Keynote 1 – Formatted Transcripts

I can’t tell you how delighted I am to welcome you all to better learning by design. This conference was conceived of in the hallway and cast about a year ago when our UDL@UVM staff attended cast training on universal design for learning on higher education and it was such a powerful experience for all of us to have framework that really fit for and we could really see it and envision it as a model for UVM. And so we embarked on creating this conference, and we’re just very excited to have a great variety of participants here today. Many of the participants are also presenters which we think will be a wonderful way for us to begin to network and then to strengthening networking for the future A. cross different college campuses with our partners in K through 12 education, and to strengthen our work here at UVM. I’d like to invite Dr. Susan Ryan to come and give you a few words of welcome, because we are paths housed within the center of community and inclusion and we’re very, very helpful with the support. Well

welcome everybody it’s great to see so many people coming to the conference, and Susan has worked so hard with larry Sheldon who both of them wrote the UDL grant and the byproducts of the grant had been enormous and this is one of them. I wanted to tell you just a little bit about p the center on disability and community incalculation. It’s one of 67 centers on disability in the United States. And you can see them. There’s one in every state and some states have three of them. We have representatives from Virginia here today, and also from Maine a and these centers are scattered around the United States and their mission is to improve the lives of people with disabilities.

threw research, interdisciplinary training, community service and dissemination.

and the universal design for learning project represents the mission of the center really well and is a reflection of work that has been going on in the center for over 30 years. We have a strong belief in belonging, so the projects that are at the center, whether they’re early intervention or higher education, such as UDL, represent the value of belonging, that all individuals, whatever their abilities are, belong in their homes, schools, and communities. Another value that this UDL project represents is that of inclusion. So we at CDCI believe that all individuals should be included in all aspects of the community and life and school. And this UDL grant demonstrates as you shall be able to see through the various workshops about making accommodations in the classroom so that all individuals can learn better, regardless of their ability and finally it represents a strength that the center and area collaboration, so that the UDL grant has worked A. cross the university and A. cross departments and actually A. cross the United States as will be indicated by the work that they’ve done with CASS. So thank you very much for coming and I’ll turn it back to Susan.

thank you, Susan. We love the name Susan in Vermont. We’re really grateful for the support of CDCI in helping us to break ground with this conference and we are hoping that this conference will be an annual event. So we’ll be looking to all of you to help us with your ideas about what will make next year’s conference really wonderful. I am very, very excited to share with you that we are at a university where our president really gets what we’re doing. And our president, Daniel Fogel, was hoping to be with us this morning, but because of his graduation schedule, wasn’t able to be, but he permitted this individual yes welcome to video welcome to you. Awe’re going to ask for some support to get our audio connected because you want to hear his words, I’m sure. Across.

I forgot how to get back to the slide that I left, so pardon me, please. At this time I’d like all of UDL@UVM staff to stand, please. Don’t be shy. This is really the wonderful team that put all this together, and probably the chief — yes. And the chief organizer, you all met at the registration table, crystal La Bell. I hope that you will get to know all of these staff members throughout the day or if you’re here for the three days, they all have a yellow designation on their name tag. And we hope that you will just introduce yourself so we can all get to know each other. This is a very hard-working group of people and they’re all part-time. So if you think that that’s a challenge, you’re right. To bring something like this together, and it just is a testimony to the incredible dedication and the commitment to what we’re teaching and promoting here in this conference. You’ll also notice that some individuals have a green tab on their badge and those are our presenters. Many of our presenters, as I mentioned before, are also participants, so we’re very excited about that. In addition, we’ve got volunteers, mostly from CDCI, who have given up their time to come and help us in any way that they can, and even some that have come out of retirement, so we’re really grateful for everyone’s help.

we’re trying something very different during these next three days and we hope that you will give us a little grace if there are a few bumps. We really want to create a community here, and to make this conference accessible as an online experience, and to that end, we’re going to be doing a few things different than you may typically expect. We are trying to go green and to reduce the paper that we use for this conference, and for that reason, you will find the power points and materials that the presenters have provided to the conference available on the website that we will show you shortly. So you will access the conference materials online. If there is anyone who needs a printed copy for any reason, let us know and we will try to provide that with you as quickly as we can. We also have placed our evaluation process for each session on that online location, so that each session has a survey monkey link that’s specific to that session, so as you finish your participation in the session, you will be reminded of that survey monkey link. Now, many of you came with laptops and requested access to the Internet during your stay here. Don’t worry if you haven’t come with a laptop. We can — we have a laptop that is out at the registration area, so you can conduct your evaluation there, and yes, we do have paper copies, as well. So if you need that, please stop out at the registration area for that.

we will also be posting session notes, as we go along. In each of the rooms, a room host will be present, and either the room host or someone who might volunteer, and you can consider whether you’d like to volunteer, will be taking a few notes related to that session, and we have some guides about what we would like to be included in those notes. For example, any websites or articles or people resources that might be mentioned during the session by the presenter or by the participants, but that might not have made it into the PowerPoint. They may be pieces of information that emerge from the session. We want to make sure that that gets recorded. So those will be some things that will be in those session notes. Why are we making this such an important part? Because some of you have selected a session that you’re going to attend, but you may be very interested in the other sessions. So this will give a way for you to have access to some of what happened there. In addition, we’ll have an online blog and I’m going to have Holly Parker come and join me up here to actually walk you through that, and what we want you to do is to feel really comfortable commenting and raising questions in that blog experience. So that we have sort of an ongoing conversation, so if haven’t noticed, we’re really big on participation ot this conference and your participation will really be what makes this an excellent conference, rather than just a good one.

so Holly, I’ll let you go ahead.

thanks, Susan. So here is the URL for the blog that will be our conference blog. It’s also blipgd pg linked from our main UDL website and our UDL@UVM blog so if you forget this particular link, you can go to either one of those websites and as Susan mentioned, we hope this becomes an annual event, so I’ve set up the URL so it can become an annual event and hopefully each year we can just be adding to this. So if we click here, just give you a little bit of preview …:

this is a main page and you’ll see there’s a welcome here. There’s a day one link. The all of the materials for days two and three will be forthcoming. They are not all up there yet, but they will be. And everything for day one that I have so far is there, but we will be adding to it. So Susan mentioned that you can go to evaluations here. Once you’ve finished a session you can click on day one and you’ll see there’s an evaluation set up for each of the sessions so here’s the one for the keynote address and as you scroll down, you also see each workshop has a link. If I have received a file for a particular workshop such as the PowerPoint file or word file, I will include that but I don’t have all of them up there yet for today. So this is sort of how it’s going to go for each of the days, and you can just click right on the link for each day, you’ll be able to get all of these resources. Susan mentioned that we wanted you also to be participating and we’ve created a water cooler for everyone to be talking online about the sessions. And also some blog guidelines and a purpose for why we have created this online participatory environment, so if you want to post, please review the guidelines first. Obviously it’s just a lot about being respectful to each other and not posting anything really derogatory about the conference up here for everybody to see. If you have issues, just let one of the staff people know. And otherwise, in the water cooler area, you should be able to post a comment and I’ve set it up so it’s a threaded discussion, so we’ll he see how that works out. I haven’t done this before in word press but you know, I’m up for the challenge. So I hope some people start commenting today.

thank you, Holly, can you get me back to my PowerPoint page? Thank you.

# she did it so easily.

OK, we have established some guidelines for our comments and really we want to have a sense of community about our writing and our contributions. So these bullets represent what we think would be good practice and would help us to really build that connection. We want to build and expand upon the values that promote universal design and universal design for learning for everyone. We would like you to limit your comments and questions to the conference topics. And relevant material. We’d like you to share your ideas and the relevance of UD and UDL in your lives. We’d like you to also feel free to post comments or questions about the conference presentations or about applications and hopefully we’ll get some conversation going back and forth. As you would expect, we all will be respectful in our commentary on the conference and related information. We ask that you use person-first language as a value and honor confidentiality if that is an issue. We also just want you to respect each of our presenters and we’re just really excited that they’re willing to share their materials. We will be having, as you are aware, keynotes from cast and we’re very, very excited about having each morning a full morning of keynote presentation that will then launch us into the afternoon breakout sessions. You should have selected breakout sessions and we’ve tried to give first choice as much as possible. The locations of the breakout sessions are all on this floor and they should be fairly easy to find. If you have any difficulty, ask someone with a yellow name tag or check at the registration desk. We will be having a closing session at the end of the day. And I know that’s a very risky thing to do, especially on a gorgeous May day. But we’re counting on you to stay with us in this community, and to that end, we’re going to be having some very nice prizes awarded at the closing each day, and we’ve kind of coined this little PPP, if you post on the blog, and you are present in the afternoon, you may win a prize and some of our prizes are not so elaborate and some are very, very nice. So I hope that that motivates you a little bit. I actually hope that you’re motivated more by the community that you find yourselves in. On Tuesday, we will be having a social from 4 to 6 — 4:30 to 6 in the far ballroom from down at the end of this hall, and during that time, we will have some exhibiter tables and we have a few vendors who are going to be coming to share with us some of their materials and technology applications. During that time, p if you are present, you may win our grand prize, which is valued at over $600. So please be there for the social. There will be a cash bar that evening, so you may want to plan accordingly.

all of the other conference logistics, hopefully you have been able to locate the rest rooms which are in the area near the registration table. There are some computer stations on the second floor. Is it the second floor where the bookstore is?

third floor, excuse me. We’re on the fourth. On the third floor is the main level of the Davis Center. And there are actually 8 computer stations there that you are welcome to use if you did not bring a laptop computer. And then we have an additional one at our registration table. If you didn’t bring your computer today or request Internet service but you would like to tomorrow or Wednesday, just see crystal or someone at the registration table and they will set you up with a guest pass to use the Internet.

now, I think I’ve covered all of the logistics. I’m going to look to my team to see if I’ve forgotten anything. All right. Well, I just have a very, very brief story to share with you before we move to the introduction of our keynote speaker. It was about five years ago that the initial grant came to CDCI under CHIDY’s director, she was our former director at CDCI and we had a very small grant that was about $5,000 called the equity in excellence project and it was a consortium if you will of the New England USED. There were five universities in the New England area that came together to explore the use of universal design and universal design for learning. It was our introduction at CDCI to this body of literature, although our values and our principles and a all of our work in K through 12 education, had already reflected much of this material. So if that grant, CHIDY gave me the job of working on this project part-time and I really knew very little about what was happening in higher education, but it really created an unbelievable opportunity for us. During that time, my partnerner, larry shell on, was one of the original group of small members. It’s a small group that began to conceptualize what universal design for learning might look like on campus here at UVM. That group grew and swelled and included Wendy and Ellen McShane, by the time that the RFA came out for this grant, we had sort of conceptualized, dreamed about, never thinking we would actually be in this position today. But we took the risk and wrote the grant and now we’re in year two of our three-year grant from universal design for learning here at UVM and it’s been a great ride, and we have much to do and far to go. Those of you who got the Free Press this morning maybe were able to take a peek at what the public is saying about what we’re doing at UVM. We’re very excited about that. So it’s my great pleasure to introduce my coPI on the UDL@UVM grant, Dr. Larry Richelle shell ton.

thank you, Susan, and I want to just comment on the fact that Susan and crystal and the staff have put this entire three-day event together, and it’s incredible to have it actually happening wonderfully.

