The future challenge of the ADA: Shaping humanity’s transformation

Through a meta-review of global trends and the contextualization of the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the author proposes that a change of strategy and focus is required to achieve the ADA’s aspirations. The argument is made that the disability community and inclusion effort must participate in a leadership role in shaping the current transformation of society, including three broad systemic factors: (a) design and development, (b) research and evidence, and (c) education and learning, to avert widening disparity and address risks that affect all members of the global society

The value of imperfection: The Wabi-Sabi Principle in aesthetics and learning

OER-based learning has the potential to overcome many shortcomings and problems of traditional education. It is not hampered by IP restrictions; can depend on collaborative, cumulative, iterative refinement of resources; and the digital form provides unprecedented flexibility with respect to configuration and delivery. The OER community is a progressive group of educators and learners with decades of learning research to draw from, who know that we must prepare learners for an evolving and diverse reality. Despite this OER tends to replicate the unsuccessful characteristics of traditional education. To remedy this we may need to remember the importance of imperfection, mistakes, problems, disagreement, and the incomplete for engaged learning, and relinquish our notions of perfection, acknowledging that learners learn differently and we need diverse learners. We must stretch our perceptions of quality and provide mechanisms for engaging the incredible pool of educators globally to fulfill the promise of inclusive education

Start your machine learning engines and race to the edge!

Summer 201

Learning differences & digital equity in the classroom

This chapter addresses digital equity in the classroom for students with learning differences, as well as the role of technology in the provision of equitable education for the full diversity of students. The chapter discusses the evolving opportunities and challenges that information technology in the classroom presents to students with learning differences and their teachers. To meaningfully understand this topic requires an understanding of the complex context, the forces at play, and their relation to students with learning differences. Among the forces at play are policies, regulations, the accessibility movement, technical trends, instructional design strategies, educational publishing, open educational resources, pedagogical trends, quality control approaches in education, and governance of formal education. The chapter highlights the benefits to all students of designing the classroom experience for students with learning differences

Life-long learning on the inclusive web

If our formal education systems were to be graded on achieving the following assignment: “to enable all students to reach their diverse, full potential, so that they can be prosperous, self-guided contributors to our global community,” our systems of education would be flunking. The impact of this failure will exponentially worsen over time, given socio-technical trends. To achieve this crucial learning goal we need more than incremental improvement. We need disruptive innovation. Can the Web be the disruptive impetus and generative scaffolding for an education system that can achieve this goal? How can we both reform and leverage Web accessibility approaches to support this mission? These are the questions explored in this article. Complex adaptive systems, emerging decentralized systems of trust, “small” and “thick” data analytics, Internet of things sensing, open platforms, but most importantly --connected communities, are all recruited in the thought experiment to craft a candidate response

The three dimensions of Inclusive Design: Part three

This is the third part of a three part blog that describes a guiding framework for inclusive design in a digitally transformed and increasingly connected world. Part One can be found here. Part Two can be found here. The three dimensions of the framework are: 1. Recognize, respect, and design for human uniqueness and variability. 2. Use inclusive, open & transparent processes, and co-design with people who have a diversity of perspectives, including people that can’t use or have difficulty using the current designs. 3. Realize that you are designing in a complex adaptive system