1
1
>> >>: hello, everybody.
Welcome. Today is day two of
5 the conference, better learning
by design. Thank you so much
for waiting patiently as we've
just been getting everything
together. I'm just going to
10 open the conference today with a
few details as to logistics.
And then we'll get us on to our
keynote speaker, David Rose. So
I'd just like to say welcome to
15 the new participants today and
also the veterans who were here
yesterday. You can get all the
details from the veterans as to
what's good around Davis Center.
20 And isn't also like to remind
you that at our registration
table, you'll find our members
of our UDL team in case you have
any questions and the
25 registration table is where you
2
1 got your badges this morning.
And also bathrooms are right
near the registration table. In
any case if you don't find
5 anyone there at the registration
table, you can find members of
our team at the Boulder room
just down the hall. So as for
an overview of the day today,
10 we're going to start with our
keynote speaker, David Rose, and
then we're going to have a brief
break and continue with our
keynote speaker until about
15 12:00. Afterwards we're going
to have a lunch break right out
here lunch will be served. If
you do want food that isn't
available here, there is food
20 for purchase downstairs at the
marketplace and that is open
until 2 p.m. Afterwards, we
will have a breakout session
from 1 to 2:15, and in our
25 breakout sessions, the
3
1 presenters can feel free to move
the chairs and tables around, so
that it's appropriate for
discussion or for any type of
5 configuration that is best for
that particular session. And
also, we will be video
recording, just for educational
purposes and there are consent
10 forms on the table, so if the
presenter of each breakout
session would just fill out that
consent form and specify their
level of comfort with that video
15 recording, that would be great.
Also, if members in the breakout
sessions can fill out
evaluations, which are also on
the table, as paper form, or
20 they can do them online, so
either one of those would be
great and Holly Parker will be
showing us in a few minutes as
to how to fill out an evaluation
25 online. After our first
4
1 breakout session from 1 to 2:15
we'll have another break for
about 15 minutes and then we'll
have a second breakout session
5 from 2:30 to 3:45 and actually
today is kind of special,
because at the end of the day
today from 4:30 to 6, we will
have a formal social hour around
10 networking hour, which will be
in the Livak ballroom. There
will be a cash bar. There will
be posters and vendors and
exhibiter tables there and also
15 there will be prized so this is
actually quite important.
Veterans will tell you yesterday
we had a great prize session
yesterday and we're continuing
20 it today. So the rule is the
three P's. First you must post
on the blog which Holly's going
to get to in a minute. The
second rule is you must be
25 present at the social hour, the
5
1 networking hour, and the third
rule is if you are present, and
you did post, you have the
opportunity to get a prize. And
5 we have a prize available today
that is valued over $600, so if
I were you I would definitely
get there.
10 >> >>: let's see. I guess right
now I would like to bring up
Holly Parker to talk about the
blog and about evaluations.
15 >> >>: we would like some clue
as about the prize.
>> >>: Oakes OHH, OK I'm going
to think about that one.
20
>> >>: could I get a little help
for a second?
>> >>: I see David has his
25 keynote here all ready to go, so
6
1 I don't want to mess with it.
Good morning everybody, I've
already had a few questions
about how to get to the blog.
5 There is a direct URL to the
blog, but I think the simplest
way would be just to go through
our website for UDL@UVM he so
I'm going to he show that route.
10 The put in the regular UVM .EDU
and then the TILDE sign, and
then universal design. So then
there is the conference ling.
So if you click on that, that
15 will take you to the blog.
That's kind of the easiest
route. Now, I am quite pleased
at the amount of postings that
have come up in the water
20 cooler. Even this morning, I
get all the emails as the ADMIN.
So I saw all of the conversation
that had started, and what I'm
going to show you just briefly
25 is the water cooler link, which
7
1 you get to over here on the
right-hand side and then you can
see there are 20 responses so
far. This area is set up as a
5 threaded discussion. So if you
see something that you would
like to reply to, all you have
to do is click on the reply link
that is associated with that
10 particular post. For example,
Hailey posted something about
getting the slides from
yesterday. And you can see that
I replied to her this morning
15 and it shows the thread by
indentation here. So that's
just a way to kind of navigate
through the discussion here, and
be able to reply to a particular
20 post if you're interested. Some
people have posted questions, so
feel free to jump in, click that
reply button and answer them if
you're able to. The other thing
25 I wanted to show you is the way
8
1 that you go to an evaluation.
So we're on day two this
morning, and if we click that
link over here on the right,
5 then you can see the schedule of
the day, and underneath each of
the sessions, there should be an
evaluation link associated with
that particular session. For
10 example, here's the link for
David Rose's keynote evaluation,
and if you click there, you will
be taken to a brief survey
monkey survey. So we're asking
15 that if you're able to do these
online, that's the most
efficient way for us to get the
feedback very quickly. But we
also accept the paper
20 evaluations that are located in
each of the rooms, and you can
pick one up either before or
after each of the sessions.
There is a box for the
25 evaluations at the welcome table
9
1 that Puja was mentioning, so you
can just drop your evaluation in
that box.
5 >> >>: and I think there's still
a computer located out by the
welcome table, a laptop
computer, that you can use, as
well, to fill out the
10 evaluations or check your email
if you need to check email.
>> >>: Puja's feeding me some
pointers here. There's also
15 some computers on the lower
levels of the Davis Center,
Level 3 and 1, I believe? So if
I can help you in any way to get
on the blog throughout the day
20 today, just let me know. And
also, if if you have any
questions or you notice that
something is missing that you'd
like up on the blog, presenters,
25 if you have not yet submitted
10
1 your slides or if you have
submitted them and they are not
appearing on today's sessions,
appear on the blog, please send
5 an email to me with the
attachment and it's Holly .
Parker at UVM .EDU.
>> >>: OK. Thank you, Holly.
10 One more thing I wanted to
mention is that this, the
vendors and the posters and the
exhibitors will actually be
available and presenting in in
15 the frank Livak room all day
today so if you have a few
minutes during a break or if you
just want to take a break from a
session, you can go in there and
20 check out what's available.
>> >>: lastly, we have rides
that are available to the
Sheraton at 6:15, and they will
25 be leaving here. If you would
11
1 like a ride, please do go to the
registration table and sign and
let one of our team members know
about that. I would like to
5 introduce Charlie, a member of
our team who has been working in
education for over 46 years, and
working at UVM for over 40
years. Thank you.