I’m going to continue the story about the grant, because that leads into the introduction of skip Stahl, our first keynote speaker. The story is that, a couple of things, one is that we wouldn’t have been able to put the grant together on the very north notice that we had without the assistance of Susan Ryan and her staff at CDCI. She walked us through the process and help helped us package it and then we kind of forgot about it. It was May and it was graduation time and in the process of writing the grant, one of the things that we discovered was how little I knew about higher education and disabilities and universal design. How little I knew is I didn’t know anything, actually. So we kind of dismissed the possibility of getting the grant until we got the call from Washington saying, well, you got it. And then we looked at each other and said, oh, what have we done? And it has been and is being a wonderful ride. I was sort of beginning to slide off into retirement looking forward to becoming dead wood around and having a lot of free time in my senior years as a faculty member and this past year has been the busiest sear of my 42-year career and it has been more fun than most of those years, as well. But a funny thing happened along the way. My wife communicates with her entire extended family regularly and we got the grant and she sent the announcements of that to all of her relatives, and I got a nice. Mail back from our sister-in-law, who said, I think my brother skip does related to that. And then I got a copy of skip’s response to her, which is, it’s a little disappointing to think that my baby sister doesn’t know what I do. But it turned out that skip was in fact already aware of our proposal and our grant, and was looking forward to making contact with us. So I have the pleasure today of introducing my brother-in-law’s brother-in-law. The contact with skip turned out to be incredibly important for our entire project, because as we found out what skip and his crew at the center for applied special technology in in Wakefield, Mass. have done, we realized that they have done for K-12 education what we wanted to do for higher education, and they had the materials and they had a conceptual framework that grabbed us immediately. So we took the entire project staff a year ago to cast for a three-day training and it changed our entire focus. So for our first conference on UDL in higher education here, we wanted to bring skip and tomorrow David Rose, his colleague, so that they could share that perspective with you, because we found it mind-bending, and it bent our minds in a wonderful way that has turned out to be incredibly powerful. So a little background about this mind-bending keynote speaker. Skip was born in Connecticut. I’m a developmental psychologist by the way. I teach human development, life span, so I’m going to give you his whole life span and interpret it for you and then if he has any time we’ll let him speak. He was born in Connecticut but then had the good sense to move as a very young child to Vermont. And lived here for a while and then his family took him away, but he came back, and skip is a graduate of Edmunds high will school in Burlington, down the street. The last graduating class from Edmunds high school. If you’ve been around long enough, you can figure out then what year he graduated. He went on to get a bachelor yes, sir in English literature at bashed college and then taught and he taught for 8 years in the south Bronx. Primarily with students with behavioral disorders, and that was where he got ANNEALED, hardened and educated about kids who are having difficulty adapting to the school environment. He then heard the call and came back to Vermont and was a school consultant with Washington County Mental Health and it was at that point that he crossed paths eventually with my future life, because my wife, my current wife was then teaching in one of the schools he was consulting at and I’d forgotten at what point he married her brother’s sister — no, his sister married, … anyway. To make the short story longer, he then went on and got a master’s in special education at bank street College of Education. Along the way he taught for a while in the GODDARDMAT program so he has background in teacher education, and then worked with students with behavioral disorders in Peabody Mass., and worked in the neuropsych clinic at the north shore children’s hospital, and it was at that point that he became interested and eventually expert in adapting technology so that students with disabilities could access opportunities in education. And along the way, I think, skip discovered that adapting to the environment is difficult for students with behavior disorders, but in order to help them really need to lock at the interface between the educational environment and the students. And that goes not just for students with disabilities, but all students. He and four colleagues from that neuropsych clinic established in 1984 the center for applied special technology focus on adapting technology to help students adapt to educational environments. And that’s the work that he’s been doing for the last 25, 26 years. Along with David Rose and others.

a few years ago, they had what, a hiccup in the brain? They changed the way they look at the world, and stopped focusing on adapting technology for students with disabilities, to adapting education instruction, and materials for all students. And they adapted universal design concept that comes from architecture, and engineering, to education and focused on the learning part of it, and that’s the part that he’s going to tell us about today. I hope. But he can talk about anything else that he wants. His lovely intelligent and stunning wife told me first of all that, and then she told me that she was lovely, stunning and intelligent and we all agree, she told me that skip can talk about anything that he witness wants to so I would like you to welcome skip Stahl to talk to you about universal design for learning. Skip, we’re yours.

Shelton. Shelton.

God morning, how’s everybody this morning? Can everybody hear me? Good. That’s even better. All right.

thank you, larry for that terrific introduction. I just want to share with you a couple of thoughts. As larry mentioned, my organization cast has been we’re in our 25th year so we’re celebrating our 25th annual, we had a 25th year celebration and one of the things we did a number of years ago as larry mentioned is we spent a lot of time thinking about adaptive technology and assistive technology and we actually started at a children’s hospital as an assistant technology clinic and then a group of us got together and said what is it we really want to do and somebody said let’s change the world and somebody said if we do that one person at a time, particularly one student at a time, it’s going to take a long long time to do it. So we shifted our focus. And about knife years ago, we have an annual years ago and about five years ago at the retreat, somebody said what is it we’re doing now? We’re doing curriculum development, we’re doing schools with educator training, we’re reaching out to post secondary, and somebody said well we’re not doing any policy. Particularly federal policy or state-related policy and that’s not something that cast will likely ever do. My current title, which changed this year, is senior policy analyst. Who knew?

so part of the work that I’m actively involved in right now is what’s referred to as aim, accessible inextrusional materials, and I am currently project director of what’s known as accessible instructional materials and that ward is particularly focused on K-12 instructional materials, but guess what, in the higher education act, Congress has empowered office of post secondary education to identify a national commission to begin to address the challenges associated with the acquisition and delivery of accessible versions of corollary materials to any students with disability in post secondary settings and there’s also funding in that higher education act for a national technical center. So there’s significant momentum now. The other thing I just wanted to share with you before I move into kind of the what of UDL, is recently at a national conference, and the assistant secretary of education said that the reauthorization of the elementary and secondary education act which is about to be undertaken by the Obama administration, the push is to begin to move together the individuals with disabilities education act. IDDA and the elementary and secondary education act, to begin to blend those two statutes, and that it is the intention of, at least office of special education programs, to promote universal design for learning as the vehicle for bringing those statutes together so I was in the audience when that was announced and I was sitting back and going, whoa, this is cool. So things are moving forward.

OK. I’m going to give you just some background information. And as larry mentioned, my colleague, David Rose, from Harvard will be here tomorrow. David and I rarely actually get a chance to present at the same conference. Which is generally good, because we steal from each other in terms of what material we’re currently using and the general rule is that whoever cervical presenting first gets to set whatever slides and content they want to use and whoever’s following up has to kind of make do at the last minute. So I sent David an email about 9:00 last night. And said oh, by the way there’s a set of slides I’m planning on using and I hope you’re not using them so anyway, well, let me know.

so some background, universal design, the term universal design really relates to accessibility and it really arose out of architecture and built environments, but this is the language from the assistive technology act. The term universal design means a concept or philosophy for design delivering products and services that are usable by people with the widest possible range of functional capabilities which include products and services that are directly accessible without requiring assistive technologies. So having products and services that are interoperable with assistive technologies. So if you think about buildings nowadays, you will no longer find doors with round doorknobs. You can use your hip and you know, bump the button and get a — so that doesn’t require any assistive technology. It’s built in from the very beginning. One of the challenges is ultimately the United States Department of Education, whether it’s K-12 or OPE, office of post secondary education, is really not particularly interested in access. What they are interested is achievement and access is a necessary component of getting to achievement, so if you cannot reach a student with instructional practices, there’s no way you’re going to be able to teach that student. And what happened at cast in the early years, and we’re basically a small nonprofit research and development organization, we’re roughly 40 people. In the early years we started thinking universal design has a terrific vision of building in but a lot of what’s being promoted for building environments doesn’t transfer on a one to one basis to learning environments and the reason for that is will school is supposed to be hard. It really is designed to be difficult. Because what we want to do is we increasingly want to present students with challenges, beef up their skills and abilities and then give them a new set of challenges because they’re in at a new base level. So if we apply universal design to learning environments we have to be very, very careful because we want to eliminate Barriers for any student but we do not want to Little Nate challenges. And that’s a very subtle distinction and we need to pay attention to that because if we don’t present students challenges they’re not going to learn. So part of what we put together in the early years of thinking was notion of universal design for learning and I’m just going to read to you a section here, this is from the higher education act of 2008. Universal design for learning provides flexibility in the way information is presented and the way students respond or demonstrate knowledge and skills and the way students are engaged. So it’s three areas. Information presentation, responsiveness, ability of the student, how they exhibit what they know, and three the level of engagement. Notice also at the very bottom of this quotation, it’s all students and then including students with disabilities and students who are limited English proficient. So we’re beginning to move out of not just disabilities but into a much broader range of student. So the core UDL principles that we developed at cast are the ones in red. Underneath it is the language from the higher education act. So we have three basic principles at cast that drive our work. Cast is definitely a mission-driven organization and we’re really looking to develop and make available multiple means of representation. So the language of the higher education act is. The seabed second. You’ll see right under that that the language in the education act is tracking that phrase and finally engagement. So we felt quite honored that what had become part of the statutory reference was in fact the result of a number of years of our work. So I’m going to take you back to where this work all came from. And David’s probably going to do a lot more of this when he talks to you tomorrow, because we want to give you a sense of where our principles merge or where the framework for universal design for learning came from and what we learned from the advent of some technologies that didn’t exist when we began. So basically one of the key aspects actually came from what’s known as neuroimaging techniques. Functional magnetic imaging or PET scans. For the very first time we were able to get images of alert and active brains and we were able to see how glucose was being burned in response to external stimuli. The glucose is burned in the brain, there’s a level of intensity glucose burns, so if if there’s a very high level of intensity in a particular area, it’s associated with a new experience for novel application of an old experience, whereas if the glucose burn is kind of low, then it’s going that we. So there’s some direct correlations now that we can relate to images.

