Journal of Microcomputer Applications (I 992) 15, i-7

Advanced technologies for enhancing the education of students with disabilities

Teresa Middleton

Instructional Technolog~~ Program, SRI International, Menlo Put-k, CA 94025. USA

The work described was undertaken for the Office of Special Education in the U.S. Department of Education to help them plan future funding for technology development. The agency has supported a large body of research out of which have come a number of innovative technologies (e.g. the Kurzweil Reader) but funding decisions in the past have been somewhat hit-or-miss.

In this paper I discuss the process by which we identified some critical learning needs of children with disabilities and how we then arrayed the emerging technologies and selected those that matched the needs. Technologies investigated include interactive multimedia, speech recognition and natural language, intelligent tutoring systems. ‘pocket intelligence’, and virtual reality.

From the information gathered from research and development laboratories across the country we have prepared detailed scenarios to describe the needs, illuminate the technology (including its background, development costs, and future development issues) and describe the process of technology transfer. I discuss in some detail the scenario we have prepared on virtual reality- -a technology that has generated a great deal of public interest in the past 12 months.

1. Introduction

The work described in this paper was undertaken to help the US Department of Education make decisions about which technologies have the best hope of becoming products to enhance the education of students who are disabled. The particular agency

for whom the work was done-the Office of Special Education Programs-has sup- ported quite a large body of research out of which have come a number of innovative technologies, including the Kurzweil Reader and SRI’s Deafnet technology. But their decisions on what technologies to support were being made in a somewhat hit-or-miss fashion, with no overall long-range plan. and they want to have a strategic orientation to their research funding.

The task. then, has been to investigate the vast array of technologies that are emerging from research and development labs, assess their worth for the education of students with disabilities, select the ones that seem most appropriate, project what it would take to transfer them to this particular market, and describe what it would take, in terms of

money and activities, to get them implemented. The overall approach was to go from the needs of the students, find technologies to

match those needs, gather information about those technologies to make our projec- tions, and then write these projections up in a series of scenarios which would illuminate the technology and describe the process of technology transfer.

This paper takes the reader through that process. discusses the technologies we identified, and then shares with you the scenario prepared on a technology that is generating a great deal of interest these days-virtual reality.

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2 T. Middleton

2. Identifying the needs

The first step in identifying needs was to categorize all disabilities. The US Department of Education categorization scheme will show you the vast array we had to deal with:

Learning, emotional, and mental impairments

l Learning-disabled l Mentally retarded l Seriously emotionally disturbed l Other health impaired (e.g. autistic children) Physical and sensory impairments l Orthopedically impaired l Deaf and hard of hearing l Visually handicapped (includes partially sighted and blind)

l Deaf/blind l Speech or language impaired l Multiply handicapped.

This broad set of needs was reduced to 10 categories of needs that had high priority-

either because they represented large populations for whom few technological solutions were currently available or because the problems the handicaps posed were so great that they begged for some kind of solution. These are shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Identzjication of needs

Child category

Students with learning disabilities Youth who are retarded

Youth with sensory impairments

Infants and toddlers with severe disabilities

Youth with severe physical impairments

Home/hospital-bound students in early grades

Need

Systems to promote learning Aids for training on sequential tasks,

on-the-job help Individualized learning systems Communication aids Support for early learning Information/support for parents Build feelings of autonomy Promote independence Maintain social/learning contacts

3. Identifying the technologies

The next step was to identify technologies that could meet those needs. For this, innovation search (idea generation) techniques were used. In the innovation search were grouped together disabled individuals, technology specialists, special educators, and rehabilitation engineers for a 2-day workshop. The needs identified were described, including vignettes or stories to illuminate them more clearly. Then, through ‘structured brainstorming’ a total of 362 ideas were generated; 265 of these were ideas about systems or tools for disabled users, their parents, or other caregivers. These were grouped into technology types as follows:

Advanced technologies for enhancing education 3

Multimedia-based learning tools

Shared workstations Pocket intelligence-hand-held computers, smart cards Individualized learning systems Advanced telecommunication, including video Speech recognition Electronic database/browsers Virtual environments.