10
>> >>: some of the more mature
people in the audience will
remember Jonathan winters who
had a great routine about, I've
15 been in this job for over a
quarter of a century. That was
one of his characters. I
haven't gotten to the
half-century mark yet. But
20 thank you, Puja, for that very
brief introduction. I
appreciate that.
>> >>: I was part of the UDL
25 team that went to Wakefield
12
1 Mass. last spring to work for
three days with cast. And my
last memory of seeing David was
at the end of the training, and
5 David followed us out, actually
everybody kind of followed us
out, to the doorway between the
cast offices and the rest of the
world. And we stood there and
10 in our good goodbyes, we kind of
dreamed up this conference. The
doorway space is called a lumen,
and in some ways it's a place
between two realities, and for
15 us it was the reality of cast
and the reality of what would
come after that. We had spent
three days immersed in that
bridge between the neuroscience
20 of learning and the
possibilities maybe of working
on higher education with largely
a population of professors who
had no construction whatsoever
25 in pedagogy. So it was a huge
13
1 challenge. But that's what
lumens are, they're places of
possibility. They're places
between parentheses of
5 experience around I think that's
the way the team took it and I
think it's the way David meant
it when he and skip and grace
and the rest of the cast staff
10 sent us off.
>> >>: I see David as an applied
theorist, very much a
neuroscientist and very much a
15 person embedded in the lives of
children, youth, adolescents,
college-age students, and their
teachers, whoever their teachers
may be. I think it's a tough
20 job to be an applied theorist.
It's much more comfortable to be
either applied tore a theorist,
but to live in both of those
worlds opens yourself up for
25 expert criticism from the other
14
1 world. And you're always kind
of pushing the boundaries.
David's very much a
boundary-pusher and he's very
5 much a bridger. And I'd like to
just spend a couple of minutes
reading you some of the titles
of his most recent publications,
because they'll show you what
10 that bridging is all about.
>> >>: applying universal design
for learning with children in
poverty. So there's universal
15 design, there's learning, and
then there are these kids in our
schools that forever we've been
trying to figure out how to
close not only achievement gap,
20 but the gap of affect for them,
so that they can experience
school with the same joy and
relevance as other children.
25 >> >>: so there is one bridge.
15
1 >> >>: there's echoes of Michael
Harrington in that title, for
those of you who remember
Michael Harrington.
5
>> >>: another title: Is
synthesis possible? Making
doubly sure in research and
application. There's that
10 bridge again between research
and application, and the view of
the scientist. Making doubly
sure.
15 >> >>: here's another favorite
of mine. Cognition of learning,
meeting the challenge of
individual differences. You
know, we use that term
20 individual differences as if
there's nobody else in the world
but you can't have an individual
difference without a group or a
larger other. And so the
25 consideration of individual
16
1 differences is also partly that
bridge between who is this
individual we're talking about
and what are we comparing them
5 to? So this world of bridging
is something I appreciate in
immense ways that David brings
with him. As I hear David talk,
I hear historical bridges. I
10 hear historical bridges to
PIAGET, one of the great
thinkers of how we think, how we
learn, conditions for learning,
conditions for extremely
15 positive mental development.
Way before there was any way of
accessing what was lighting up
when the brain was used in
certain ways. There's bridges
20 to the GODSKEY, there's bridges
to the educational theorists who
have been around for a long time
and I'm stalking talking like a
thousand years who have always
25 enacting what is being learned
17
1 in the moment it to deepening
your understanding of any
particular reality that you're
living in. So I am so grateful
5 that David and skip, but this
morning David, have continued
their commitment to this project
in UDL at the University of
Vermont, and have continued
10 their willingness to come
support us, support you in the
work that you're doing here in
the Davis Center this morning.
Skip? David? Where are you?
15 There you are.
>> >>: thank you, Charlie, for
that very sweet introduction. I
guess I'm on a lumen, too, that
20 was great. Very nice. I
apologize. I won't be able to
stay for the nice events at the
end of the day. I'm in a week
of sort of great stress and
25 great opportunity, just finished
18
1 turning in my graze yesterday,
so you university faculty know
what that feels like. And you
always have that student that
5 you just don't know, is it going
to come in by 5 or not, and then
turned up up in my grades and
rushed up here and I have to
leave to go down to Washington
10 tomorrow doing a congressional
briefing on matters that are of
interest to all of us here, I'll
tell you all about that toward
the end of the day. But there's
15 sort of action everywhere, but
my assistant was saying, are you
really going to drive up four
hours, you know, come back four
hours and make it in time to get
20 on your plane and get to
Washington and all that? And I
thought this would actually feel
quite nice, you know, kind of
settle down for a while in my
25 car and think about this. I'm
19
1 hoping, skip said you were a
nice audience, you're not going
to attack me or anything, so I
am actually very much looking
5 forward to spending the time
with you, and I have plenty of
time which often doesn't happen.
Because there's a little
breakout session later, so I'll
10 be putting things often in a,
you know, in a garage where I'll
say, well, maybe let's talk
about that in the afternoon
session, but it's enough time to
15 do some broad strokes now, and
still have some time for a
discussion later for a few of
you that like to do that. Just
broad what I'm going to do
20 today. This morning I'm going
to do background on UDL, some of
the underlying learning
sciences. And a few
application, although not too
25 much of that. And I'll take a
20
1 break and I'll also see from the
wonderful colleagues at UVM just
whether I should tweak what I'm
doing for the second part. The
5 second part is largely I'm going
to talk about my own teaching,
what I do and don't do and I
want to say before I begin that
I actually had a disappointing
10 semester. I tried some things
that didn't work, that I'll tell
it you about, a couple of things
that did work that I'll tell you
about, and I also had a
15 neurological incident myself,
which made teaching very hard
for a while, and I'll tell you a
little bit about that. So it
was a kind of like odd semester.
20 And I thought I would be a lot
better than I was, but I thought
this is a good group to kind of
share that with, that actually
for a little while I was a
25 different person. Things that
21
1 were easy before were not easy
for me all of a sudden, and I,
too, like you, had some bad
teaching days where I was not on
5 top of it, didn't do very well
and some things that I'd hoped
to do were not great. So we're
all too human, and so I'll tell
about the sort of good things
10 and bad things that happened
this semester. And show you
some student work and things
like that. So broad theory and
some application for the first
15 part, little break, my own
teaching which are graduate
students in education, and then
more interchange in the
afternoon, OK? And I like being
20 interrupted with questions. I
will often ignore them, so don't
worry. That is, if I don't
think it's sort of in the thrust
of where we need to be in the
25 moment, I'll say let's talk
22
1 about that a little bit later,
so you can feel free to ask
them, knowing that I'm going to
feel free I don't want to answer
5 that right now, OK? But
hopefully el I'll be able to
later. And let's see if I get
up on this screen. This me
shifting or do you shift?