I’m going to actually take you on a quick guided tour of some neuroanatomy and talk about about it from a functional perspective. I’m going to do it briefly as I said, because David’s going to spend some time with more intense and focus on this tomorrow. But I wanted to give you a clear sense of background and where our notion of universal design for learning emerged, from whence.

basically there are three cornet works in the brain and I’m going to tease these apart just a little bit, but this is artificial, because these networks never work in isolation. They always work together. One has to do with recognition, how we identify things. The second has to do with strategies for teaching network, how we exhibit meaningful, purposeful behavior and the third is affect. What’s important to us, what engages us, what compels us? So I’m going to start with recognition systems, which are roughly approximate the hinted portion of the brain and for those of us with intact vision occipital cortex, this area really stores a lot of information. I’m going to show you an image and I’m going to show it to you very briefly and I’m going to ask you to tell me what you saw. So there’s the image. That was brief. Were there people in that picture?

were there any children in the picture? Yes, some people said yes. Were there any men in the picture? Women? Yes. Was it indoors or outdoors? Indoors. Can somebody give me a date for that image?

1800s? Early 1900s? Somewhere in Victorian, everybody would pretty much agree. OK, we’ll go back to this. This is an image that’s meant to be a little fuzzy. It’s used in certain type of eye tracking, visual tracking research. What I just asked you to do was essentially a recognition test. What do you see here? And depending upon how much information you already have stored, you actually don’t need a lot of exposure to a particular image like this, because you can get the information very quickly. If I show this image to a group of second graders, same type of exposure, very quick and I say, indoors, outdoors, male, female, children in the picture? They will answer eye dentically eye dentally to the way that you answered except with the question can you give a date to this image and my favorite response from a second grader is yesterday. Because yesterday covers a lot of ground you know? You can — from a you know a 7-year-old’s perspective that’s a lot of ground. Those of us have a lot of in our brains know that we can tell by the nature of the chair and the fact that there’s some wallpaper and so on and so forth. So we’re going to come back to this information but what’s neat about this is we’ve stored certain information so that we’re able to identify very quickly what’s in this particular image and so this is very much a recognition test and tapping prior experience. So let’s shift the task just a little bit. So if I were to ask you, is there a dog in this picture? Most of you are not going to look from waist level down, right? But if I were to ask you, is there a cat in this picture then you have to look everywhere. Because the nice thing about dogs is they don’t climb in the drapes, they don’t end up on top of bookcases, you know, they’re pretty much below the waist level. Cats, however, are totally unpredictable, they could be pretty much anywhere. So your strategy for analyzing this particular visual image is going to change depending upon what the stimulus is. And that’s the basis of some eye-tracking research, and these are scatter plots from two individuals. The individual on the left is actually a pretty fully functioning individual with no frank brain injury in in contrast to the scattered plot from the individual on the right-hand side. So what’s happening here is individual is seated in front of — has two video cameras pointed at their eyes and video cameras track off their movement and generate a scatter plot and this happens instantaneously like in seconds or even Millie seconds in response to certain stimuli. So the question on the lefts is is there a cat on this picture and they’re looking at the same picture and you have to look everywhere. The question on the right-hand side for an individual has a significant frontal lobe lesion is, is there a cat in this picture? And what’s stickily striking about that scatter plot is regardless of the question that you asked this individual, their scatter plot looks identical. Question to question to question. And it’s because they really have no strategic capacity to alter their ability to respond to their environment. It’s just kind of random looking through it. And what’s really interesting and somewhat intrigging and a little challenging is that this individual in the right-hand side, who actually has significant frontal lobe lesions and needs ongoing care, does pretty well on standard IQ tests, because a lot of that kind of preplanning, as well sequenced task analysis often doesn’t show up on some of the tests, particularly Wechsler. So here you have that dichotomy between someone who needs really 24-hour care because they’re unable to plan for themselves, doesn’t show up so bad on kind of standard IQ testing.

OK, we’re all somewhere between these two extremes of highly strategic, able to analyze environments and having no strategies whatsoever and just kind of randomly being tossed in the middle of circumstance.

final network to consider really has to do with affect. How we engage with our environment, what turns us on, what propels us. How many people here have iPods or portable music players? Raise your hands up high so I can see. OK, almost everybody. So here’s that quick little exercise for you. Pick somebody you think you know really well who has an iPod or a portable music player and ask them to share with you their favorite place, and you will in all circumstances either be stunned or appalled. What you’ll discover is someone you thought you knew really which will listens to something that would drive you totally insane. Or vice versa, you might find that their choice of music is identical to ours. Music is incredibly evocative. It’s very personal. It’s between you and your emotive moment and iPods increase that level of intimacy, because it’s this portable little device that you rarely show with anybody else. So all of your emotive secrets are locked in that place. And share it with someone at some point because it’s a really interesting experiment. It’s a similar thing if I go back to this image. And I won’t take a long time to do this now, but if I were to ask, well, maybe I’ll see. Just see if somebody can do this. Can somebody tell me what’s happening in this picture? Give me a story? There’s no one right answer.

yes?

someone’s returning — well, returning from

where do you think they’re returning from?

from war, from a long stint at work.

OK. Any other stories? Somebody want to throw out?

yes.

person looks like they might be either house staff or support and or they could be in some sort of a medical setting. So that could be a patient since there are other people in the room. I’m guessing it could be —

oh, OK, so interpretations. One is someone returning, could be from war or from work. Or it could be that this is a medical facility and that the person coming in might be related to a patient or related to a patient or

some sort of a patient, medical offer psychological

psychological, medical situation.

where does this stuff come from?

so if I ask you what’s here. What I’m asking you to do is kind of impose meaning on a static image. And what tends to happen is I’m going a little deeper. This is not what is here. This is not — so it’s not a recognition test. It’s not there, is there a cat or a cang roo or a dog in the image. This really has to do with engagement and what’s important to you at any given moment. So if I ask this — if I show this image and ask a group, which I did a month ago, in mid April, the first response I got was it’s the tax collector. And the date was, I believe, April 17th, right? So classic. So we also, a number of us have family and friends in harm’s way, so to be able to look at this and say someone coming back from war or there’s an announcement here or something like that. During this culture and where we are at the moment that’s not an uncommon response. What we’re doing isn’t really projecting on this image. It’s the typical psychologically — this is a Rorschach. It’s an ink blot. There’s nothing here. But what happens is it very quickly overrides your recognition system and you really struggle to figure out some meaning and somebody says tell mow about what’s going on here and basically if you asked this to 60,000 middle age white guys and they all say it’s two moose dancing around a totem pole and middle age white guy 6,001 says road kill you kind of go why that person feeling threatened. There’s something here about vigilance. So I’m going to move this ahead because this is generally an unpleasant image for most people.

so I’m going to recap. Three networks. Recognition network. That’s really the what of who we are and in most cases, we want to automate a lot of recognition tasks. How many people here shop in the same grocery store that they’ve shopped in for say, four or five years. A lot of us? Did you ever go into the store and discovered that they changed the aisle where they keep something? I don’t know what your reaction is but I’m outraged. They didn’t call me to tell me that they were moving coffee from aisle 4 to aisle 8 and in fact if I go to a grocery store, I really don’t want to burn any glucose. This is not a learning experience for me. I want to be as comatose as possible and make this automatic. I just want to move on down the aisle and I have to stop I’m in aisle 4 and no coffee. Oh, great, now what? After we learn the rule thing. A lot of our recognition capabilities tend to be automated and as I’ll talk about a little later this morning, the brain in in automating a lot of its decisionmaking capabilities can be very dictatorial and sometimes actually alter the reality of your experience, and there’s all sorts of good reasons for that. But it’s a little disconsrting when it happens. But having multiple representations of information is really critical, because each of us infuse into different thingsment some of us are much more attentive to audio, some of us much more attendive to print or tactile or images or video and so the more ways that we can represent something, the better the chances are that we can all have access.

the second collection of networks is really strategic, our ability to express what we know. I often say that if singing on key had been a prerequisite for high school graduation, a lot of us would be in different professions right now. Certainly I would be. Because I would have not gotten that all-important high will school diploma and would have had to go off in a different direction, but for whatever reason, it wasn’t selected as being one of the prerequisites for high school graduation, so here we are and thankful. On the other hand, each of us has a different set of abilities and so we need to be able to allow students to what they know in the strongest way possible. When I talk to K-12 educators and certainly when I was in the classroom myself in middle school, junior high I often knew more about what my students couldn’t do than what they could do and I discovered that that was actually a bad way of approaching it. I needed to know what they could do really well so that I could help them capitalize on those strengths and move forward and finally engagement. So engagement really is connected, and the ability to present information assumes in a manner that really fits in their engagement style and the example I often use is think of a bell curve and on one end of the bell curve you have students with somewhere along the autistic spectrum with Asperger’s and on the other end of the bell curve you have students with attention deficit. So we often don’t think of those being totally opposite, but let me throw this out. So think about novelty. A student with ADHD is a novelty-seeker. They are looking for new stuff. And it’s not so much high degree of distract abilities. It’s the newness and in fact it’s really being pulled off to novel circumstance, novel things, looking for new, you know, unusual, challenging, because the level of engagement needs to be quite high and they’re looking to pull that forum. On the other end of the spectrum, students with Asperger’s are novelty avoiders. If you could guarantee for them that tomorrow would be exactly the same as today, weather would be the same, they’d see the same people, they’d have the same meals, go to the same activities, it would be like dying and going to Heaven. Everything totally predictable, no novelty. So if you think about a class of students that you’re instructing, you have those two students in the class, and all the rest of us who fall somewhere in between with regard to novelty. And so wouldn’t it be neat if somehow in our instructional practice we could have some sort of little slider that we could adjust novelty for students and working with a student with Asperger’s, you can crank the novelty meter way down, but working with students with attention deficit, you could ramp up that meter really high because it’s going to help lock them in. The God example, just quickly anecdote. I have. Research on two types of students reading printed material. One was a classic learning disabled youngster, and another was a student with attention deficit who actually lost their place in the narrative flow and so if you gave each of those students a paragraph and said, read this and and come back to me and these were 4th graders, we’ll talk about it, they looked very similar, because neither one of them could actually extract meaning from the paragraph. One, because they couldn’t decipher the words and the other because they couldn’t follow the sequence long though to extract meaning. So she said, well, let’s try some text to speech support, having the computer read aloud the material for the student, put it under the student’s control, they could have the entire pass read aloud or they could just have unfamiliar words read aloud and she looked at some of the variables and it turned out that for the learning disabled population having the text and having the student be able to control the text was a significant variable and increased the success rate in comprehension almost by 100. So almost all of those kids could pick up and extract the meaning when that. But there was a subset of students particularly who were attention deficit where it really didn’t make a whole lot of difference and so she was looking at the very groups and one of the variables was the reading rate, how quickly the words were being spoken amino acid loud. So she noticed that for most of the LD students they were choosing somewhere between 150 and 180 words a minute which is about what my speech pattern is now, and she thought what if I bumped the speak to the kids with attention deficit? So she started at 270 words a minute, went up to 400 words a minute with the kids with ADHD and it was like she opened a door. The level of stimulus was significantly high enough to engage those kids who were not otherwise engaged, to lock them in, and she said she was stunned by the fact that a number of the kids, particularly the bright and inattentive ADHD kids, text read at 400 words a minute, they could tell you exactly what the paragraph was about. They were just locked into it and it was that speed that was also repeeling to the students with LD. So here you had two populations of students, they were manifesting the same degree of characteristics and the having to do with novelty, attention, and locking in engagement made all the difference in the world.