To find out what development work was being done in these areas the following

companies were visited: American Telephone and Telegraph, Bell Corporation, Dragon Systems, Nynex Corporation, Texas Instruments, and VPL Research Inc.

At least one day was spent at each, sometimes more, meeting with people in research and development labs and finding out what they were working on and how those

applications might be applied to the needs we had identified. The information obtained from these visits was synthesized and the final technology applications matched to the persons with disabilities. The final match is shown in Table 2.

Table 2. Technologies matched to persons with disabilities

Disability _____

Students in early grades with learning disabilities

Students in upper grades with learning disabilities

Youth and young adults with moderate retardation

Youth with moderate to severe hearing impairment

Adolescents with visual or hearing impairment

Infants and toddlers with severe physical and/or sensory impairment

Parents, caregivers of infant toddlers Adolescents with severe physical

impairment Youth and young adult with severe physical

impairment Homebound, hospital-bound students in

early grades

Technology/application

Interactive multimedia

A computer-based collaborative writing too1

Pocket intelligence

Intelligent tutoring system

Telecommunication networks

Speech recognition, natural language

Tools for searching electronic databases Virtual reality

Shared workstations in separate locations

‘Video Windows’ --shared video via telecommunications

4. Writing it up Matching technologies to needs and gathering information on them was now complete. From the government’s point of view they had already received enormous benefit from the project. In fact they used these results to decide the types of technologies they would support in their Spring 1991 SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research) procurement.

4 T. Middleton

Now came the work of projecting what it would take to transfer them as viable products to the market-and writing this up for each technology in a way a layperson

could understand. The mechanism used for this is a series of scenarios, one for each of the disabilities and their matching technologies. In each scenario there is a vignette that describes what it is like to be the person with the disability, and the needs he has. Then is described the technology that could help address some of those needs and (in very pragmatic terms) what it would take to adapt and implement it.

5. Scenario on virtual reality

Cerebral palsy is motor disturbance that results from damage to the brain. usually at birth. The brain damage also may produce other disabling conditions such as speech and language disorders. Serious impediments for many children with cerebral palsy include their inability to walk around, socialize, and explore their environment, and their serious speech problems which hamper communications.

Virtual reality is a technology that has the potential of helping these children in unique ways. Let us first take a brief look at the life of a child with cerebral palsy. This description was provided by E. Paul Goldenberg, PhD of Education Development Corporation, Cambridge, MA.

Picture Jane. She is slumped in a wheelchair drooling slightly, head hanging to the side, immobile with a book open in front of her on her lap-table. Her most devastating handicap is not the cerebral palsy itself. but the resulting destruction of her sense of self.

Infants learn to master the world about them by seeing things and reaching for them. grabbing things, banging them on the table, putting them in their mouths, picking them up and dropping them, by exploring. For children with cerebral palsy these are lost experiences which reduce the foundation upon which they can build further learning.

The life work of a toddler is to learn his own power. Jane was never that kind of

toddler. Overprotection limited her choices and experiences; and cast her as ‘to be controlled’ rather than ‘to be controller.’ She can’t fight, verbally or physically. She can’t

sneak a cookie, or run away either. She can’t resist in any way except to be deliberately passive and withhold the help that she can give.

Pre-schoolers cut, paste and color; they play with bath toys and build with blocks and throw balls. They interact with a variety of other children. grappling with such difficult ideas as the ownership of toys, issues of sharing, accidental and purposeful hurts. Beyond the ‘sandbox physics’-learning the behavior and properties of the things-and socializa- tion, pre-school children are continuing to build their sense of autonomy. They are learning that they can make things and they can cause things. Jane’s pre-school years were different. She was a spectator. She could look at, or not look at. whatever her wheelchair faced. She also missed the complex and educationally rich interactions with other children.

5.1 Virtual realit?

Can we give Jane the ability to pick up and manipulate objects-including the ability to throw them? Perhaps not in real life, but it is possible in a ‘virtual’ world through the technology known as virtual reality. Virtual reality is 3-dimensional computer-based technology which generates ‘other world’ environments within which users can interact. The virtual world is not a real one, but is a representation of a world that is generated in a computer. It can be as close in match to the real one, or as different, as the person designing it wants.

