2005 NCTI Conference General Sessions Long Writeup

Paths to Innovation

Promoting awareness of the benefits of Assistive Technology (AT) for students is a common practice among professional and stakeholders in the field of AT. But how do we promote awareness of the benefits of joining the field to new professionals and nurture the next generation of innovators and researchers?

Larry Goldberg (Moderator), Director, National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM), WGBH

Michael Behrmann, Professor and Director, Helen A. Kellar Institute for Human disAbilities, George Mason University

Corinna Lathan, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, AnthroTronix

David Williamson Shaffer, Professor, Wisconsin Center for Education Research, University of Wisconsin

The dividing lines among researcher, distributor, or vendor blur although all have different roles. How do we collaborate across the lines? How can we advance the field?

David Williamson Shaffer, Professor, Wisconsin Center for Education Research, University of Wisconsin

Technology can help practitioners think about innovation and education in the modern world—but only if the entire complex of form and content is considered. In Star Trek, when they invented something that they believed would be the future of education, the writers simply added electronics to traditional pedagogy. That’s clearly not good enough if we are going to compete in a world where jobs are being outsourced to other nations.

Some technology that has been commercially developed is epistemic games—like Zoo Tycoon—where you get to create and manage all parts of a zoo. You can walk into the zoo, and see how your patrons are doing. You can track attendance and track the profit sheet. Games like Zoo Tycoon present complex worlds with decisions that have consequences. Play, in this case, is about being able to create imaginary situations, creating worlds. These games recruit players to particular identities, people who need to care about certain things and manage their consequences.

How can technology like this be used to support innovative thinking and other educational results? Every subculture has an epistemic frame, the perspective through which you see and frame the culture. These games are based on understanding how people deal with uncertainty, make decisions, and engage in a kind of thinking that reshapes action while we are acting. In these ways, epistemic games are similar to practicums, where trainees act in their fields, get feedback on performance, and adjust their behaviors and strategies. Technologies can be used to simulate those educational, skill-building, judgment-building experiences.

Another example is a program called Ecology 20/20, in which players become urban planners. They get real-life input through site visits, but use computer tools to assess the impact of various changes and create a model, which they present to mock representatives of a City Council, explaining the trade offs that they made in a complex model. Pre- and post-tests assess how they think about complex, interconnected problems in the real world.

This kind of tool could involve professional training—and cut across professional training, enabling students to think across traditional categories, a key element of innovation.

Corinna Lathan, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, AnthroTronix

Lathan founded AnthroTronix in 1999 as a research and development company, starting work with a rehabilitation hospital for children. They worked with the Department of Education and then received a DARVA grant for military application. She is currently launching CosmoBot, an interactive robot for kids with disabilities, a transitional product called Mission Control, an alternative computer interface and software program.

How did she enter into this business?

Her background was in aerospace engineering and neuroscience. Then, because she wanted to be an astronaut, she started to wonder how human beings could live and work in space—which led her into tech transfer. That led her to programs in tech transfer, and eventually joined the National Rehab Hospital in Washington, DC and Catholic University where she became a professor of Biomedical Engineering. Finally, the moment arrived when she wanted to do in industry what she was doing in the lab. The University of Maryland’s business incubator guided her, she found resources through an SBIR program grant, and so the business was started.

Michael Behrmann, Professor and Director, Helen A. Kellar Institute for Human disAbilities, George Mason University

This panelist was interested in technology early on. By 1981, he was involved with AT.

He sees the “edge of innovation” operating in four stages:

• Over the Edge, thinking way out in front.
• Cutting Edge, areas where the work being done often doesn’t directly end up in successful commercial projects.
• The Bleeding Edge, where you’re trying to integrate systems and where applications are possible and make a difference in people’s lives.
• The Dull Edge, where the technology is obsolete (for example, fifteen year-old computers in the schools).

Ideas move through these stages. They may start as Over the Edge, become Cutting Edge, then become useful Bleeding Edge applications—only, finally, to end up as Dull Edge systems. Some ideas have a hard time moving from one stage to another. For example, Robotics hasn’t been able to move from Cutting Edge to Bleeding Edge, although it’s getting closer.

A lot of the work at the Helen Kellar Center funds Cutting Edge so these items can move into practice. Some ideas are ahead of their time, for example, programs that collect data and automatically pour it into charts and graphs for further use.

We need to think about design and uses. Look at the example of curb cuts—they are not just used for people traveling in wheelchairs. What else can “electronic curb cuts” be used for? We need to think about unintended design consequences. If you make a curb cut at the corner of the intersecting sidewalks, what happens to a person with limited vision that is habituated to use them as they are traditionally placed, one on each side of the corner, to understand where the crosswalks are placed?

Here is an “over the edge concept” for new teachers. What do new teachers think they’re going to be doing in the next 25 years? Teaching reading and writing. But reading and writing, the panelist asserts, will not be part of the curriculum in the next 25 years. With the introduction of Gutenberg’s printing press, reading and writing became important because it was the easiest mode of information retrieval. These new technologies will bring back the Storyteller, which will be the computer. The computer can retrieve and synthesize information, and give it back to you in video, sound. Why should we teach reading and writing? Our society already shows evidence that you don’t need it to survive on a day to day basis. Because people have television, you’d don’t need a fourth grade reading level to get the news off television or the cell phone. Because of this and other consequences of technology, the curriculum in our schools may change.

Discussion; Responses to Questions in Q&A

Corinna Lathan: Venture capital is not a likely source of funding because they don’t want innovative tech, they want a sure thing that produce a strong return on investment. They are looking for evolutionary, not revolutionary, ideas.

Explore the possibilities of expanding your market beyond its current niche. For example, a product like Where In the World Is Carmen Sandiego? was a market intersection of technology, entertainment, and education.

Government and angel investment, while slower, can be desirable because you retain IP ownership.

Michael Behrmann: It is hard to do large experimental group studies in special education. More developers should link up with researchers.

Larry Goldberg: He sees an oncoming train wreck, because if school systems continue to ask for research-based products, small companies won’t be able to afford producing products.

David Williamson Shaffer: Funding for innovation tends to come from government grants. But funding out of No Child Left Behind has tended to support ideas and products that are no longer cutting edge but on the way to dull—because what they fund must move immediately to wide application.

All of the discussion about scaling up is wrong because it assumes that we’ve already done enough research to know the basic answers.

MB: On the subject of research-based practice, some common sense things don’t need to be research tested—a child who needs an augmentive device to take the test doesn’t need someone to prove this, he just needs to get the device and learn how to effectively use it.

LG: Large mainstream technology companies perceive traditional AT either as (a) a nuisance, (b) something unnecessary for their consumers, (c) an intriguing niche market, or (d) integral to the consumer solution.

Comment from the floor: There is often very little difference, in terms of design, between doing research that industry can benefit from, and one that can not benefit. A small difference in design enables you to make a huge difference in your market, so that you can easily reach the second audience and make loads of profit.

DWS: Think about the nTag. Everyone notices that it is clunky, it keeps resetting itself and it is quite frustrating, but imagine all the things it does right that we don’t even notice. It does a pretty amazing array of things.

Comment from the floor: We haven’t done enough to get the word out on the history of how AT has served that wider market. For example, the typewriter was invented for cerebral palsy. Breakthroughs in AT enhance the entire society and can revolutionize education for not only special ed kids in USA but in the rest of the world.