OK, the three guiding principles of universal design for learning, to provide multiple means of representation of information, really relates to the recognition networks that I mentioned earlier. Multiple means of expression relates to strategic networks, our ability to organize and express ourselves, and to provide as many ways as possible for being able to do that. And multiple means of engagement, having to do with affect, finding different ways to engage and lock students into the learning task. There’s a URL at the bottom down here, that’s almost indecipherable about because it’s so light. I apologize. There’s a growing body of work that we refer to as the UDL guidelines and so if you do essentially just a Google search for UDL guidelines and I believe there’s a handout in your packet related to a UDL guidelines checklist, so there’s a series of these three principles, and then a series of checkpoints on each of that, and then below that, there’s all the resources associated with each one of those checkpoints, so it’s a pretty major body of work related to how do I know it when I see it, what could I do to begin to appropriate some of this into my practice and so it moves it from a theoretical framework into practical.

so what I’m going to do right now is do some exploration with you of why we need multiple means of representation, expression, and engagement.

so I want to give you a little hearing test. And we’re going to — you know what I need? I node this computer connected into audio. But or I can do it with my — if I take my lapel MIC and hold it on the computer, is that going to —

only for the camera.

only for the camera. All right so I’ll be fine. All right, so here’s what I’m going to do.

that’s working fine.

OK, so here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to play a tone and we’re going to start at 8,000 HZ. And I want you to raze your hand if you hear the tone.

I’m going to lower my volume.

OK. 9,000 had HZ. 10,000 HZ. Right, nick. Oh, good I can still hear them.

11,000? Raise those hands high. I want to see it.

because I’m going to — start looking around. 12,000.

I’m going to skip to 14.

oh, I see some people going. Oh, like this. Like they see hands going up, and I don’t know. What’s going on. 15.

I heard it come on and go off. Try this one. 16. Anybody hear 16? OK. Good. Let’s try 17:

oh, all right. So here’s what’s happening. Does anybody notice a pattern?

yes, getting older.

yeah, yeah. So it’s reversed, though, right is this so those of us who are you know, over 40. We here fine at the lower registers, but as you go up, in fact developmentally, you lose the ability to hear those upper register sounds and in most cases you have to be somewhere close to your 30s to have 15,000 HZ and up. Remember there was a Chris van osberg story where he was given a bell and the parents come and he rings the bell on Christmas day as a child and the parents go, oh, too bad the bell is broken because they can’t hear the sound?

there’s a growing movement in some small towns in Europe where they have youngsters, particularly adolescents, doing skateboards outside their shops and driving away some of the older patrons, so they’ve taken to posting a little speaker outside the door and playing a tone at about 19,000 to 20,000 HZ, which most of the older folks cannot here hear at all and is totally annoying to the adolescents and essentially drives them away from that spot. It also means there are no dogs in the area either for the same reason, that high frequency drives them a little crazy. So for me this is just a lovely kind of fun and concrete example of why we need to present different levels of information in different formats and that we’re going to have differentiation. The brains of 30-year-olds are really not much like mine in some ways and very much like mine in other ways and yet there are areas of differentiation so it’s important to understand that some of this is histologically, some of this is volitional, we’re really choosing to align ourselves to different things.

how do we need multiple means of action and expression? So I’m going to share with you a story, but also a project. So David will probably talk a little bit about this tomorrow in a different context. David teaches a course at Harvard called T560, which is the title is something like mind, media and instructional design, it started out about five or six years ago with a small group of students and now is in a really nice kind of presentation hall and usually has about 100 students every spring semester. And he draws from the business school and the head school and MIT and other Harvard departments because what he’s really looking at is — he’s looking at how — what we know about neuroscience relates to our ability to express ourselves and how we can put together learning materials and learning environments that really promote the broadest possible opportunities for all students. So here’s the way the class is structured. It’s a semester class. There are two major projects. Both projects have to involve, or students are encouraged to use multiple media types. In fact, they’re limited to I believe 1400 words if they’re writing. So think for a moment about what graduate students at Harvard and MIT or the Harvard business school are really good at, it’s writing, and so by saying to them, you can only use 1400 words in your project, it essentially strips them of the key toll that they’ve used to be — are used to using in academic situations and he said in any other media, images, audio, video, you may use unlimited. But you’re limited to 1400 words.

so I want to share with you a project that was submitted a couple of years ago. Oh, and the task for this particular project was this: Design a curriculum unit that is specifically focused on a particular type of learner. And this curricular unit was designed for students with autism. So this up here, so this is profound artistry in autism, project 2, visual literacy, lessons in architecture. I’m going to go to project 2.

so this is teaching visual literacy. Obviously there’s a lot of text here. so I’m going to go to the learning goal. Understand how a 3D architectural structure correlates to a two dimensional ground plan so I’m going to go through the lesson. And here’s the lesson. And this is the entire presentation. Lesson 1, learning goal understand how a 3D architectural structure correlates to a 2D ground plan. The only other instruction I don’t know if you can see it, right up here, there’s a little spinning yellow thing that indicates you might want to click here. I’m going to clicket click there. OK, so now we have 3 dimensional, 2 dimensional ground plan. And then there is assessment exercises down below. I’m going to go to lesson 2. Learning goal in lesson two is understand how an architectural ground plan comprises repeated, simple geometries. So here’s the geometry. And notice the only option here is when I offer over things it’s highlighted so it’s encourages me to click.

so the little circles move out for the APSES.

I discovered after watching this that I could never look at a cathedral the same way again. I gun to look at it as a geometric master plan. And had to marvel its complexity but also its simplicity. Through there’s all interior views of SAN. SPIRITO and shows me the view itself.

so this was submitted in response to the assignment, and David chose this one to share with the class and say, this is a pretty strong submission. And you might want to take a look at that and one of the students in the back of the class said are we going to be graded on presentation? And David, instead of responding, threw it back to the class and said, what does the class think? And so is they said, well, obviously this person is very talented with technology and art and developing things in a manner that a lot of us are not going to be able to compete with. So this really seems a little unfair. If this person gets a high grade, and we can’t all do the same thing but we’re graded because we don’t have the same innate abilities. So the discussion went on in the class until the author and the designer of this particular project stood up and said, he said, I’ve been really patient with you all. But I want to share with you the fact that I am significantly dyslexic. I have been graded on my worst abilities all the way through school. He’s now a graduate student in design and technology at MIT, working on a doctorate, and he said so you’re going to say to me that for the first time when I have an opportunity of really showing you what I know and how to do it, you’re going to tell me that I can’t be graded on that? And it was a really remarkable moment in the class. Because it really brought home to all of the students how their success, their degree of success was really dependent in many ways upon their ability to use a single media type, which is in their case print that they could write and now they’re being introduced to a whole other world, with someone who actually moved with ease and grace through other media types and yet struggled with the media that they found the most comfortable. So the class voted that he should get an A-plus.

here for me, this was a great example of a circumstance where had you limited this student to expressing what they knew about one, autism and this is really a masterful lesson plan, two, design, three, in how to present information in effective, efficient and very active ways, you would have never seen any of this magic. And yet, by allowing these students multiple ways of expressing what they know, we get to see this pretty clearly.

OK, I want to shift over to engagement. This was a story that appeared a few years ago having to do tw students and engagement and I wanted to share. It’s a few slides long, but worth kind of going in this direction. OK so Adam got a great education in high school. I learned how to meet girls, what drugs to take where the best shows were. Failed most of his sophomore and junior years, earned a 460 combined score on his SAT’s. I’m not sure how you do that. That to me takes some real talent. I’m determined to fail here. Following high school, played in various bands. Jamie DYK tried out for the laker girls and made it pretty far before realizing that …

Wayne Lee considers himself lucky to have a wife who bought him grand theft auto: Vise city for Valentine’s day …

no, I work for NASA. This is the Mars rover team from NASA’s jet propulsion laboratory. This is a remarkable story. If you ever get a chance to read the biographies of some of these kids. And I call them kids because compared to me. Anyway. So rocket scientists indeed:

each of these students were students that struggled their first time around and their second time around and their third time around and for whatever reason, just stuck to it. There was a degree of persistence an for many of them, that persistence spanned multiple years, not just a couple years time, but ten years to really get through it and get they are master’s degree and another way to get the doctorate, but everything was moving forward.

I love this slide and I love the picture that goes with it, because it’s clear that people do get to do this kind of work. So the message here, I think, with this little vignette is look for those little signs of engagement and we try and find ways to ex hort students to keep trying. I always tell my colleagues that the word retention has a different meaning in higher education than it does in K-12, right? In K-12 retention means you stay back. In post secondary retention means you’re sticking with it. OK, those are two different interpretations of the same word. And so the Mars rover team for me is a great example of persistence and people sticking with it. So just a couple of statistics to think about. Lee, who’s the this is Wayne Lee. Lee almost didn’t go into engineering because the I willages he saw of NASA’s mission control in 1960s, it was a lot of nerdy looking white guy w’s crew cuts. On DYK’s first day a female colleague told her she should learn to be one of the guys and never wear a dress. Good scientists tend to have a healthy disrespect for authority. DYK wore a dress the next day. As for Lee, he still doesn’t own a suit or know how to tie a tie.

so I’m going to share with you just some examples of some of the work that we’ve been doing and talk a little bit about getting beyond access and into the world of learning and achievement and this was a project that we did jointly with Google a year and a half or two years ago and we’re beginning to expand some of this work.