10
>> >>: oh, you are I'm already
ahead. Let me get out my little
magic wand which I've never
used. Oh, I see. I'm looking
15 over there. But -- now I get
it. I'm already having
technical difficulties. This is
where I want you to look. And
is it -- it's a little, we're
20 going do some brain slides so I
hope that it's bright enough.
Is it possible if I needed to,
to dim the lights? Let's just
see, let me try T I just want to
25 see it before I get going.
23
1 Yeah, OK, now, is that enough
for interpreting? Do you have
enough light?
5 >> >>: that's good? OK. All
right.
>> >>: so, I want to do some
broad setting. There we go. I
10 think skip probably talked about
NIMAS, I'm not going to do much
talking about NIMAS. Did you
talk about NIMAS, skip?
15 >> >>: a little bit
>> >>: and did you talk about
the higher Ed extension or not?
20 >> >>: not yet snoovment is it
all right if I do that? Or are
you going to do it tomorrow?
>> >>: no, no, OK.
25
24
1 >> >>: NIMAS, skip would have
introduced you to, and so I can
skip that for the moment, except
I want to go into it a little
5 bit. One part of it. So NIMAS
is a standard for digital source
files that can be used to
accurately and reliably produce
instructional materials in a
10 variety of alternate formats
using the same source file, the
glory of XML, you make a thing
once, display it in many
different ways. It's the kind
15 of thing we couldn't do in the
world of print but now we can.
Partly I want to focus on this.
What does it do?
20 >> >>: I actually think, more
important than the technical
standard, which NIMAS really is
a technical standard, make your
books like this, so we can make
25 lots of different things out of
25
1 them, was the putting into
congressional language the word
print disability. And I want to
talk about that word, actually.
5 For most it will it will
underlie most of what I'm going
to talk about. Print disability
is way too narrow for what we're
going to ultimately talk about.
10 But I think it's a watershed
moment, the inclusion of this
word, and I want to talk about
why that is. OK?
15 >> >>: the outcomes of NIMAS is
that virtually every textbook in
American schools, this is K-12
published after 2006 is now
available in a digital XML
20 version to any child with a
print disability. So there's a
law, there's a force, there's a
definition that people care
about, if you have a print
25 disability, then you have access
26
1 to materials that other kids do
not, and that you didn't used
to. So every textbook since
2006 is now available as a
5 digital source file marked up in
the way that actually skip's
large commission defined. And
if I can say it, skip can tell
you more about it tomorrow
10 because skip's in charge of
this, but we've been asked just,
is it OK to say this?
>> >>: sure, why not.
15
>> >>: I think it's OK to say
it, you'll be the first to know.
The Congress when they passed
the law earlier, said there
20 needs to be a higher education
commission on accessible
instructional materials for the
college level crowd. Your
folks, and the Department of Ed
25 called us two weeks ago and
27
1 said, Congress wants us to make
a higher education commission.
We want you to lead it, that
means they really want skip to
5 lead it, and so there will be a
higher education commission
doing what this law did for
K-12, so I know that skip --
thank you, thank you.
10
>> >>: skip, I know that skip,
skip and chuck have a view that
it will be different than the
way it works in K-12, so maybe
15 he'll talk about that tomorrow.
>> >>: but print disability is
what I want to focus on here.
So I want to -- as I said, I
20 think this language is a
watershed, and I think -- I'm
sorry I forgot to say one other
thing I want to do today.
Largely I'm going to do things
25 that I often do but in each case
28
1 I'm going to say something new
today about what I think is
next, because the UVM people
hope that I would talk a little
5 bit more about what's next. So
in each case I'm going to do
that.
>> >>: and here, though, I
10 wanted to say that the -- what's
next will be an elaboration of
some of these concepts, but the
critical thing was this term
from seeing kids as having
15 learning disabilities to seeing
them as having print
disabilities. There's a very
fundamental shift that I think
is a HARBINGER of very important
20 things to come and I guess I
want to say before we get there,
that the difference is because
it starts to define disability
in a modern way, which is to say
25 a disability always occurs in
29
1 the interaction between an
individual and their
environment, disabilities are
never decontextualized. That
5 is, you can all think of places
where you are disabled and where
you are in other respects would
have been disabled but you're
not, and trying to think, so the
10 world will start seeing it this
way: I'm a little, have a
little fetish for reading books
and movies about climbing Mount
Everest, something I would
15 never, ever, ever do, but it's
just, you know, I'm sure you all
have these little fantasy lives,
so I read things about climbing
Everest. One of the things
20 that's different about Everest
is it's not actually a difficult
climate the top, it's not
treacherous, but there's almost
no oxygen, so the real, as you
25 probably know, a quarter of the
30
1 people that have summited
Everest have died, so you're
putting yourself in this
environment where there is just
5 not enough oxygen and then
you're going to have to do some
very, very hard things. So that
combination, the environment
does not have enough oxygen, and
10 you're being challenged to do
your strongest work, makes most
people disabled. Most people
become disabled near the top of
Everest and can't go to the very
15 top, and thousands of people
have been within visual sight of
the top and not make it, OK?
And everybody knows that.
Parties will begin with 60
20 people, and three will summit.
Gigantic disability at the top.
So that's a kind of a way to
think about disability that in
this room, you know, 97 of us
25 would be disabled at that moment
31
1 on Mount Everest, and then it
makes you think, oh, well, then
that's an odd way to think about
it, but most people would be
5 disabled, that is, you would
have lung conditions at that
height. In fact, you get
neurological conditions. Many
people are unable to tell what
10 the right thing to do next is
because there's just not enough
oxygen for their nervous system
to operate well. So we can make
conditions in which all of us
15 will look disabled, OK? Mount
Everest is probably too extreme
an example. We'll have other
ones as we go along. Most
people look disabled at Mount
20 Everest at this altitude, most
of us don't feel the
neurological and the breathing
disabilities we would feel out
on Mount Everest, OK?
