid accommodation for the social disability that comes with being Autistic. We need online interaction.
- Thin slice studies showed that people prejudge us harshly in just micro-seconds of seeing or hearing us (though we fare better than neurotypical subjects when people only see our written words).
- The internet has allowed autistic people- who might be shut in their homes, unable to speak aloud, or unable to travel independently- to mingle with each other, share experiences, and talk about our lives to people who feel the same way. We were no longer alone.
- 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.
- For many disabled people, social media gives them access to a social life and community involvement in an otherwise inaccessible world. Not only does social media give me the platform to correct assumptions, people don’t assume things about me in the first place, because it’s a level playing field.
- Phones are very stressful. ‘Call if you have a problem’ is an inaccessible gauntlet for many.
- Lots of autistic people can only sometimes use phones. It’s a major barrier to healthcare, to job success, to getting basic services and basic human rights.
- There is a clear message that mode of communication can be either enabling or disabling for autistic people. A reliance on phone calls can create barriers to access, yet the option to adopt written forms of communication can improve accessibility.
- Services should move away from a reliance on phone calls for communication. They should make sure that access to support is not dependent on the phone, and instead offer written options such as email and live messaging which are more accessible.
- Written communication may diminish some of the social interaction challenges autistic people experience in face-to-face contexts.
- Written Internet-mediated communication provides more control, thinking time, clarity and fewer sensory issues and streams of information that must be processed and interpreted.
- Autistic adults reported a preference for online or text-based appointment booking, facility to email in advance the reason for consultation, the first or last clinic appointment and a quiet place to wait.
- Writing is too important because, though forms and structures will differ, writing is the path to power for those born without power.
- Expression of one’s identity in a form that evokes empathy in those without similar experience, “communicating” “well” is a social leveler of supreme importance.
- Multiplicities are an intention: We build the best collaboration, the deepest learning, when we expand the opportunities for complex vision.
- The future is text: the universal interface.
- The Future Of Text lies in the re-definition of text “craftsmanship” focused on enabling and facilitating a text-mediated access and interaction with the relationships, functions and actors of the reality we live in.
- Text augments all other media.
- 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.
- A workflow-focused approach to writing offers a pathway to agency, creativity, and confidence with computing.
- A lot of our ways of working are actually disability hacks: as it turns out a LOT of our people are very visual and a LOT of my people have poor working memory.
- Workflows can be an inclusive and productive concept-that we have much to gain by considering how we work, what tools we work with, and how those preferences can help us think beyond a set of default, invisible, or unstated norms.
- Disabled ways of languaging are primarily about modality.
- Crip linguistics frames language as a form of care work where we work collectively to provide access and co-construct meaning.
- If you are a dyslexic person or the parent of a dyslexic child, I recommend that you allow technology to become your new best friend.
- Use these terms to address an underlying bias in our schools: that eye reading is the only form of reading. You can help move the needle on this limited assumption by using the terms eye reading, ear reading, and finger reading yourself and explaining them to your child.
- We must question what we are taught is the “normal”way to do things, and instead integrate multiple ways for our children to access information.
- No one should make you feel bad about your language. We need a bigger and more flexible understanding of what language is and what it communicates about a bodymind’s capacity.
- I type to talk. Without typing I have no voice to tell you I am smart.
- Let’s augment everybody, let’s leave no mind behind.
- It is remarkable what happens when you stop telling people how to write and start encouraging them to write.
- No child should need a label or prescription in order to access the tools of learning or environments they need.
- Bring the backchannel forward.
- Backchannels accommodate neurological pluralism while fostering the serendipity of networks.
- Online communication for autistics has been compared to sign language for the deaf. Online, we are able to participate as equals. Our disability is often invisible and we are treated like humans. It provides much needed human contact otherwise denied us.
- One could make the argument that autistic people created the very computer environment autistic people are most comfortable in.
- Computers as the essential prosthetic device for autistics.
- Getting online was revolutionary and may have saved my life.
Our Technology: Open Source Communication and Indie Ed-Tech
We choose open source tools built by and for communities. These communities have decades of iterative experience in bringing safety to the serendipity. #DIYEdge #Stimpunks #RollinOnOurOwn
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Main Takeaways
- Too often, education technologies are developed that position students as objects of education.
- Education technologies do things to students, rather than foster student agency.
- If we are to challenge what “school” should look like, we must also challenge what “ed-tech” does as well.
- The technologies we develop and use tend to reflect the level of collaboration and competitiveness within our culture.
- The three levels of communication: Conversation -> Discussion -> Publication
- The three speeds of collaboration: Realtime, Async, Storage
- The three archetypal learning spaces: Caves, Campfires, Watering Holes
- “Indie ed-tech” draws rather explicitly on the spirit of indie music and the DIY (do-it-yourself) ethos of punk rock.
- “Indie ed-tech” offers a model whereby students, faculty, staff, and independent scholars alike can use the “real-world” tools of the Web,
- Indie ed-tech invokes some of the potential that was seen in the earliest Web technologies, before things were carved up into corporate properties and well-known Internet brands.