when I think about universal design for learning in particular, three principles of representation, expression and engagement. I also think about them in the context of four components of the curriculum Lum. So if I talk about curriculum. I’m talking about four things. One is goal. What is the goal? What are we trying to achieve in this instructional setting or in this class or in this project? What is the goal? That’s really, really important. It’s also important to be able to distinguish the means from achieving the goal from the goal itself and where we tend to run aground at times is we confuse the goal with the means of achieving it. So my favorite example came in the Boston city schools education standards for first graders, they had a goal that stated the student will write his or her name in the top right-hand corner of the paper. So if you think about that for a minute, well, that’s God if the student can write. That’s good if they can spell. It’s actually good if they have vision. Because otherwise they’re not going to know where the top right-hand corner of the paper is. It’s great if they have arms. You begin to see that a goal written in that manner actually creates a Barrier for many students. And they rewrote that goal to read, a student will identify his or her work in a consistent manner. Yippee, OK? Now we’re into a whole different era. That’s an achievable goal regardless of the means. The message is starting to come out of the Department of Education and particularly dunkian’s group is tight goals, loose meanings. So they’re really focusing on standards that are tight, clear, and unambiguous for many students, but multiple means of getting to it. So this is really important to talk about. So curriculum first aspect of curriculum is goals. The second really has to do, and the order is not particularly important. The second aspect of the curriculum is what materials are you using to try and help students meet those goals, and that’s where kind of multiple representations comments in. The third has to do with methodology. What methods are you using as part of the process of incorporating those materials in and getting the students to meet the goals, and finally how do you know that the students have met the goals? What assessments are being applied to the big battle right now around the reauthorization of the elementary and secondary education act is that the current administration is still pushing large-scale assessment. Which means you assess the students after they’ve gone through the process of instruction and from my perspective that’s great if you want to know about accountability at the school level. It really offers very little help for the styl students themselves because they’re beyond the point of instruction. You either have to go through the entire sequence and it doesn’t work with the educators who work with them. I’m a big proponent of informative assessment A. Let’s assess the students as they move through the process because it gives the students the opportunity to correct and it gives the instrucker a way of. Now, in some ways some people think people go a little too far so I’ll share with you a vignette from Harvard law school. Harvard law school typically has a large class size, stadium seating, incorporation of laptops and portable technology into law school classes that’s been going on for a long time but there’s one shift that occurred two years ago that challenged everybody’s per speption about how people should learn. So typically you have someone who is lecturing, like I am, but if I were doing this at Harvard law you might also have couple of graduate assistants that are kind of off at the side and if there were — because the content is incredibly technical, you have attorneys who are lecturing who have been doing this stuff for 20 years, trying to push information to students who are new to the field to the terminology and everything else. The students started text messaging the TA’s while the professor was talking. And saying things like could you ask Dr. So-and-so to repeat this because I wasn’t really sure you know, so this is live, real time, you’re done with 90 students in a stadium and you’ve got 15 of them text messaging your TA’s saying could you go back over that again and for the first few times it trove everybody crazy. The initial response was no more laptops in the class, finger in the dike stuff, right? Let’s stop this, anyplace it in the bud, I can’t be interrupt inned middle. Well, that didn’t last very long. And so now the majority of the classes actually incorporate the ability of texting between the TA and the student for clarification of information during the lecture. And I got to thinking, you know, I would find that particularly unsettling. On the other hand, what better way for someone who’s teaching to get immediate feedback as to whether or not what they’re trying to get across is in fact working. So quick summary on.

So when I talk about curriculum, those four things I want you to keep in mind. Goals that that’s the entire kind of curriculum sequence and when we talk about universal design for learning, we talk about thinking of ways of incorporating the principles into those four areas. You know, are there ways to do it within goals? Are there certainly ways to materials and methods and are there ways to do it with within assessment. The big issue right now with assessment is it’s called construct relevancy. The question is, are you measuring what you think you’re measuring? That’s the construct. And is it relevant to it and the classic point of collision is when you’re testing students who have struggles with reading on word problems, what are you getting when you get a poor level of achievement? And in many cases, what you’re going is you’re getting a measure that the student can’t read. We know that. So we need to figure out a better strategy for doing it and a lot of the collision right now around arguments for incorporating access or universal design principles is does it validate or invalidate the construct relevancy of the test if you have aspects of the test read aloud to the student. If reading is not what’s being tested, does it really matter? OK, and I’m not going to respond to that other than you probably have an idea of where my opinion is.

OK, so we did this project with Google. This is wholly accessible. There’s text help tool bar. I don’t think mine is working at the moment, but text can be read aloud. You can highlight, you can look up words, you can get background information, but we wanted to get to something a little deeper. I’m going to go into the sonnet. And notice that over here on the side, I don’t know if you can see, right over here, there’s support available. So I’m going to start with maximum support, which essentially says, stop and think prompts are multiple choice highlighted critical features hints and available immediate feedback on responses. This really has to do with the goal. And one of the things that occur in learning environments that is in many ways unique and this goes back to the notion of school being art. Is what’s the purpose. Why are we introducing this information to these students at this time? Because that gets you to what your goal is. And in this case we’re going to be talking about a Shakespearean sonnet and this is the most famous of the 154 sonnets. I’m going to take you in here. Notice there’s a lot of stuff here and the reason that all these things are kind of augmented is because I asked for the most support possible as I’m reading through this information. So I’m just going to go through and I’m going to highlight. If I click on a word shall, I bring up a glossary and it says and this all can be read aloud to me, that shall is an old fashioned way of saying will. So even the basic kind of semantics and tack takal level of getting information. And then over here, there’s another image and if I hover over it, it says this is a literary device. Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day, thou art more lovely and more temperate. OK, anybody want to take a guess on what literary device this is? Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day.

There’s a comparison.

There’s a comparison, great, and what type of comparison? I’m going to push you a little bit on this.

Analogy. Metaphor? Good. I’m looking for one other word, too.

Sim Lee. Good so we’ve got analogy, metaphor, comparison, simile. We don’t know which exactly one of those. Let’s go in and find out. It’s a simile. Figure of speech that makes comparison between two unlike things and uses the word like, as, than or resembles, but notice those things don’t appear poo in those two lines.

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day. Here Shakespeare writes that his beloved is lovelier and more consistent than a summer day. The word than is I am plied. So now we’re into the realm of implied semantic identification and this softs sophisticated stuff. So we’ve got all this area where it turns out that every line in this sonnet is a literary device and so by being able to look at the sonnet, being able to bring up what the literary device is, I’m being provided with adds isional background information. But notice there are some buttons over on the side. So this is a list of resources. So I if I want to know more about this, I can delve into the inentire range of resources that’s available particularly related to sonnet 18, definitions, interpretations, critical writings, et cetera, more than I probably ever wanted to know but it’s there. And then there’s a stop and think.

And this is where I wanted to take you and this says, this sonnet is about characterization. And so one of the ways of understanding or assessing whether you are getting what Shakespeare is actually trying to indicate with you is interpret the characterization with clues about. And I can go down here and say, OK I’ve got three choices. Now, remember, this is the highest level of support. So if I were to do this stop and think with the least level of support, it’s not going to suggest to me that I should look at particular things. It’s going to ask me something and not provide those supports. So this is what’s known as a highly scaffolded environment. Now it’s wide open but from these three. So the first is beloved is just like a summer’s day. The second is the beloved is more beautiful and more pleasant than a summer’s day or the third is the beloved is beautiful and quick-tempered.

OK, and now I’m not sure, so I could go and ask for some help from these goofy guys and these are coaches. So I’m going to click on Monty.

OK so he’s saying I use my own experience about the summer day and look at the second line. Now, the other coaches may give a different interpretation. So let’s see. Q. OK, so each of the coaches is kind of prompting you to look at something slightly different. In addition to which before I make a choice, there’s a button here that says show. If I click on this, the text is highlighted and what it’s doing is it’s forcing me to look at that particular aspect before I make my selection.

I need to understand what these words mean and then I can make a choice. So if I can go back over here, I’m going to hide that, say No. 2.

And it says great. Shakespeare describes the beloved’s beauty. What I’m doing is self-assessing here. How am I doing. Am I processing this information relatively accurately. Those appear throughout the sonnet. And this again is at maximum level of support because the purpose here is to make sure that when reading this, that a person has an understanding of form, that they have an understanding of the literary devices that Shakespeare is applying here. And that finally, they really can understand that there’s an underlying message that this is a love poem from an author to his beloved and how is this different from a piece of narrative. So what we try to embed in here were first of all to make this as accessible as it could be. So that you couldn’t read, you could have it read aloud to you. That there were multiple ways of presenting this information. But going beyond that, the purpose of presenting Shakespearean sonnet, as with a lot of other content is not to make it accessible. It’s to actually — the goal is to help you understand what Shakespeare is doing at multiple levels. Device, structure, literary device, flow, word choice, background information, and what is this sonnet about? It’s a love poem.

So when we built UDL editions, we went after a number of examples and I’ll just kind of quickly share this with you. We have a a story about coyotes, but we also have a whole section about coyotes. We also did all of jack London’s call of the wild with similar aspects built into it. We did the tell tale heart, we did the Gettysburg address, and: The purpose of providing these materials out there was to use them as examples of what we think is a good use of technology of resources on the web, and how instructional materials can be embedded directly into the content of using the capabilities of media. One of the things that those of you are familiar with K-12 textbooks is that the classic textbook has two editions, it has one known as the testimony E which is the teacher edition, and it has the SE which is the student edition. All the information about the goals of learning are in the teacher edition and we looked at that and said, well, that’s stupid, why not make explicit with the goals of learning are and take those two books and do this, mash they will them up and let the students know what the purpose is, why they’re reading this content at this particular time. Otherwise it’s guesswork. So this was kind of an extension of that, and saying you know, what’s the purpose, what are the goals for reading this, here are some methods, here are some alternate materials and oh, by the way we’re building in some assessments and supports so that you can measure how you you’re doing against what the ought authorize author intended.

A couple of quick things: Learning in the brain differs according to the task. OK, that dependent on the task some of us are equipped to handled it, some of us aren’t. The it differs according to prior learning and it differs according to the individual.

And remember I mentioned earlier that the brain is a bit dictatorial, so from a developmental perspective, there’s a delay in information processing, particularly for those of us who are highly visual and it also works for auditory processing, as well. So this is a visual reference, that information captured by the retina takes about 100 milliseconds to reach the brain. In some situations that is not sufficient to ensure your survival. In other words, you need as fast processing as you possibly can to compensate for this lag. I often don’t think about 100 milliseconds as being a lag, but in this case, it is. So that what the brain has learned to do, it has learned to interpret the circumstance regardless of what the actual physical or sensory stimulation is. And make a decision maced upon what it knows prior knowledge. If you’re like me, those of you who are sitting out there going no, that doesn’t happen. So I’m going to share this with you.

And what’s going to happen now is your brain is going to make and act on prediction as opposed to what is really in front of it and I’m going to use what this is known as the KOFFKA ring and I’ll just let it play.

So what’s happening is the donut is here together, it’s the same shape, right, the minute it shifts, the shape changes. Everybody see that? There is no change in shape. The shade stays exactly the same. What is happening is your brain is taking over at this point and saying, I know this balance of shading and color and when things shift in this direction, this is what happens. What it essentially is doing, it is overriding the truth in front of you and telling you, you may think that it’s this way, but it’s not and I’m going to prove it to you.

So the donut is in the middle. Now it shifts. Then you kind of go whoa, what happened? Know it looks like a totally different shade. But in reality it’s the same.