Advanced technologies for enhancing education 5

Today interaction with such a world requires specialized input and output devices

such as gloves, body suit, head-mounted eyescreens and sensors, and 3-dimensional spatialized sound to allow the user to experience the artificial environment. The sense of entering virtual space is reinforced by the wide-angle image that is generated in high resolution. The head-mounted eyescreens present a wide-angle 3-D display of the virtual

environment and head-mounted sensors tell the system about the user’s head position and movement so that the display shown can be changed appropriately as the user turns

his head-just as his view of the real world would be altered as he moved. The system draws and presents new images quickly enough so the user feels he is ‘really there’.

Data gloves or body suits provide information to the system; they also serve as a representation of the user within the environment. The user sees a representation of his hand (in the case of the data glove). If he lifts his hand, and points to the right, he will see the representation of his hand do the same thing within the virtual world.

A virtual reality system permits the user to explore a 360” virtual environment and to

interact with lifelike and/or fantasy elements created by the designer. In the virtual world the user can do things as routine as throwing a ball, or as fantastic as flying through space and walking through keyholes. And these things can be made to occur by something as simple as a hand gesture or a nod, or (one day) a sound.

With virtual reality technology a child such as Jane can experience things that have been denied her in the past. The technology will provide her with experiences to help her

growth in her conceptual ability, in forming hypotheses, and for observing and interpreting results. Perhaps as important, the technology will enable her to exert control over an environment-she will get to choose what to explore, and what to leave alone and will learn the consequences of such choices. As the technology advances and refinements such as tactile feedback are built in, there will be opportunities for Jane to experience sensations she has never before been able to experience.

5.2 Virtual reality’s history

Virtual reality has been around in one form or another for quite a long time. An

approach to surrounding a user in a 360” virtual world was first developed in 1958 by Philco using a remote stereo camera and head-mounted display. For the past IO-~15 years work on the creation of a virtual reality system that would allow the user to interact with it has been pursued in a number of research labs. The current development of virtual world technology, and the introduction of first applications into the market- place, is relatively recent and to a large degree has relied on the existence of very powerful graphics machines for presenting and manipulating the virtual world. Today’s principal input device is a glove containing a number of sensors; and roaming the environment takes an ability to point, make a fist, or gesture. Within 5 years it is likely that other input devices such as voice activators or eye movement sensors will be incorporated into the virtual reality set of components.

5.3 Current developmental issues

The present head and body tracking devices, used to detect where the user is in the virtual environment, are quite restrictive, and need to be improved. Researchers are also working on the problem of providing tactile feedback to the user. If Jane were to enter a virtual environment today, she would be able to walk or float around by signalling with

6 T. Middleton

her hand or other input. She could also pick up a ball, and throw it. What she would be missing, however, is the feel of the ball in her hand-the heft of it, its texture, its

roundness. Within the next few years such tactile feedback may be possible. A third problem to be resolved is in the way the user interacts with the environment. The data glove can be used to point, or gesture, and eventually to receive information about

weight, texture, temperature and so on; however, the body suit which provides a sense of full-body motion is relatively clumsy and restricting.

Future markets for virtual reality technology appear quite broad. The technology has a variety of applications which includes: design (e.g. automobiles, buildings), entertain- ment, training in military and in industry, education (e.g. learning surgical techniques, conceptualizing molecular structures), surrogate travel, and for performing operations in remote, dangerous, or hostile environments (e.g. maintenance checks of a satellite- based computer, checking the level of toxicity after a nuclear reactor explosion).

Virtual reality technology is now moving out of research and development laborator- ies and into the mainstream market and it seems to be doing so in three phases. First, within the next 3-5 years, it will be implemented in industry and in the military (e.g. for design, for training, for operating machines from a great distance). Next we can expect to see more general use for entertainment and, concurrent with this, the introduction of some virtual reality applications into higher education settings, particularly in the areas of medicine, science, and computer science.