- Students should have the freedom to explore and experiment with their school-issued devices.
- In an open schoolhouse, every student is trusted with learning technology and empowered to rewire and reshape the world.
- If we don’t like ‘the system’ of ed-tech, we should create one of our own.
- Writing across multiple modalities is learning made visual.
- Giving students their own digital domain is a radical act. It gives them the ability to work on the Web and with the Web, to have their scholarship be meaningful and accessible by others.
- Repressive computer device management policies crush learner agency and intellectual freedom.
- Technology needs to be open and under student control, or it becomes a limitation instead of a key to the world.
- If I had a desert island EdTech, it would be blogging.
- Nothing develops and anchors your online identity quite like a blog.
- It is important to have one’s own space in order to develop one’s ideas and one’s craft.
- It’s important that learners have control over their work – their content and their data.
- The importance of giving students responsibility for their own domain cannot be overstated.
- WordPress is a powerful force on the Web. Because it is used by so many sites, learning it is an actual marketable skill that our students can include on their resumes.
- For WordPress can actually serve as an exemplar, a symbol with which our students can grapple as a way towards a deeper understanding. The things they learn to do in WordPress are generalizable to other systems and other online spaces.
- Tools matter though. They are the most basic thing about being human. They matter most for those who lack the highest capabilities.
- We want our children to discover how to choose effectively for their own needs. To do that, they need choices, and so we believe in Toolbelt Theory.
- Toolbelt Theory is based in the concept that students must learn to assemble their own readily available collection of life solutions.
- No student will have mechanical limitations in access to either information or communication — whether through disability, inability at this moment, or even just discomfort. Learning is our goal, and we make it accessible.
- We hand our students real laptops with real capabilities, and we fill them with software, apps, and bookmarks.
- We want our children to discover how to choose effectively for their own needs. To do that, they need choices, and so we believe in Toolbelt Theory.
- Laptops in the classroom represent the first real chance at Universal Design for Learning.
- Bring the backchannel forward. Written communication is the great social equalizer.
- Writing is too important because, though forms and structures will differ, writing is the path to power for those born without power.
- Multiplicities are an intention: We build the best collaboration, the deepest learning, when we expand the opportunities for complex vision.
- Chance favors the connected mind.
- We need to design learning where there is no option for oppression.
- With the LMS, we find that its primary operation is the acquisition of data, and the conflation of that data with student performance, engagement, and teaching success.
- But rules, procedures, and steps are exactly what code defines, and when we fail to acknowledge this we fail to see the pedagogical power that technology and the LMS can have in our classroom.
- Through its coded spaces, the LMS values a learning experience that is as streamlined and predictable as possible, and, thus the teaching we do in the LMS never addresses the Web below the surface.
Bricolage, Remixing, Constructionism, and Pastiche: Behind Our Punk Rock Research-Storytelling
We use these tools to bricolage our activist research and research-storytelling.
Main Takeaways
- Bricolage: construction (as of a sculpture or a structure of ideas) achieved by using whatever comes to hand.
- Punks draw freely from highbrow culture, lowbrow culture, and places in between, picking and choosing as they go, bound by no formal ideology.
- Punks borrowed freely from previous youth cultures and dominant society, melding these elements into a new form of expression.
- Neurodivergent and disabled people have to do it ourselves, or we go without. We bricolage from “a diverse range of things that happen to be available”.
- People with disabilities are the original life hackers because our motivation is so high. If we don’t hack we often go without.
- In the arts, bricolage (French for “DIY” or “do-it-yourself projects”) is the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available, or a work constructed using mixed media.
- Bricolage is a French loanword that means the process of improvisation in a human endeavor.
- The most important message I got from punk, was the DIY ethos. The DIY ethic. It’s inherently part of surviving.
- My life, of my speech, as a database of words: Scripts, commonplaces, canned monologues.
- The created serendipity of streams offers bricolage thinkers a bounty to feed our databases.
- Everything from banal household gadgets to space probes becomes part of a frontier for ceaseless innovation through bricolage.
- We celebrate the work of the many authors and artists we incorporate into our storytelling through pastiche.
- A pastiche is a work of visual art, literature, theatre, music, or architecture that imitates the style or character of the work of one or more other artists. Unlike parody, pastiche celebrates the work it imitates, rather than mocking it.
- Punks view the pedestrian actions of everyday life as potential expressions of art and ideology.
- A good library is comprised in large part by books you haven’t read, making it something you can turn to when you don’t know something. He calls it: the Anti-Library.
- You must build a library and an anti-library now.
- The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means … allow you to put there.
- The more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
- A good library is filled with mostly unread books. That’s the point.
- My library serves as a visual reminder of what I don’t know.
- Everything is a remix.
- Remixing is key to progress.
- Creation requires influence. Everything we make is a remix of existing creations, our lives, and the lives of others.
- Instead of creating a competitive environment, we try to promote a culture of cooperation in which students are happy to see their ideas being appreciated and remixed by others.