25
32
1 >> >>: the way that print
disability changes things is in
the same way. It says that the
environment is part of what will
5 define whether you're disabled
or not. Print is part of the
definition of disability. That
colocation, it's not just in the
kid. Whether you're disabled or
10 not depends on the environmental
conditions you're going to be
in. In a print environment,
many kids are disabled that are
not disabled in the same way as
15 Everest, not disabled in other
learning environments. So I've
always hated and I'm sure skip
does, too, calling kids learning
disabled. When in fact the
20 learning conditions have been
ones in which there's not enough
oxygen. So saying to, you know,
Hillary on the top of Mount
Everest, you have a breathing
25 disability because you're so
33
1 bent over and strained, you
know, is a nutty way of to think
of it rather than thinking
there's not enough oxygen here
5 for almost everybody, the fact
that you're breathing at all is
amazing. So print disability,
that colocation, saying print is
part of the problem, it's a
10 fundamental shift, what I think
we'll see to say what's next is
we'll talk about things that are
curriculum-based disabilities.
So print is just an example of a
15 curricular materials, but as we
move forward and universal
design moves forward, I think
we'll start to talk about, does
this child have a
20 curriculum-based disability
meaning there's not enough
oxygen in this curriculum for
this kid. Then you can think
about the solutions. The
25 curriculum is part of the
34
1 problem, though, and it makes
you focus on the curriculum
first, which is what we need to
to. the problem of focusing on
5 the kid first is that it gets us
into some bad loops.
>> >>: OK, so who has a print
disability? It's critical,
10 because only if you have a print
disability are you entitled to
the benefits of the NIMAS
legislation, so this is the law
as it talks about it, relates to
15 a really, really old law and it
says it doesn't actually define
print disability, which is
really interesting, and when all
this was happening, some
20 staffers would call us from time
to time, for advice about how
the law would be written. They
never tell you that, they just
very generally saying, if you
25 were going to talk about print
35
1 disability, would it be -- do
you think it would be smart if
we used the following, whatever?
OK, it's really these kind of
5 interesting as-if conversations.
But they didn't end up defining
print disability, which we
thought was sort of odd, that if
you're going to have a law, you
10 can just say that kids have
print disabilities and they have
certain rights. You'd think
you'd define it but they didn't.
In fact, they said it's actually
15 often better to leave things in
the law vague and let case
study, case law, defining it
over time and they said don't
get uptight about it. That
20 actually law often works this
way. It's sort of an organic
view of and sometimes if you
overdefine it you're hurting
yourself. So they said we're
25 just going to go back and look
36
1 at a really, really old law, and
skip knows a lot more about this
than I do, but an old law, which
before the library of Congress,
5 which defined four groups.
Blind people, everybody gets it.
That print materials for a blind
person are not going to work.
Persons who have visual
10 disabilities aren't blind, but
have significant vision
disability. Everybody gets it,
OK, well a printed book has a
specific font size so there's
15 going to be lots of people who
can't use that. Third, persons
certified by competent authority
as unable to read or unable to
use standard printed materials
20 as a result of a physical
limitation, and for reasons that
are quite curious, this word
physical limitation has been
expanded in some views to
25 include it even being the source
37
1 for students who have learning
disabilities. They have a
physical limitation we'll come
to that when we talk about the
5 neuroscience.
>> >>: and lastly, person
certified by a competent
authority, and you can see where
10 right away this starts to go
awry because you're thinking,
well, who would be a competent
authority? And in the old days,
when the law was written, we're
15 going to talk about these
changes in the old days, they
really thought doctors would be
the competent authority, OK?
And you think, oh, my God, I
20 would not want my doctor to
decide whether my kid had a
justified learning disability or
not, because E. doesn't know
anything about it, but at any
25 rate, that's one of the
38
1 problems, a competent authority.
We wouldn't define it the same
as they did back in 1933 or
whenever this happened. But
5 competent authorities having a
reading disability resulting
from organic dysfunction and of
sufficient severity to prevent
their reading printed material
10 in a normal manner.
>> >>: don't like the word
"normal "there, but at any rate.
And that was thought to really
15 save everybody, because the
present framers wanted to
separate out kids that are just
bad readers, don't even ask me
why they might be bad readers,
20 but the publishers would have
gone berserk if all bad readers
would have access to these
digital materials. This is free
of charge, by the way. So the
25 publishers needed something, and
39
1 so this language was tried out
to say, OK, competent
authorities, got to say who it
is, and it's got to come from
5 organic dysfunction.
Something's got to be wrong with
their brain. It can't be that
they just didn't have good
teachers or they're poor, or
10 English isn't their first
language or those things. That
would be way too far. They
should have an organic
dysfunction. Can everybody see
15 why that sort of people, this is
a compromise and it was reached
there?
>> >>: so I'm going to go after
20 this at some length as we talk,
and talk about what works and
doesn't work about this
definition in the light of
modern cognitive neuroscience,
25 but any questions about the
40
1 laws? The law says if you have
a print disability, you have
access, your school must provide
you with these new kinds of
5 materials, and in a timely
fashion and all of that, and
it's the law of the law in every
State of the Union and as I
said, higher education
10 commission is now going to look
at how do we do something like
this for colleges and universe
it's and you can go after skip
tomorrow about what's going to
15 happen. And don't tell too many
people about that because it's
not official.
>> >>: I probably shouldn't have
20 said anything.
>> >>: OK. So I want to talk
about three advances that have
happened since the time that
25 those four things were written.
41
1 And like I said, I'm not sure I
made it clear, that there's no
definition, but what the law
says is if you're one of those,
5 you're OK. You can get NIMAS
materials. So it's not really
defined. It just says there's
the kind of people who are print
disabled.
10
>> >>: and so we're going to go
through today three kinds of
advances. And the culture in
science that would make that law
15 be framed very differently now
and described and I think is
where the law will go. So first
is the neurosciences. We
learned a lot in the last seven
20 years about how the brain really
works, how it learns and in
particular about individual
differences in kids. So that we
wouldn't say things exactly the
25 same.
42
1 >> >>: first, the big change
that we want to say is that now
to a cognitive neuroscientist,
neuroscientist, any kind of
5 neuroscientist, all learning
abilities and disabilities are
organic. They don't think
there's any kind. They're all
organic. So you're not going to
10 be able to use oh, this one is
organic or it's not organic. So
I want to talk a little bit
about how learning works, OK?
15 >> >>: these are PET scans and
you skip probably showed you a
couple of these, and I think
explain that the brighter it
looks, the more in this case
20 glucose is being burned, so it's
a way to sort of map the brain
and look at what parts of the
brain are most active. The more
active it is, the brighter, the
25 more hot it looks like it's
43
1 burning. So that when you're
seeing words, there's a very hot
area there, a couple of others.
When you're hearing words, very
5 hot area there and a little bit
less, a little bit less in some
areas that aren't very involved.