Researchers are already working on applications for persons with cerebral palsy and TM communication problems. The Virtual Receptionist is a system developed for persons

with cerebral palsy that allows them to serve as receptionists using the data glove as an input device to a computer-driven telephone answering program. As its developer says. the goal of The Virtual Receptionist is to ‘allow persons with speech and/or motor impairments to perform the job of receptionist-answering and initiating phone calls, taking messages, doing word processing. The main theme governing this work is to take the impaired person’s strongest ability, what he or she can do and control best, and

harness that ability to control of the program.’ The second application under development for a handicapped population is the Glove-

TalkerTM. This involves gesture recognition (input from the data glove) to be mapped to a voice synthesizer. The Glove-Talker is set up to recognize the gestures of the individual: the technology will make use of the person’s ability and not anticipate more mobility than he or she has.

6. Summary

I have said that all children need the kinds of experiences that foster learning; that support growth in conceptual ability, in forming hypotheses, and for observing and interpreting results. Children like Jane are, by reason of their disability, denied many of these experiences. Technology can now provide us with the means to create artificially what cannot be experienced naturally.

Picture Jane in the future. Instead of sitting in her wheelchair as an uninvolved spectator, she is playing hide and go seek with a playmate in a virtual environment. Her playmate may also be wheelchair-bound, yet they can run behind bushes, crawl under beds, or climb into laundry hampers with a gesture of a hand, or the shrug of a shoulder. The two girls can pick up objects and examine them; toss them to each other; throw them

Advanced technologies for enhancing education 7

away. A water balloon explodes as it hits the ground; a balloon full of air just bounces.

Those are important discoveries. The possibilities are limited only by the child’s capacity for learning, and the creativity of the world’s designer.

Bibliography

D. Churbuck 1990. The ultimate computer game. Forbes, February. P. Elmer-Dewitt 1990. (Mis)adventures in cyberspace. Time, September 3. S. S. Fisher & J. M. Tazelaar 1990. Living in a virtual-world. Byte, July. P. Freiberger 1990. Schools are still low-tech. San Francisco Examiner, September 2. E. P. Goldenberg 1991. Jane’s Story. Exploring Technologies for the Education of Children with

Disabilities. SRI International, Menlo Park, CA, June 1991. R. Kanigel 1986. Computers will help someday. Johns Hopkins Magazine, April. V. Y. Rab & G. Youcha 1990. Visions of the future. This World, San Francisco, CA, August 19. R. Stuart & J. C. Thomas 1990. The implications of education in cyberspace. NYNEX Artificial

Intelligence Laboratory, White Plains, NY, July 1990. US Congress, Office of Technology Assessment 1988. Power On, New Tools for Teaching and

Learning, OTA-SET-379. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office. US Congress, Office of Technology Assessment 1989. Linking fir Learning: A New Course for

Education, OTA-SET-430. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office. A Vivid Experience-And You Are There. Personal Computing, August 1990. Virtual receptionist project 1990. Greenleaf Medical Systems, Palo Alto, CA.

Teresa Middleton, Program Manager for Instructional Technology at SRI International in Menlo Park, California, performs research in the areas of education and instructional technology for domestic and international government agencies and commercial organizations. MS Middleton specializes in the study of the application of technology to education and training, and in the study of emerging technologies and their transfer to education markets. Among her most recent projects was a study to explore advanced technologies for the education of students with disabilities-an 18-month project, funded by the United States Department of Education, designed to support the agency’s long-range plans for funding innovative technology research and development. A particular focus at this time is virtual environment technology. MS Middleton chaired SRI’s technical conference on this subject in June 1991, and serves on the editorial panel of Virtual Reality Review.

MS Middleton received her M.B.A. from Pepperdine University and holds a Bachelor of Science degree in business administration from Syracuse University, New York.

SRI International (formerly Stanford Research Institute) is an inde- pendent, not-for-profit science- and knowledge-based research and con- sulting organization. Staff perform a broad spectrum of problem- oriented research and consulting under contract to government, indus- try, and business. SRI, one of the world’s largest research and consulting organizations, provides services ranging from basic science and engineer- ing to applied research, business management, and consulting. Head- quarters and principal laboratories are in Menlo Park, California, with regional offices in Washington, D.C.; Princeton, N.J.; and international offices around the world.