- The central tenet of his Constructionist theory of learning is that people build knowledge most effectively when they are actively engaged in constructing things in the world.
- Constructionism is being practiced anywhere where people are making artifacts to represent their knowledge constructions.
- It is impossible to export pedagogical practices without reinventing them. Re-create and rewrite ideas.
- The creation of house spaces, volunteer-run spaces, and other punk- specific locations truly materialize DIY in powerful ways that also model what it means and feels like to do DIY together.
- The emergence of the house as a DIY venue explicitly and implicitly challenges conceptions of the home as cut off from public life.
- The people who live in the house and book the shows are enacting a DIY philosophy and politics, as are the bands that play and many of the people in attendance.
- These magical systems of connection have a common feature: they are capable of infinite extension because basic elements can be used in a variety of improvised combinations to generate new meanings within them.
- Prominent forms of discourse (particularly fashion) are radically adapted, subverted and extended by the subcultural bricoleur.
- Copia provides a strategy of invention, a rhetorical term for the process of generating ideas.
- Copia involves proliferation, multiplying possibilities.
- Everything that was normally supposed to be hidden was brought to the front.
- Punk rock is a living thing. It’s about turning problems into assets.
Online: Bringing Safety to the Serendipity
How do we help our students navigate the world of public, digital scholarship in a world increasingly dominated by harassment, abuse, disinformation, and polarization?
Closing Tabs, Episode 3: Teaching with(out) Social Media – UMW Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies
That’s the piece that’s been missing, bringing the safety to the serendipity.
We bring this all together in the online component of our learning space.
Main Takeaways
- Online, we bring safety to the serendipity with our distributed community and communication stack.
- Our learners connect using 1:1 laptops and indie ed-tech.
- We give our learners real laptops with real capabilities, and we fill those laptops with assistive tech and tools of the trades.
- Design online education spaces that are accessible, sustainable, and representative of the communities they serve.
- Chance favors the connected mind.
- Opportunities for serendipity increase with bigger, more diverse networks.
- You, each of you, have some special wild cards. Play with them. Find out what makes you different and better.
- When we seek perspectives different than our own, share hunches, and connect ideas, we participate in created serendipity.
- If we don’t support young people in building out a strategically rich graph, they will reinforce the worst segments of our society
- Created serendipity doesn’t just happen. You must create it.
- Written communication is the great social equalizer.
- Backchannels accommodate neurological pluralism while fostering the serendipity of networks.
- Writing is the path to power for those born without power.
- Text and reading have never been as pervasive and central as today.
- Text augments all other media.
- A workflow-focused approach to writing offers a pathway to agency, creativity, and confidence with computing.
- Disabled ways of languaging are primarily about modality.
- Internet access has opened a wide window of opportunity for people with ID and ASD.
- The internet has allowed autistic people- who might be shut in their homes, unable to speak aloud, or unable to travel independently- to mingle with each other, share experiences, and talk about our lives to people who feel the same way.
- Let’s augment everybody, let’s leave no mind behind.
- “Indie ed-tech” offers a model whereby students, faculty, staff, and independent scholars alike can use the “real-world” tools of the Web.
- Giving students their own digital domain is a radical act. It gives them the ability to work on the Web and with the Web, to have their scholarship be meaningful and accessible by others.
- No student will have mechanical limitations in access to either information or communication — whether through disability, inability at this moment, or even just discomfort. Learning is our goal, and we make it accessible.
- Laptops in the classroom represent the first real chance at Universal Design for Learning.
- “Indie ed-tech” draws rather explicitly on the spirit of indie music and the DIY (do-it-yourself) ethos of punk rock.
- Students should have the freedom to explore and experiment with their school-issued devices.
- Successful human beings, whether they have learning differences or not, mitigate weakness through teams, technology, and help, and they build a life around strengths, gifts, talents, and interests.
- What we know about successful human beings is they take an interest and they make it a passion and they take the passion and they make it a sense of purpose and they take the sense of purpose and they build a pathway.
- There is also something uniquely satisfying about working with other people effectively, towards a shared goal; in my experience there is no substitute when it comes to building a community.
Activities
- What backchannels exist in your classroom, school, workplace?
- Communication is oxygen. What communication modalities are on offer?
- Are you biased toward eye-reading? Does your school conflate eye-reading with intelligence? Use the terms eye-reading, ear-reading, and finger-reading to enumerate and validate different types of reading.
- Does your classroom, workplace use three speeds of communication?
- How can we bring safety to the serendipity?
Reflection Activity
What’s in your toolbelt? What tools do you offer your students to facilitate confident and safe communication?
Take It further
Successful human beings, whether they have learning differences or not, mitigate weakness through teams, technology, and help, and they build a life around strengths, gifts, talents, and interests.
What we know about successful human beings is they take an interest and they make it a passion and they take the passion and they make it a sense of purpose and they take the sense of purpose and they build a pathway.
Lab School Lecture Series