So here’s what’s happening here. Particularly with relation to visual field and sensory interpretation and the neuroanatomy of this all, is that when you are looking visually, the amount of area that you can focus on is approximately the sides size of your hand. That’s it. Everything beyond that is peripheral vision, and your brain is really attuned to looking out for change. Brains are kind of change grabbers. They’re looking for fluctuations, alteration, things that are unpredictable in the environment, it particularly with visual processing and if you’re presented with something that the brain already knows, it’s going to make a dictatorial decision on your behalf. It also does this with some auditory information. It’s important to know. Because it really is based on prior experience. So I like the fact that the brain has a little bit of a dictatorial.

The brain constitutes reality based on what it perceives reflected by the mirror of past experience and this is the one that I always, when I first learned this it caught me way off guard. Neurons running from our brains to our senses outnumber those running from our senses to our brains by ten to 1. I logically would think that it would go the other way. That sensory information because that’s our primary way of processing the world around us, whether it’s touch or smell or hearing or site, sight. You’d think that there would be many more neurons running into the brain than running out, but keep in mind that from a kind of long-term evolutionary perspective, the brain has made some smart decisions that allowed us to develop and continues to do that but in order to do that it takes away some decisionmaking.

And my favorite line, perception is manipulated by expectation. And this really has a lot to do with experiences starting at a very young age and some of this is really controlled by the autonomic nervous system, but some of this is controlled by the culture, by your early experiencing, what you’ve grown up with, all of that shapes who we are as individuals.

So just I want to leave you, we’re going to take a break in a minute because you’ve been sitting way too long with a conceptual shift. Diversity in a classroom is a norm. We need to anticipate this. I remember when I first started thinking about making sure that materials were accessible for students, I was focused on the individual student and it was an ad hoc retrofitting of whatever existed in the classroom and that was occurring either in the K-12 setsings or post secondary settings and all of a sudden I realized I was doing a lot of professional involvement and the country and I could go into a school district a high school somewhere that was useing an American History textbook and discovered that that book was simultaneously being digitized from print into a digital format by 300 schools around the country and I said, well, this is not a really good idea in the sense of I want to get educators out of the business of retrofitting publisher content and if that has to happen, there has to be some sort of central repository for doing that we need to anticipate, rather than waiting for these students to show up, we need to anticipate that diversity is what we’ve got and so we need to make our learning environments flexible, we need to provide multiples, the representations, expression, engagement and within the context of goals, method, materials and assessment and then on to an individual student. So that really was a shift. Just another reiteration of the principles, and we’ll be — I’ll be spending more time this afternoon just talking about how do we begin to address the challenge with, that makes it difficult to incorporate all of these things. And for me it’s always applauding approximations. I’ve never been in an environment that’s totally UDL where I can say whoa, this is terrific, but I have been in an environment that there are approximations and each one of them make it a much more both responsive and respectful environment for students. I’m going to — I think I’ll skip through UDL guidelines quickly because I want to do a break and then, yeah, I’ll wait — OK I’m going to stop there. Let’s take a 15-minute stretch break and then we’ll come back. Curriculum. Koffka. Flick school welcome back. If everyone could take their seats, please: I have a quick announcement about the blog and the Internet access. A few people had indicated that they couldn’t get on the blog if they were using the codes that they got from the registration desk. That problem should be solved at this point. So hopefully if you have any further questions about that, it’s not working for any reason, you can come see me. I’ll be sitting right over here, and otherwise, I’ve already had a few people posting some comments in the water cooler area, so please continue to do so. I have set it up so it’s moderated so if you do post something, it won’t appear right away. I have to verify that it’s acceptable, but anyone at the conference who’s posting things according to our guidelines, it should be no problem, you’ll be accepted right away, and also I wanted to make it known that skip’s presentation is also on the blog, if any wants to download that and follow along. It’s available on the day one page.

That’s the first one. This one is not.

Great. Everybody hear me OK? Back in the room? OK. So what editions’ like to I’d like to do is shift gears a little bit and talk to you about instructional materials and particularly around strengths and weaknesses of different types of media and I would like this part of the session to be a little more interactive so there will be points when I’ll stop and ask you some questions and we can kind of muse on some of these items and ideas together. So I’m just going to do a quick remediation on neural networks, kind of recap and recover what we covered earlier this morning and then I want to take a look at print images and audio, and what are some of the challenges both their virtues and Barriers associated with each of those media types and hopefully this will be useful for those of you who are in instructional practice, in thinking about strategies for presenting information and also encourage your students to exhibit what they know. So this is one of my favorite images. This is a mag if I fied and colored image of a rat brain, but it’s actually an extracted neural network with millions of cebses. Connections. One of the nice way about our brains process information is that they take in information simultaneously. It all happens in parallel. So it’s not sequential in the sense that one bit of information has to build on another, although that does occur and so as you’re sitting here, your entire system is processing auditory information, tactile information, you know, smells, tastes, touch, and it’s an incredibly efficient system. Within neural network systems, meaning is constructed what’s known as HETERARCHICALLY. As I mentioned before, processing is distributed and it’s also distributed in parallel. All happening simultaneously. I’m just going to skip over the recognition. We did the Koffka ring and the purpose of my showing this to you was really to kind of illustrate how there are two types of processing of information. One that’s referred to in the neuroanatomical and neuropsych literature. One is called bottom up, which is sensory information coming in, so touch, smell, taste, hearing, vision, and the other is top down, where your brown is saying, oh, I know what that is, you know, here’s what it is, move on and that’s essentially what happens with the Koffka ring. There are a number of examples of these types of visual allusions and auditory illusions, one of my the other classic one is an auditory illusion of a drum beat that actually stays the same but if you listen to a recurring pattern of a rhythm and it lasts longer than about 30 seconds, your brain speeds it up. And it’s one of those again, oh, no, that can’t be happening, yet in fact it does.

So we talked about recognition, and the process of generalization, which is where the top-down decisionmaking for the brain comes, that perception memory and learning are all processes of generalizing and all of you generalize from some things to others and that’s how the brain becomes somewhat dictatorial. So recognition networks. Take this from a different perspective and think about this as an interesting kind of intellectual challenge but one that actually relates a lot to how we process information. So one of the challenges is, thinking about how we arrive at a uniform and agreed-upon set of definitions for particular items or objects and in this case I’m going to use a bird which is pretty simple and straightforward and in fact, most preschool students can tell you what is a bird and what is not a bird. And so this is really getting to categorization processes. So I’m going to ask, do all birds fly?

No.

OK. Do all birds have feathers?

Yes.

Do all birds have two legs?

Yes.

Do all birds have beaks? Yes.

So we’ve got some agreement with everything. We say no on the flight but yes on the other two. But then I’m going to use what is the actual definition of a bird that’s used in the scientific community and here’s the definition. They are endothermic vertebrates, so warm-blooded.

Their skin is covered with feathers. They are four-chamber hearts. Their bones are light Waite and usually hollow. Their forelimbs are modified as wings and they lay eggs.

OK so these are the characteristics of a bird that are used scientifically. So the only thing that really matched with what our initial pass was that I kind of tead up those characteristics was the feathers and beaks. Didn’t say anything about limbs. Actually in the scientific community forelimbs. We didn’t say anything about bones or light weight or how many chambers in their hearts. Andelity every preschool youngster can tell you what is a bird for the most part and what is not a bird. And it really goes back to a complex incorporation of characteristics that we build on from a very early age to begin to clearly identify this as an example, and this is as a nonexample.

We talked about representation expression and engagement and I related those earlier this morning to four aspects of the brain, particularly recognition systems. So more ways we represent information the better we are, particularly hoping that students get it. Multiple means of expression, roughly associated with the frontal lobes. The ability to initiate meaningful, purposeful behaviors and actions and finally multiple means of engagement and that relates really to the limbic system. It oversits the some of the neuroanatomical aspects of the brain to the neocortex, and largest concentration of neurons actually exists between the limbic system and the frontal lobes, which connects action with responsiveness to what’s important in your environment.

And which is generally assumed to be a nice survival-oriented bundle of neurons to be able to distinguish between something that’s about to eat you and something that isn’t, and if something is about to eat you, you need to initiate an action or behavior in order to get out of the way and so there’s a lot of neurons that are connected between what’s important and movement.

OK.

I’m going to switch over to print for a minute and I’m going to open this up at this point because I want you to all to think about what you’re doing and p had this context, think about print and text as being somewhat similar. So symbolic representation of language. What are the benefits of using print or text-based resources, particularly in instructional settings? And we’ve got some folks with microphones around so emand I’m just looking for whatever comes to mind. A lot of us in here are print people, who we use print. Charlie there’s one behind you.

It’s stable.

Stable in the sense —

You can express something this print and you can carry across-country and those words can be read by many people in many places over a period of time.

Great, and that’s actually the legal definition of the distinction between liable and slander.

You can slander somebody and the actual, you know, your actual fines are minimal, but if you put it in print it’s libel because of that persisting nature that it, you know, it can persist from one situation to the next, so potentially if it’s a negative commentary, it’s that much more damaging. Over here?

You can use it in multiple ways, you can use basically all your sensory inputs, because it is it isn’t just about reading it. You can also manipulate it, even though it’s stable, so you can make notes, you examine use it for other purposes, so it’s got multiple aspects to it.

It’s also portable. Print or text. And we’ll combine those two in a moment. It’s pretty easy to carry from one place to another. Any other benefits?

If you build proficiency in creating and reading it, it’s much faster than most other media.

So let me restate that. If you build proficiency in print-based materials it’s more efficient than a lot of other media. Yes, agreed. And you have one?

I think I’ve connected being visual representation of marriage. So for someone like me who can’t hear it’s visual right in front of you. You don’t have to hear it.

Right, it’s there, and you can call it up later so it’s both a media and you can call it up later, as well. So yeah, great, thank you.

So let me throw out what the researchers say, and I think what you’ll discover it’s going to cover a lot of the things that you already presented. But from a kind of semantic perspective of looking at how we pull the language apart, print offers a simultaneous presentation of patterns. And those patterns can be visual in the sense that certain words go together, there’s a flow of visual patterns and that gets to the efficiency of print as a medium. There are phonological patterns. We can react to certain things, either auditorially in some cases or. there’s semantic patterns, the way that words go together. And in fact, a lot of skilled readers tend to read ahead because you’re anticipating and predicting what’s coming next and can make the flow of reading pretty quickly.

So anybody want to take a shock at reading this paragraph? Somebody can do it, come on. Go ahead. Back here. We need a microphone.

Whoa. Good job.

OK, so this is kind of reinforcing that sense of visual pattern, that those of us who are skilled readers actually can look at this and actually have no difficulty reading this, because we’re just translating it as we’re reading. If you’re an emerging reader, this is the nightmare you know, that you can’t get to this stage. This really is a skilled reader. So it’s pattern recognition, particularly with text is important as a medium for transmitting information.