And why glucose? Now we do
oxygen, as well. What you're
10 doing is measuring every time a
neuron fires, that takes energy
so it's got to reuptake some
more glucose, it's got to
reuptake some oxygen so it can
15 fire again. So when neurons are
firing, they're taking up
glucose. So all they're doing
is measuring how fast are these
parts of the brain burning
20 glucose. So when you're hearing
words, you're -- you tend to
burn glucose here. When you're
seeing the same words, you burn
it in a slightly different
25 place. So this is visual
44
1 cortex, this is auditory cortex
it, no big surprise.
>> >>: I guess I want to go back
5 just to make my point. We'll
see this in
>> >>: question?
10 >> >>: is that the left or the
right side of the brain? Into
most of the slides I'll show
will be the same. This will be
the front and that's the back.
15 You can always tell the front
because the temporal lobe points
toward the front.
>> >>: left or right?
20
>> >>: these will be -- this is
so just picture if you were
facing the front this would be
your left side. So just look at
25 the temporal lobe right there,
45
1 this will always be visible.
Just say that's pointing toward
the front, OK?
5 >> >>: we'll have a little bit
of cause to look at how
different tasks can be. It's
really cool, the last 20 years
you've seen this explosion of
10 our ability to study how does
the brain accomplish learning,
and in specific for different
kinds of tasks. Different kinds
of work. But another thing
15 that's been amazing, and more
recent, is we can actually study
the brain not after it's
left-hand, but while it's
learned and watch what kind of
20 changes actually happen in the
nervous system. And I like to
do this among educateors. If
you look here, this is a naive
brain, just like we were looking
25 at before, and by the way, these
46
1 are college sophomores. They're
almost always college sophomores
because they are free and
they're past the trauma of
5 freshman year and they're
usually in their major now and
so you can demand that they get
in these experiments. So -- and
this task, a very simple task, I
10 don't think I'll bother to
explain what the task is, but
here we have a task that lights
up some areas here in the
temporal cortex and a big area
15 in the frontal cortex, pretty
hot in the middle. So this is a
thought experiment for you.
This is actually right away when
they started doing the task,
20 it's very easy. You say a noun
to the student and they're just
supposed to say a verb. Not
hard but you say car, they say
drive. Tree, they say grow,
25 whatever? OK, all they have to
47
1 do is say a verb. And there's
no right or wrong, but just keep
within class verb. Turns out,
though, that changes what the
5 brain does very significantly,
just to even say a verb. But
anyway, that's what it is. What
I'd like you to think about is,
after they get good at that,
10 that is, this is at the
beginning. The brain's going to
change as it learns, so how
would it look here? After
they've done it for half an
15 hour, it's actually shorter than
that, what would change? How
would this use of oxygen, of
glucose here, how would it
change? And it's interesting.
20 Neurologists, many neurologists
guessed exactly wrong with p
what would happen. And a lot of
them just had the wrong idea of
what would happen. Usually when
25 asked educators, educators could
48
1 guess correctly. So just take a
moment and see if you're more
like a neurologist or an
educator. What do you think the
5 brain is going to look like
here?
>> >>: OK, let me just take some
hypotheses. Anyone -- I need to
10 get a little bit closer. Anyone
willing to hazard. If you know,
don't raise your hand.
>> >>: with practice it might
15 get better, more efficient, so
maybe use less of the brain?
>> >>: great. The hypothesis as
you practice, it would get
20 better, more efficient, so it
would burn less glucose.
Another hypothesis?
>> >>: may move to a different
25 area.
49
1 >> >>: it could move to a
different area because maybe the
task looks different when you
gain expertise and you approach
5 it differently. Mm-hm. Any
others?
>> >>: now, you haven't said
what the neurologists thought
10 might happen. So none of you
are neurologists, apparently.
And actually, both of you are
right but the neurologists
thought maybe the brain would
15 become more involved, like it
would just be what gets smart is
that the brain becomes more and
more holistically involved. But
actually proven again that
20 educators are smarter than
neurologists. In fact, exactly
what you said happened which is
that it gets very efficient in
it and you have a great
25 reduction in the glucose burn.
50
1 But we're only showing part of
the brain and in fact, among
other mings just to give you a
little example, most tasks when
5 you begin them, you tend to use
the right side of your brain
much more heavily, and as you
get more and more expertise, it
moves much more focally to the
10 left side and then begins to get
much more tightly coupled with
specific areas, so you actually
do burn less glucose in those
areas when you become practiced,
15 and it changes often, because
you start treating the task
quite differently, different
parts of the brain light up.
OK? Everybody with me? And the
20 novel is all of a sudden you
come back and you say I have a
got some new words I want to try
and the brain lights up and says
U owe uh-oh. I've got something
25 new to learn here.
51
1 >> >>: I like to talk about
this, and Charlie set me up
nicely to connecting to VIKOTSKY
that in fact the glucose burn is
5 much closer to what we actually
want in learning is that we want
kids to be burning glucose.
Because it turns out that that
burning of glucose and oxygen is
10 in fact the brain changing
itself. It's becoming a
different brain. It's a brain
that knows how it to do this now
and you can actually watch it
15 wire itself. And sculpt itself
into being a brain that does
this task. And typically
leashing locks like that, but it
doesn't change itself under two
20 conditions. One is, whoops,
that's a new button pusher here,
one is that you already knew how
to do that. In which case the
brain doesn't burn any glucose
25 and doesn't change itself, no
52
1 learning is going to occur and
the other, and you won't be
surprised at this either, is if
the task is too hard, if the
5 task is too hard for you to
change your brain in order to be
able to do it, in fact a similar
thing happens, you don't in fact
burn glucose, either. So
10 VIGOTSKY talked about being in
the zone of proximal
development. That you've got to
learn just enough to burn enough
glucose. Too hard you aren't
15 going to change and too easy you
aren't going to change. And the
hard part is how to do it with a
whole lot of people that come in
to the class class at very
20 different places. How can I be
just hard enough for 25 students
who range from people who know a
lot to people who know very
little and et cetera.
25
53
1 >> >>: a second point I want to
make, people are different. And
when we look at learning in the
nervous system, we can see that
5 they don't learn alike, and I
have a collection of things.
I'm not going to bother to go
through them now, but one of the
things that I would ask you to
10 look at is you'll often say
brain image slides of the
changes that occur in learning
now. But what's often left off,
except in the methodology
15 section, is that they're
aggregates, they're averages.
