'I know how I feel': listening to young people with life-limiting conditions who have learning and communication impairments

UK government policy advocates involving children in decisions about their lives. However, disabled children are often marginalized and not consulted, especially those with learning and communication impairments. Drawing on an ongoing English Government funded longitudinal study exploring different groups of service users' choices, this article demonstrates the important contribution that qualitative research methods, especially non-traditional methods, can procure when working with young people who are non-verbal or have limited speech. Working with young people with life-limiting conditions raises some specific challenges for researchers. Here, adapting project wide materials and research methods in order to gain some thematic continuity across different service user groups. Some of these considerations and challenges will be discussed, especially the development of non-verbal forms of communication (talking matsTM). Practical experiences, both positive and negative will be examined. The article concludes by considering some wider implications of using symbols based methods for future research and how these methods can be used across disciplines and by practitioners in their everyday work

SymbolDesign: A User-centered Method to Design Pen-based Interfaces and Extend the Functionality of Pointer Input Devices

A method called "SymbolDesign" is proposed that can be used to design user-centered interfaces for pen-based input devices. It can also extend the functionality of pointer input devices such as the traditional computer mouse or the Camera Mouse, a camera-based computer interface. Users can create their own interfaces by choosing single-stroke movement patterns that are convenient to draw with the selected input device and by mapping them to a desired set of commands. A pattern could be the trace of a moving finger detected with the Camera Mouse or a symbol drawn with an optical pen. The core of the SymbolDesign system is a dynamically created classifier, in the current implementation an artificial neural network. The architecture of the neural network automatically adjusts according to the complexity of the classification task. In experiments, subjects used the SymbolDesign method to design and test the interfaces they created, for example, to browse the web. The experiments demonstrated good recognition accuracy and responsiveness of the user interfaces. The method provided an easily-designed and easily-used computer input mechanism for people without physical limitations, and, with some modifications, has the potential to become a computer access tool for people with severe paralysis.National Science Foundation (IIS-0093367, IIS-0308213, IIS-0329009, EIA-0202067

Math Search for the Masses: Multimodal Search Interfaces and Appearance-Based Retrieval

We summarize math search engines and search interfaces produced by the Document and Pattern Recognition Lab in recent years, and in particular the min math search interface and the Tangent search engine. Source code for both systems are publicly available. "The Masses" refers to our emphasis on creating systems for mathematical non-experts, who may be looking to define unfamiliar notation, or browse documents based on the visual appearance of formulae rather than their mathematical semantics.Comment: Paper for Invited Talk at 2015 Conference on Intelligent Computer Mathematics (July, Washington DC

An Action Research Intervention Towards Overcoming “Theory Resistance” in Photojournalism Students

Account of an action research project designed to understand and overcome 'theory resistance' in undergraduate photojournalism students, based on the Academic Literacies model. A collaboration with students using group reading exercises, drawing and questionnaire data to investigate students' relationships to the reading and writing encountered on their course

Justifications-on-demand as a device to promote shifts of attention associated with relational thinking in elementary arithmetic

Student responses to arithmetical questions that can be solved by using arithmetical structure can serve to reveal the extent and nature of relational, as opposed to computational thinking. Here, student responses to probes which require them to justify-on-demand are analysed using a conceptual framework which highlights distinctions between different forms of attention. We analyse a number of actions observed in students in terms of forms of attention and shifts between them: in the short-term (in the moment), medium-term (over several tasks), and long-term (over a year). The main factors conditioning students´ attention and its movement are identified and some didactical consequences are proposed

Circling the Cross: Bridging Native America, Education, and Digital Media

Part of the Volume on Learning Race and Ethnicity: Youth and Digital MediaTo paraphrase a Native elder, any road will get you somewhere. The question for Native America is, where will the information highway take them? As Native Americans continue to face challenges from the legacy of colonialism, new media provide both an opportunity and crises in education. Standardized education policy such as No Child Left Behind and funding cuts in social services inadvertently impact Net access and Indian education, yet alternative programs and approaches exist. It is necessary that programs conceptualize new media learning strategies within a historical context by being sensitive to the political and cultural connotations of literacy and technology in Native American communities. By encouraging the use of new media as a tool for grassroots community media and locally relevant storytelling, this chapter asks educators to consider an alternative epistemology that incorporates non-Western approaches to ecology and knowledge