accessibility

In this 45-minute recording from the 2006 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference, we'll hear from Sara Clark, David Cook, Craig Jackson, Susan Lewis, Tracy Mitrano, & Terry Thompson in a session entitled Campus Perspectives on IT Accessibility. They share accessibility strategies from their respective campuses.

From David Wilcox comes this timely post on "Home truths about technobabble and social media."

I agree with David that we ed tech-ers can become victims of our own success: caught up in our vision, we can get carried away by our own enthusiasm, and start using language that is alienating to the very people we are trying to engage.

The difficulty is that many of us working in this area are essentially working as trumpet-blarers (we might prefer a metaphor of 'trailblazing', but I think 'trumpet-blaring' is probably more accurate). We're in the business of trying to convince other people that there's something going on, something worth paying attention to, and talking with jargon is - unfortunately - a well-tested strategy for acquiring credibility and demonstrating competence. It's not the only strategy, not by any means, but it's one that - if we're honest - most of us have been known to use. We should all take extra special care that the process of establishing our credentials does not involve silencing others, and does not convince our potential audience that we are interested only in talking to ourselves.

In this 17 minute recording, Marliu Goodyear sits down with Lehigh University's Bruce Taggart to cover a range of topics including professional development, accessibility and portals. 

In this 17 minute recording, we'll hear from Jim Gregory about a range of topics including a very interesting approach to classroom technology support and the use of automatic lecture recording systems (and video more broadly). 

In this 12 minute recording, Virginia Tech's John Moore touches on a range of topics related to Sakai and shares some thoughts on patents, and a very interesting "smart dorm" project.


This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2006 Fall Task Force Meeting.  The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity.  You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org

In this 17 minute recording, Marilu Goodyear sits down with John Morris for a discussion about transcoding legacy media, digital preservation, and the synergy between architecture and technology.

In this 10 minute recording, Bill Hogue sits down with Tim Lorang to get some thoughts on the Research Channel and their digital asset management software, Digital Well.

New disability laws have come into force in the UK:

The new Disability Equality Duty (DED) places a legal obligation on public bodies to consider the needs of the disabled when planning services. In carrying out their functions, the Act says public authorities must "have due regard" to needs that include eliminating discrimination and promoting positive attitudes towards disabled people.

All we need now is for people to actually start meeting their obligations.

This 25 minute recording provides coverage of an interview with Google's Vint Cerf. In a couple of weeks, Dr. Cerf will be speaking at our Annual Conference, and we hope to see you then. For now, let's listen in as we cover a range of topics including Google Video, digital preservation, intellectual property, net neutrality and high performance computing.

The use of podcasts brings an assymmetry into a learning style area.  Converting text into audio has been reasonably well solved by "screen reader" technology.

Podcasts provide the audio but some learning styles would be more comfortable with the addition of text.  People with auditory impairments may need the text.

As podcast usage becomes more common in education, the need for a good (accurate, fast, inexpensive - no, "pick any two" isn't acceptable! :-) conversion method grows.

The old method was dictation/transcription, which is expensive and slow . Its accuracy can be excellent if more expense and more time is allocated.  The expense is high enough to keep transcriptions being routinely made for all recorded lectures and podcasts.

There are more and more speech-to-text technologies being announced.  Many are still in the laboratory or under development.  I'm hoping that we will see a number of these available in the next year, and at affordable prices.

This would greatly help learning.  I hope it's not another attack of vaporware!