Well, we put all the sophomores
together. Because they've
excluded all the people who
20 might be a little bit weird, all
the people who are too bright,
all the nonEnglish speakers, all
the left handers so they've
taken out all the people who
25 might be different and then
54
1 aggregated everybody who's left
and say well, this must be
average but what's interesting
and if you talk to a
5 neuroscientist they'll say it's
true. If you look at individual
slides you'll see great
variability. They don't all
look the same. It's just that
10 wage them so you can kind of
make a general point, OK? But
they really look quite
different. You've probably seen
and heard of these examples, but
15 this is SHAYWITZ's work that's
very familiar to probably lots
of you. This is Newsweek
putting the word normal here.
So a typical reader tends to
20 show areas that light up in the
posterior, the back part of your
brain, and typically areas sort
of threeish of them that look
like that. And when you look at
25 and this is reading single
55
1 words. If you look at a
dyslexic, those areas aren't
lighting up. They're not being
used. The brain has not
5 sculpted itself to read with
those parts. It's actually
reading with this part. What
I'd like to show to you is
there's been a great expansion
10 somewhere else. It's not that
the brain isn't trying. But
it's trying with a different
part of the brain, OK? A
differentiated part. It's
15 reading with frontal cortex,
this is reading largely with
these areas in posterior cortex.
We'll have reason to understand
this a little bit later, but and
20 now you probably know there's
dozens of experiments going on
where people are doing early
interventions with reading and
looking to see if you succeed in
25 your early interventions, do
56
1 dyslexic readers start to have
normal patterns and lots of them
do. So we did our early
interventions, we worked on them
5 and in fact their brain starts
to light up more typically. Not
all do, but some do.
>> >>: here's another one that
10 makes the point really about not
differences between people, but
differences within you, within a
single person, that changes over
time. When teenagers are shown
15 emotional faces, they're trying
to read the emotion in faces or
voices or things like that, what
part of the brain do they use?
Sorry, I clicked the wrong
20 thing.
>> >>: they tend to, what lights
up most is the amig dulla, which
is a very old phylogenetic
25 structure. Lots of really
57
1 stupid animals have amig dullas,
and for a lot of animals we
think we're really smart because
we've got this neural cortex all
5 over the place that we have more
processing capacity than animals
that have an amig dalla have.
So anyway, teenagers the largest
chink that happens when they're
10 learning emotional information.
Adults, on the other hand, the
thing that lights up most, where
you would burn most glucose is
in free frontal cortex, orbital
15 frontal, prefrontal cortex up in
the front of the brain: And
rely more on the cortex. Which
differentiates us from most
animals, and most particularly
20 monkeys and most particularly
us. So you have to think about
a teenager is actually
processing the information with
a different brain than you have.
25 Because this part of the brain
58
1 is very late developing. It
develops all the way through
adolescence. If you look at it
physiologically and if you look
5 at it anatomically, it's still
an immature part of the brain.
So teenagers do the best they
can with the parts that are
mature. You are using a really
10 a different brain. So when you
think how come he couldn't tell
I was sarcastic, you've got to
realize, oh, my God, he was just
using his aMYGDALA, it doesn't
15 understand schasm. You need a
lot of cortex to understand
sarcasm and scorn. So our
brains change over time and
sometimes we ask kids to do
20 things that they don't have the
brain yet to do. And our
brains, probably you've seen
this, this is the kind of stuff
that's on NPR, and various
25 shows, that in the last five,
59
1 maybe a little bit more than
that now, people have been able
to watch the brain change as a
result of experience. So the
5 first thing I did was the
dyslexic is different than
typically achieving. A young
person is different than an old
person. But also a person
10 that's had experience has a
different brain than a person
that doesn't have experience.
And the classic one that sort of
rocked everybody's boat was
15 studying taxicab drivers in
England, and in particular,
looking at the hippocampus,
which was the structure I was
really interested in when I was
20 in graduate school and they
found out that the hippocampus
in taxicab drivers in London was
much bigger than regular people.
And it was a shock, because
25 obviously they didn't learn to
60
1 drive a taxicab until they were
adults. So everybody's assumed
that well, your brain could
change during childhood with
5 your experiences, but hey, 30
years old, people weren't
expecting to see physically the
brain look different, look much
bigger in some places just
10 because they drove taxicabs.
Now this has been done lots of
times, so in fact the
experiences we have, even as
adults, are changing our brain
15 from one kind of thing to
another, from a brain that has a
small hippocampus relatively
speaking to a brain that has a
much bigger one. And I think
20 I'll skip this. As you can make
it go either way, and the -- I
just want to see how I'm doing
in time. I don't want to open
up this video. I have a video
25 here but I can tell you the
61
1 results. That another thing
that's very disturbing and
important for us as educators,
another experiential thing can
5 happen to that same area of the
hippocampus. So if you're a
taxicab driver. By the way,
hippocampus is very important
for spatial, what a shock, so if
10 you're going to do a lot of
spatial locating yourself around
the universe, that part of the
brain says hey, we need to get
bigger and stronger to do this.
15 And by the way they've been able
to show that it's not just
people with big hippocampus go
into being taxicab drivers, it's
really that you in in fact, it
20 does get better with experience.
But the reverse can happen.
Very disturbing work shows that
if you stress, if you put an
individual in stress, typically
25 these have been done with
62
1 children, but many with adult
rats and monkeys and so on, that
that hippocampus will have rink,
physically shrink. So we're not
5 talking about subtle changes,
we're talking about macroscopic
things. It looks bigger in
taxicab drivers and it looks
smaller p if people that have
10 stresses over long periods of
time. Traumas of orphanages,
rape, whatever. The hippocampus
gets smaller. So that means
that whatever the hippocampus
15 does, it can get better with
experience and it can get worse
with some kinds of experiences,
as well. Worse meaning not as
functional, OK?
20
>> >>: and Charlie asked me to
mention, I'll just trying -- I
want to make sure because I'm
going to go out of the order of
25 my slides. Oh, no, this is a
63
1 good place for what's next. So
I want to tell you about some
research that one of my own
graduate students has just
5 completed for her doctorate, and
I think it's going to be a
knockout when it comes out, OK?
And it's related to this. And
it's related to your work. What
10 she wanted to study was -- this
is the right time to talk about
it, OK? This is a really cool
new direction, and I need to say
how to think about this. The
15 word is stress. And stress can
be either good or bad. People
who studied the nervous system
discover that what would be a
stress? A novel environment.
20 Something new and strange is a
stressor. Your nervous system
reacts and it gets prepared, OK?