We’ve got visual patterns, we’ve also got phonological awareness and this relates to younger students. Phonological awareness, so it sounds similar, major component of skill in beginning readers …

OK, I’m going to — this is a pet scan. And what it’s really showing is the burning of glucose in the brain. I’m not going to spend a whole lot of time on it, other than just to point out a couple of things. When glucose is being burned in the brain, there are neurons that are fired. Glucose is really a sugar compound and it’s used for energy generation, and what pet scans do is they allow us to see the burning of glucose in the brain with an alert, aware individual in response to specific stimuli and it gives us a sense of what neurons are firing with what degree of intensity in the brain and so the one that’s kind of predictable is listening to words, which is this one right over here. This is a brain that’s facing — we’re looking at the left hemisphere, so those of you speech and language pathologists and folks remember western Wernicke’s area. This is. Now for the first time when these images were first made available late 80s or early 90s, so within the last 25 years, we’re able to kind of reconcile notion that we had earlier with what is actually happening and but what is interesting is how much neurons are firing outside of the areas where normally you’d think there would be a heavy concentration. So if we’re viewing words passively, you get a very high glucose burn in the rear part of the occipital cortex, but also what’s happening is neurons are firing throughout so they’re firing a lot of up in the frontal cortex and as you can see 3 dimensional, also down into the limbic system. And the reason when this information first became available, the reason this was really enthralling and terrifying was for the first time we had a sense of what was happening in the brain as neurons were firing. In response to a particular task, but it also meant that there really wasn’t a reading area of the brain. A lot of the researchers were looking at this and saying we know how the brain works, we can go a long way towards helping students learn better, because if we can isolate a reading area maybe we can do something if it’s not functioning chemically or. And what we discovered is there really isn’t a reading area in the brain, there are thousands of reading areas in the brain because neurons fire throughout.

OK, so simultaneous presentation of patterns. PHOTI in English can spell fish. And the reason being you can use the PH from phony and the O from women and the TI in action as come up with the word fish. The problem is not all phonological patterns are accurate. So something to keep in mind.

OK. Barriers of print. So what happens if some patterns are hard to recognize? Visual patterns are a significant challenge if you do not have functional assistance. Phonological patterns if you are hard of hearing or deaf or for English being a second language because your phonological awareness is focused on a whole different level or a different set of patterns. And then semantic patterns with dyslexia.

So these are be challenges that ADHD low cognition, English as a second language. So these are potential Barriers to using print as a primary media for transmission of information.

OK, digital media offers some benefits. One of the things that often happens with those of us is that universal design for learning and digital media get kind of intertwined in a way that also implies some degree of dependency. And the way I kind of express this is I think there’s a lot of ways of incorporating universal design for learning into intrucksal practice without using technology. It’s just that some of the aspects of digital media technology make it much more efficient and much more easy to actually do this. So one of the classic examples is oh, how text can be read in alternate formats almost instantaneously if the text is digital to begin with. You can naggify, you can do custom colors, you can also transform it pretty automatically into Braille and you get output using text to speech. All of that is possible using a standard print piece of paper. You just need a lot of people and a lot of time to make that happen. So using digital media in the context of enhancing print is pretty powerful.

The other thing about — let me see I’m going to stop here and go on to imbedded strategy.

… OK. So what are images good for? And this goes back to the same question. I’m going to transition now away from print into images. So I’m going to open this up and see what what your all opinions are. When would you use or envision using images or in your experience what have images been really helpful for? We have a response right here so bring the microphone over?

Imagery is universal. It’s often used for example one obvious example is road signs. You can go from country to country and drive a vehicle and usually with either road signs or when you’re dealing with any type of danger situation or chemicals, that are universal examples of danger, as well.

Great, great. Yeah, they really do transcend cultures in a really interesting way.

Any other impressions, thoughts, related to images?

They often relay — information more quickly. Succinct.

Yes, great. Yup, one other? Charlie, don’t run away.

They also can convey a complex pattern or singling and simplify something such as a cellular mechanism or something to that effect.

Right, right, everybody hear that? So complex pattern, cellular mechanism, that’s a great example.

Anybody else? Yeah, in the back.

For those who have difficulty processing language, imagery can be a more successful way of communicating.

Yes, absolutely. So let’s take a look and see what some of the research says or at least what’s out there. Representing concrete objects and the spaces between them. And I’ll show you a couple of examples of that. This is actually some of you mentioned, like you know being able to look at cells or something like that, that images can be much more telling and what it would take to describe that same combination of images in text usually gets people lost pretty quickly. Representing the relationships between objects, illustrating or capturing their relationships. So how they’re alike, how they’re different. Representing context, capturing objects in actual context, maintaining figure and ground. An capturing simultaneousate, parts and whole relationships. So this is kind of a classic example. This is an image from a manual on putting together a gas grill and if you could — this is one of those nightmares of construction that those of us whose parents have mistakenly have bought items for children and haven’t put them together on Christmas Eve. This falls into that category. So this is multiple relationships amongst objects that that if you could imagine trying to put something like this together in print or text only, it would take reams and reams and you’d be lost by probably the third paragraph. So this is another indication of just showing relationship between objects. That there’s a clarity here that these images really can perfect these relationships much more efficiently than certainly any other type.

And sometimes they’re less useful than others, because you may want to have alerts posted, and you need to know when to stop using images and when to move into text-based.

This is — these are the parking symbols for Logan airport central parking. Now, I don’t know how many of you have ever parked in Logan. But it’s like Dante’s 9th circle. You kind of — you pull your car into central parking and there are three or four garages and they all look the same and there’s level 4 east, south, west, and it’s just unbelievable and always when you’re parking in Logan and you’re coming back in from a red eye from somewhere you’ve totally forgotten. My favorite experience was coming in in a snowstorm and I thought I’d parked on Level 3 in the middle of the tower so I go to Level 3 in the middle of the tower and my car isn’t there. It’s Level 3 in one of the other two towers and I thought I’ll be smart I’ll just hit the panic button on my car and if the. But of course all I could hear was this faint beep, beep, beep, and I could not tell whether it was up or down. So I get back on the elevator, go down, hit the panic button again and now it’s even fainter, so I know it’s up. Anyway, using this system of setting off my alarm I actually found my car 20 minutes later and it was on level 4, not Level 3.

But images here, this is what this is really trying to reinforce is a sense of location and mnemonics and differentiation. And as you mentioned, that sense that this is kind of is cross cultural to some extent.

So representing concrete objects, spaces between them, representing the relationships between objects, illustrating or capturing those relationships. Representing context, capturing objects in actual context, maintaining figure and ground and capturing parts and wholes simultaneously. And think about images in an instructional context. The purpose being you want to transmit some information using images.

What are the challenges related to Barriers of images is it gets you into top down constraints. This another another optical illusion showing that the square that’s identified here is the same shade as this square over here, so that one and this one are the same. But your brain is saying, no, they’re really different, but it’s another one of those top-down I am positions that relates to shading and color where your brain is overriding what your sensory system is doing and this tends to happen a lot with images. So we come to it with a predisposition, at least a neural anatomical predisposition to see certain things and to not see others. And you get also things are imposed upon you simply by experience. On first pass it would be very easy to say this would be Clinton and gore but it’s really Clinton and Clinton, and all we’ve done is simply changed the hair style. But it’s relatively easy to trick yourself into thinking you’re seeing two different individuals and some of you are going what? Really? Yes.

So what challenges images present to learners? The first is sensory. If you have limited vision or your vision is compromised in some way, obviously then images are going to create impairment. The other one is perceptual and that has to do with interpretive, how you’re able to accurately interpret an image, particularly when in context. And finally cognitive, the degree to understand what you’re being presented with and that goes back to that diagram of the grill that as you walk through the grill set diagram, everything is clear until you get to the area that says don’t do this. And then all of a sudden what happens is your uncertainty takes over and you’re not sure what they’re asking you not to do. And so you get uncertain and you end up oftentimes doing exactly what the image tells you not to do because you mis interpreted the image.

OK, ways of representing information that can help. Particularly with images, providing text equivalents for images is part of accessibility expectations for a variety of standards, so certainly on the worldwide web, having some sort of ALT text, which is a short-text of an image is really preferred and in many cases require practice, but in some situations having, and this is what is known as a long description. So having a long description of an image gets again to purpose. And I’ll just share with you, so share with you a discussion that arose around the national instructional materials accessibility standard. So curriculum publishers agreed to proceed high quality digital source files including images to a central repository and out of the repository organizations like book share .ORG and others would take this content and make blind versions. And when it came time, everybody agreed that having images was really important, any image that was included in a textbook or related materials should be provided to students because some students were going to be looking at this content on a computer screen. Learning disabled students, for example. And then the next question came was, well, text equiv will lens are essential for students who are blind, because obviously they can’t see the image, they need to have some sort of text description, and they proved incredibly useful for students who are learning disabled or have attentional issues, because what the text equivalent does is it really helps focus what the purpose of this image on this page is for. And so a lot of the folks who were in the alternate format production world say well we’ll create the text equivalents for that, because this is a disability thing, and the publishers’ reaction was interesting, a couple of publishers said wait a minute, we choose images to embed in our instructional materials for their pedagogical content so we think this is an editorial task and so now what happens is a number of publishers are actually providing text equivalents for images even though they’re not required to do in a because they’re the ones that are selecting the images in the first place and making them a part of the process.

So providing text equivalents is important. This another use of images of some interesting approaches to helping students structure their writing and this is from an article called, to write, draw. And it’s a way of scaffolding student writing by using a triangle approach. And this came, I was reading an article inside higher Ed and talking about how the to mentor students because oftentimes students simply don’t understand the structure associated with academic writing, and so what WEIR was doing here is saying this structure is relatively straightforward, it’s an inverted pyramid, you start with a thesis statement, you look at a vector in aspects of support that support that thesis statement and you come to a conclusion and if these components are not imbedded or if you capital tease out these components, you need to go back and using a diagram of this nature, something like this, to analyze or reanalyze what you’ve written. So I thought this was a nice example of the use of an image to support going the other way. Image to support text, as well as text to support image.

The other aspect of images has to do with engagement. And the difference that color can make, particularly, and this gets into the evocative category of how connected emotionally one feels to a particular image or not. So if you take the color out of an image, it becomes far less of an image. And so this image is much more compelling using color obviously than it is when just black and white. And that was another example of what happened with newspapers a number of years ago. Anybody remember like I do, when all newspapers were black and white and then all of a sudden they went color and you started to see color images on newspapers and it was almost jarring, because we’d gotten used to the black and white.

Another example, that if things are just black and white, they’re far less compelling than color.

