Monday, July 5th:
A good start is established in this day by watching Susie’s and Tyler’s cases and starting to construct the perception of assistive technologies and what impact they have on disabled people’s lives, capabilities, and, as a result, level of satisfaction and happiness. For me, Susie’s and Tyler’s videos have a great influence on my initial shift for perceiving disabled people as being able. How different they are when having access to the assistive technologies they need in order to communicate and act like other normal people. My first set of questions sparking from the video message that technologies seem to have the potential for turning disabled to able in terms of learning and communicating are: how many disabled kids or their parents are aware of these technologies? How many of them are willing to utilize it? How many of them believe that it would make difference? And is there enough support for people with disabilities to be introduced to assistive technologies?
Another thought that resulted from watching the other case studies’ videos for Ryan, Caleb, Amelia, Ben, Lucas, and Mathew is how pervasive is the presumption that disabled people have limited intelligence. I also learned from these four videos a new valuable lesson that the inability to articulate feelings, thoughts, or ideas has nothing to do with the cognitive and intelligent level. Particularly the two case studies for Ben and Lucas made me think that the basic board and marker teaching and communication method that is traditionally utilized by teachers has to be broadened to include technologies that support visual learners.