And it can go two ways. A
frightening thing would do it,
25 too, but even just a novel new
64
1 thing is a stressor to the
nervous system, you can see it
mobilize. It goes in two
directions. It can mobilize
5 positively like here's something
I'm going to have to do or
something I'm going to have to
learn or something I'm going to
have to be skillful about, and
10 people call that challenge. OK?
So you can be stressed by
challenge. Here's something I'm
going to have to do. I'm going
to have to have get better. I'm
15 going to have to get a better
grade or whatever it is, OK?
And your brain is mobilized.
You can see itologically in your
skin, in your eyes, all of these
20 things, go oh, get ready and
we're going to change. The
other way it can go, if the
first thing is challenge, which
mobilizes you, your brain to do
25 it, to learn new things, the
65
1 other is threat. In which case
your brain mobilizes, not to
learn new things, but to get out
of here. OK? And that's your
5 basic flight or fright thing
that you've heard many times.
By you can see the brain
mobilize in a different way and
physiologically measure it in
10 your skin, your heart, your
lungs, different things, threat
is a different thing and threat
is not a mobilization to learn
stuff it's we need to get out of
15 here, this is a bad situation,
OK? And the work that Same is
doing comes from a realization
that how does a certain decide
whether it's going to be a
20 challenge, meaning mobilize to
overcome this, versus a threat?
And they have this really need
equation they've realized that
people do. People immediately
25 do an attribution which involves
66
1 how hard is it, how frightening
it is it, how new is it,
whatever it is. And the second
piece they immediately assay is
5 what resources do I have to meet
this stressor. It if you feel
you have the resources and it
may be an illusion that you have
them, but if you feel you have
10 the resources, I think I could
do that, I could do that with a
shovel, I could do that if I had
a little help, whatever, if you
feel you have the resources, you
15 move toward challenge. If you
feel you don't have the
resources, this is too hard, I
don't have any help, I don't
have any tools, you move toward
20 threat and your body says, OK,
this is not a good situation,
get out of here. All right, is
everybody with that distinction?
So it's a beautiful, nice, all
25 stressors are going to lead
67
1 toward either challenge or
threat and it depends on what
resources you feel you have, and
you can all remember yourself
5 feeling like that, some days you
know you have more resources, I
can handle this today. And
other days you know I can't do
it today. I don't have the
10 resources. Your body, your
brain is making that
calculation.
>> >>: so what she studied is we
15 have these new kinds of readers
that we'll probably show you pa
little bit of later that give
extra resources, extra support,
so she wanted to study, well, if
20 you have extra support in the
environment, does the stress,
does the threat stress go down?
So she thought what if I could
do is get students with learning
25 disabilities, who would probably
68
1 be stressed toward the threat
end, by giving a reading task,
but what if I give them more
resources, give them electronic
5 reader with the extra stuff that
we've built in that you've
probably seen some of and
certainly we'll see more more
of, does it move away from the
10 threat and toward the challenge
and she got no results, and she
was in despair, because this was
a year's work and she's
measuring LD kids and regular
15 kids to see if there's a
difference, and nothing shows
significant results. Until she
actually looks at their stress
level. She's measuring things
20 like glucose -- not glucose,
what's the word I'm trying to
think of cortisol, thank you,
cortisol in their spit and their
skin conductants, heart rates,
25 things like that, sophisticated
69
1 measures, so the kids are wired
up. And then she does a
different analysis and this is
the part that's the knockout.
5 What she finds is that when LD
kids, kids who had been
identified in school, came into
the situation, just coming into
where she's sitting, a nice
10 quiet little room, nothing
really bad in there and she says
we're going to do a little
reading, their tonic level of
stress is, before she starts the
15 experiment, is .0001 different
from the typically achieving
kids. So they come in, the
minute she says we're going to
do a reading thing, they're at a
20 high stress and the typically
reading kids are at a completely
different stress level. So at
beginning of they are experiment
there are two different kinds of
25 brains. Some kids are in a
70
1 brain that is in a threat
situation looking to how do I
get out of this, and typically
achieving kids are in a
5 challenge situation, cool, this
is something that I might be
able to do. So they didn't
begin her experiment the same
kids at all. They began as very
10 different kids. Some of them
under -- both of them stressed.
Some under threat and some under
challenge and then she realized
oh, my God, they're walking
15 around school like that they're
chronically in a state of high
stress. High threat stress.
And she's going to start -- she
just joined us at cast and she's
20 going to start doing studies
where she's literally monitoring
the walking around, because can
you imagine what it would do
when that gets out to national
25 television, that kids with
71
1 reading disabilities are walking
around at stress levels that are
pathological, and remember I
just told you, that's doing bad
5 things to their hippocampus,
among other things. So they're
walking around in a
pathologically, what's the word,
preparatory pathological state,
10 too much stress. Just a
knockout. So I think we'll
coming come to understand that
we're putting kids in situations
which make them very different
15 and these kids are walking
around, looking to how to get
out of here, which is the way we
experience while other kids are
walking around with great sense
20 of challenge.
>> >>: OK, I want to go back to
individual differences. And I
want to push the point that we
25 really do see things
72
1 differently. And everyone that
has a spouse sort of knows that,
but I want to just give you an
example of how deeply it can be
5 there. So this is an
experiment. The task is merely
to draw this. But there's two
groups of students. Students
with Williams syndrome and
10 students with down syndrome.
They're matched for IQ. OK,
50ish IQ, so these are kids that
are down in the spectrum, all of
them had intellectual
15 disabilities and you present the
task and you you say will you
draw what you saw and again I'm
stressing same cognitive level.
If IQ tests were that was
20 differentiating, no difference.
But here's what they draw. The
kids with Williams syndrome see
detail. They see that this is
actually composed of a lot of
25 little Y the and they draw all
73
1 the rel little Y's. The kids
with dawn syndrome see this as a
large shape, a D. Very
different and the reason I'm
5 just using this, is to say that
we often think that when we show
kids the same thing or lecture
the same thing, that everybody's
got the same information. And I
10 want to say that that never
happens. That that interaction
that I talked about the at the
beginning is where the knowledge
will be constructed. And what
15 the kids with Williams syndrome
matched in IQ with the down
syndrome are seeing and
remembering is very different
when we presented the exact same
20 thing and we'll talk about when
I talk about my class, I always
think that everybody heard the
same lecture, but if I look at
their notes, they don't hear the
25 same lecture at all. OK?
74
1 >> >>: learning is also
differentiated by task. I've
talked about just finished
individual differences, it looks
5 different. When I look at a
task analysis, here's the brain
and they're all still facing the
same way. But with different
tasks. And you can see and this
10 was the thing that has caused
more of the cognitive science
revolution than anything else.
