by Samuel Sennott
One to One Thousand is a concept that I believe will powerfully help the field of special education. The basic premise is that if a thousand people each work for an hour on a project with agreed upon standards, then they can create something that one person working for a thousand hours, could never create. It gets pretty in-depth from there, but I am excited to share how the theory is shaping up in some upcoming presentations, papers, and webcasts.
That being said, it is fun watching the theory unfold over on the terrific collaboration between UNC’s Center for Literacy and Disability Studies and the Computer Science Department, the Tar Heel Reader. Look at how quickly an open source library of books is growing, by checking out a snip from a post on the site’s homepage:
“The graph below shows the amazing growth of the collection thanks to the contributions of many authors.
| Total | 4 | 14 | 20 | 66 | 164 | 180 |
| Week | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |
We’ve had 66111 page views from 1470 different computers worldwide.”
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by Samuel Sennott
In the context of an Augmentative and Alternative Communication course, it is often challenging to teach the subject matter framework information, general device knowledge, device programming, as well as all of the intangibles such as Velcro strategies and light tech board hacks and modifications. As more and more information and research comes onto the scene coupled with the ever expanding list of mid-tech to high-tech speech generating devices, we need to start finding ways to compact the information. One clear focus of assistive technology research for the foreseeable future is looking at ways to get massive amounts of framework and technical knowledge to students who are often busy either in full time school programs or both in a combination of school and employment settings.
Personally, I am being called on in an ever greater way in the speech language division I work in to provide training and tutorials to students in the graduate degree program. While it is important to have a personal touch and bring the concepts to life, it has been helpful to find ways to not reduplicate training and efforts.
Here is one resource my friend Amir Shasavari and I created. It is authored in Keynote, but here is the PowerPoint version. The focus is to help train people about the relatively new Tango! AAC device from Blink Twice. Here at Nova Southeastern University, we are finding it a helpful resource for training graduate students in Speech Language Pathology in their diagnostics as well as their AAC course.
The presentation/ tutorial has features that are important for both online learning and for self study:
- linkable information that goes out to increasingly rich levels of media (video, more directions, downloads)
- solid navigation tools inside the tutorial
- a uniform look and feel to the whole user experience
I hope you find this resource useful and consider the importance of this topic.
Download the tango tutorial in MS PowerPoint
Click the image or here to go to the online flash version.