They’re also pretty important for evoking emotion and this is the other air area where images can do things like music and sound in a way that is very different from what print was capable of doing. This is an image from the trail of tears Cherokee nation moving, being forcibly moved out to the west. And you can see by the placement and perspective, particularly the woman up front who’s crying, and that there’s a real emphasis on kind of grabbing your heart strings and showing you that this is an unpleasant set of circumstances and so another means of using imagery to evoke a trigger emotion but also provide a lot of detail that if you begin to delve into the detail, all the detail supports that kind of pathos that that first image presents. >> : OK, just transfer over a minute to the virtues of lecture and by lecture I’m thinking of audio in general. Just the way we use audio in an instructional setting. So what are the virtues of audio? A lot of us, me included, spend a lot of time talking to others. What do you think the benefits are of doing that? Anybody want to throw out is …

You can listen to it while driving.

Ah, great. Great. Listen to while driving. Another one here? It can be very personal and engaging.

Personal and engaging, yes.

Emotion and stress can be conveyed in the way something is expressed.

Great, great.

Has anybody ever had the experience with email where you send an email to someone and they interpreted it exactly opposite from the way you intended, because there was no ability to stress and emphasize? I’ve had that happen a number of times.

Well responding to the email example, I came from the IT world and I’ve gotten in trouble many a times because of how exclamations or colors were interpreted. But as you were talking about in terms of evoking emotion, audio also is a way of making sure that whatever message you’re trying to convey in terms of the actual terms, not emotion, is usually universally expressed. It might not be universery interpreted, but at least you have an opportunity to express your ideas to a multitude of people at the same time. So that’s one of the advantages, I think.

Any other thoughts about audio?

I would just like to say, I see audio as virtue like a passionate way of getting information and I always laugh when I hear a speaker or someone, you know, suddenly, is there any questions or something and your brain has to jump back into the engagement part. Doesn’t happen a lot, but you are you’re expected to just watch TV and.

Some people simply process differently or process better by hearing or by hearing and reading together.

Yup.

There’s also body language and facial expressions.

Yes, right, and again it gets back to that notion of stress. Good. Any other comments?

OK. So let me — oh, we’ve got another one? Yes, go ahead.

EU6S just going to say that we’re really expanding the definition of audio to say that there are multiple forms of communication that could be embedded which that and so we have to interrogate the standard definition of the terms that we’re using. Because it seems most of this is about multiplicity or various intelligences and various ways of accessing the information.

That’s correct, and also to try to identify, try in some ways to tease out when audio is a Barrier and for whom and when it’s really a strong method for getting the message across.

So what the you know, what the experts who are researching some of this say that the virtues of lecture is the power and flexibility of the human voice and its accompaniments. It’s relatively easy to do in a conversation because of inflection or emphasis. Also, within a lecture situation, there’s this kind of feedback and wisdom of the crowd that develops. That whether it be positive or negative or investigate where the questions will start to move in a similar direction. Amplification contagion, those things occur in audio lecture situations.

However, there are some challenges to audio. I’ll just throw these out. It’s a uniform means of representing ideas and information, and it involves — it’s a pretty heavy memory load and the reason it’s a heavy memory load is it’s sequential and transient. So that once the information is out, it’s gone unless it’s being simultaneously captioned or recorded, and so the way we manage that transency is we look to other means of making an audio stream permanent so that we can go back and pick it up. There’s an executive load and by executive load I mean it’s relating to executive function. Organizing, staying focused, both from the speaker’s perspective and the listener’s perspective. Is the speaker on task, does it make sense. And from a listener’s perspective, how long can I continue to listen to this guy. There’s an implicit structure. I remember when talking to somebody about a first class at public speaking and somebody saying, well, you first get up and tell them what you’re going to say and then you say it and then you tell them what you said. Kind of that three-step prong approach to implicit structure of presentation and there’s also background knowledge because the speaker may using vocabulary and there’s no way to either reify or contextize that vocabulary because there isn’t time. Nick mentioned it’s fairly passive that there’s a lack of interaction, a lack of construction meaning if it’s a lecture, and I mentioned impermanent and linear. And that the challenges really have to do with uniformity of the ways that one can engage an audience using audio. Recruiting interest is important.

So these are types of things that kind of arise. So I’ll just share with you some of the pros say is first understand your audience, so it’s really nice to know whom’ addressing and that what you have to say is really relevant to them. Because if you’re ever in a circumstance and about to talk to somebody and realize that what you have to say and what they’re interested in are two different things you know you’re in trouble. 20 minutes by itself except if it’s interspersed with other media. This is really talking about a person’s attention is really only good for 20 minutes. Organization should have some power and punch. There’s an expectation of entertainment, as well instruction, or exploration. And that there are alternatives available. Audio amplification, such as what we’re using today. Multimedia. Concept maps, structural scaffolds. What I’ve sometimes done with PowerPoint presentation is use a little thermometer at the bottom of the PowerPoint slides that shows you how far you are in the slide set. Because that way people can look and go oh, I can’t bear this any longer, he’s only a part of the way through, or thank god, he’s almost done. So little things like that can be quite useful.

Visual and audio recording of information. We are David Rose teaches at Harvard, in his classroom there are some challenges and benefits to this room. It’s part of the Ed school and it’s a theater seating room. Seats about 110, and when he lectures and talks or has a class, there’s audio a digital audio stream that’s recorded and then there are two video cameras that record him and about usually about an hour after the class is over, the entire class is online and all the audio has been transformed into a text transcript using the technology. So it’s up and available there. And that’s actually useful for many students. Not just for students who are hard of hearing, but students who want to revisit, you know, what happened in the classroom. So finding ways of representing and increasingly that type of technology is becoming more commonplace.

Providing guided notes and in some cases guided notes can be very highly structure. They can be notes with some key pieces missing. And finally timer pacing indicator like that thermometer bar that I mentioned. Or providing some indication on a slide set or some aspect of presentation where you say, OK, we’re on item 12 of 50 or something.

For expression, particularly with lecture, and I’ll talk more about this in a the session this afternoon. But large-group Q and A sessions can be useful, follow-up discussions. Assigning note takers, having note-takers in class as part of an ongoing process, and this again has to do with instructional practice. Having online discussion forums like for this conference that people are already taking advantage of. Multiple ways of sharing information. So it’s not just listening.

Questions are really powerful. Personal anecdotes are powerful. Connecting with people based on shared experience is a really important way and also, the other part of it I think is affect. If you’re passionate about a electric tire lecture that you’re trying to inculcate or move towards it’s much more powerful than just saying data or statistics say this is the way to do it.

So this is one of those classic on speech making. Power. Punch, one theme, wait, loop back, talk about what you’ve already said.

Just a couple of comments on PowerPoint. I use power points all the time. I use them as an anchor and trying to avoid, unless the situation really requires it, I’m trying to avoid reading any slides but I wanted to read this one to you so I’m going to violate violate my own rule.

So that’s the positive side of it. And this is from Clifford NASS.

But, …

So you have the plus and minus in both regards.

So finally, death by PowerPoint and I violate all of these simultaneously. Never begin or end with slides, don’t read word slides. Tell and show, rather than show and tell. Don’t turn the lights off. Use blanks like silences of ways of interacting. One image per concept. Graphics for good news, tables for bad. I love that one. And I think back about watching you know, all those movies that talk about stock market crashes and that’s exactly what they do.

So I’m going to stop here. And just thank you all for hanging in with me this morning. And I think it’s a good time to take a stretch because I’ve been blabbering at you for a long time. Just wanted to see if there were any questions before we take a lunch break. See you don’t want to risk a row bation by your peers. A.

I don’t know if this question is a no-no, but are these PowerPoint slides available for us to look at?

Yes, in fact this set, Susan doesn’t have but I’ll see that she gets that. So we’ll post these on the blog so you have them available, yeah, yeah. Any other questions?

Thank you very much. Go have lunch. Approbation. Approbation. Approbates. Approbate. Approbate. Approbates. OK, lunch is on the third floor. There are food places all through the building. One floor down, two floors down, and three floors down. Each of the floors does food places. Each end. All different kinds of things. There are restaurants, there are fast food. Ben & Jerry’s, right. New world tortilla, there’s a vegetarian bar. Just explore. There’s a list inside the elevator. We will meet at 1 in the workshops. And all of the rooms are listed on the schedule in your folder. Charlie’s signaling:

People paid for lunch. I didn’t know that. If you don’t like what’s out here for free, you can buy lunch anyplace in the building. Right outside. Rhetorician. Rhetorician. Naltrexone. Naltrexone. Naltrexone. Naltrexone. Cortex. Cortex. Thrall, thralls, thralled. Flor. Flors. Flora. Florium. Floribunda. Test test test test Punia. Pun yeah. Pulitzer Priza. Pulitzer prize. Punia. Punia. Hoity-toity. Edelman.Edelman. NIMAS. Nimas. Anymore. Anymore. Nipple. Nipples. Nippled. Pulitzer Prize. UDL@UVM. Universal design for learning.@. Amino acid amino acid. Acronyms. Acronyms. Acronym. Ann off ovulatory.

Good afternoon.

Like to welcome you to the closing for the first day of better learning by design and I’m Ellen McShane, director of academic support programs here at the University of Vermont 57B I’m a member of the UDL staff and a member of the design team. A little bit about which individuals are on the UDL staff and so with me today is Zach. I’m going to have him introduce himself.

I also work sort of as a tech support specialist on the team. It’s been a very nice privilege of mine to work with everyone and get to know the UDL principles and get to know more about accessibility. It’s really cool especially since I just graduated in December of 2009 and then I get to meet with all these faculty and professors which is kind of a will cool thing for me to do, especially since I just graduated but yeah, Ellen and I wanted to sort of ask you guys how you thought the first day of sort of processing went. This is our first time holding this conference and we hope to build sustainability in the long run so if there’s anything that anyone would like to share with us right now as to how they thought the flow of the day went, I guess that would be reassuring for us to know that it went smoothly, put a lot of work into it. Any comments or a slogan that anyone can think of for the first day of activities at the universal design for learning conference? Be brave. It’s OK. We were the sentiment. Regardless of what you’re familiar with or what know, hearing others in your profession come here and speak on this particular topic of UDL and their approach, I think that on this first day what was really interesting was that it was full of different perspectives or different ways of applying what you know. So unfortunately I’m going to have it leave here today which I’m going to regret, but I’m curious as to what would happen in the next two days. It’s all centralized throughout the whole conference. It’s under the comment called column walled the water cooler … Test test test test test test test test test is it showing on there? Test test test test test test test test test before you go on there are some questions. Zach, can we wait for the microphone?

Test test test test the question is how long will this information stay on the blog.

As a learning group. In terms of the blog, I think it’s a really neat idea and we’re doing so many other things, that it feels like a stretch to get there and really pay attention to what’s going on there. It would have been helpful to know, to bring a laptop if you had one …: Any other questions about the blog? I’ll just say really quickly. One really nice thing about the blog is it’s kind of the conference stuck? Time. It has a different time frame than regular time.

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