That the brain lights up very
differently for viewing words
15 than for listening to words,
than for speaking words, and
than for generating verbs. All
of these are language tasks, and
the neuroscientists were like,
20 holy cow, it blows away the idea
that there is he' some kind of
large capacity called language,
because in fact there's actually
many components to language and
25 the brain treats these aspects
75
1 of language as very different
things, and this is done now
countless times, that looking at
the brain physiology we've come
5 to understand that things that
we thought were sort of the same
or one kind of learning, the
more you look at t the brain
says that's not true at all.
10 These are very different things
in the brain and look at the
difference here, this is the one
that the neuroscientists went,
holy cow, this says any word
15 that you want to. This is what
lights up. This one is that
exact task I talked about a
little bit ago. I say a noun
and you say a verb. The change
20 from saying any word you want,
to you got to say a verb, made
the brain go completely
different and see the task as
very, very different. And now
25 we understand that verbs are not
76
1 treated in the brain in the same
way that nouns are. Nobody knew
that. And all sorts of
individual difference about
5 language and all sorts of things
can happen but in fact just
saying I only want you to say
verbs means the brain organizes
itself differently, burns
10 glucose differently, acts
differently and acts in fact
differently.
>> >>: would that issue be the
15 same if someone could say any
word that they wanted to?
>> >>: whoa p spoken like a
neuroscientist. Would that be
20 different if the --
>> >>: can you repeat the
question? If they were able to
say any verb they wanted to,
25 would it change this so it would
77
1 look like this one. It was a
great question, and they didn't
do it. So the answer is,
partly, but if in fact, one of
5 the tests of frontal lobe
function, which is this, is to
say something like say only
words that fin with F or only
words that are animal names or
10 only words that are verbs. It
does change. So that you have
to use this part of the brain to
do that, as opposed to anything.
OK? But it's a wonderful
15 question, because in fact, it
would be still closer, though,
than, the confrontation device
of saying a noun and you've got
to respond specifically to it is
20 what lights up this part of the
brain, that is, you have to hear
that first word. So it would
look much more like the
individual. That was very good.
25 So you should have been a
78
1 neurologist.
>> >>: OK, and skip I think
talked about this so I'm going
5 to breeze lightly for universal
design for learning, we divide
up the brain into three large
systems. There's lots of ways
to divide up the brain and this
10 one is a common way to think
about it. Recognition networks
in the back of the brains,
teaching networks p in the front
and affective networks in the
15 middle of the brain and they're
going to help us orient to how
do we think about learning and
its differences? The
recognition networks, the back
20 part of would your brain and
it's very consistent,
information that comes into your
brain, always goes to the back
part of your brain, whether it's
25 in your spinal cord or if it's
79
1 in your thalamus, anywhere,
cortex, if the information is
coming in, it goes to the back
of your brain and with the tack
5 of cortex, high levels of --
sorry. With this part of the
brain, all that part of the
brain is designed to extract
what is that that was on your
10 retina what is it that a hit
your eardrum, et cetera, OK?
And when you look at this image,
that back part of your cortex
lights up right away to say,
15 whoa, OK, what was that pattern
of stimulation that hit me on
the retina? Skip might have
done that. One thing that's
come out new that I want you to
20 know about is in the category of
what's next.
>> >>: some findings that have
really excited neuroscientists
25 is well, how do you remember
80
1 things? OK, so to go back, if
you're going to look at that
picture, you're going to
understand it here, back part of
5 the brain. Make sense of it,
know that this picture works on
all of those things. How do you
remember it? Now, if I say to
you, if I just don't look at
10 that slide for a minute, if I
say remember that picture, OK,
just do it for a second, that
picture I showed you for a
second, try to remember it, OK?
15 By the way, some of you will be
fabulous at that, some of you
will be terrible, which I don't
have time to go into, but and
but there's individual
20 differences but anyway, most of
you will do OK. So the question
is where is the memory? And in
the last, in this last decade
we've realized you you know what
25 you're doing when you remember
81
1 that? All you're doing is
you're making -- I have to go
back far enough to get to it.
Here's visual cortex, that
5 lights up when you look at that
picture, and you know what
happens when you remember that
picture? It lights up again.
You are recreating, so the word
10 remember, remake it, you are
remaking it in your brain.
That's what you're doing. You
say do that again. You
literally tell your brain to do
15 it, and people have now, in the
last couple of years it's really
been just an explosion of this,
so it will be the they'll
literally put a little electrode
20 next to a neuron and they'll
show you some pictures. Here's
a picture, this picture,
nothing. This picture, nothing.
Simpson's, bing, OK? That's
25 like some of you. Goes crazy.
82
1 And that later they say, can you
remember that third thing we
showed you? What was that like?
All right or I'm sorry they said
5 the real thing, Hollywood sign,
nothing, the simple sons, boom,
same cells. Go crazy. So you
actually make the same cells
light up again. The very cells
10 that you used to perceive it are
the cells that you use to
remember it. You just make them
do it again. So you are
remembering it, remaking it
15 again inside your brain. Isn't
that cool? People didn't know
that that was the case.
>> >>: does that mean does that
20 mean we have Simpson cells?
>> >>: no, because you have to
excite millions of neurons. The
fact that they had it next to
25 one, doesn't mean that that one
83
1 coded simp sons, but it meant
that that was part of a large
system of neurons that fired
together to tell you that was
5 the simp sons. But now, people
are going crazy watching people
remake things that they saw
before. By the way, where do
you think you dream?
10
>> >>: there's only one visual
place. When you dream, and
you're having a big dream of
either me or Brad Pitt, you, if
15 your dream has gone visual, this
will light up again. The same
part with which you recognize
Brad Pitt's picture will be the
part that you say, in the middle
20 of your night says make that for
me again. Good old Brad, bring
Brad Pitt back. Now, it's
important to know that it works
that way, because it means you
25 are constructing it. You're
84
1 making it. There's no real film
back there. It's not locked in.
It is an act of cognition. You
are saying, I want to do that
5 again. The thing I did when I
saw Brad Pitt live or on the
movie, I want to make that
again. So that's why eyewitness
testimony is so bad. Because in
10 fact it always is a
reconstruction and the more
neuroscientists look at the way
it works, the more they think
oh, my goodness we shouldn't be
15 doing this eyewitness thing.
Because it is always a cognitive
act of reconstruction. There's
no vault. There's nothing
stored away. You make your
20 neurons do the same thing and of
course you're never perfect and
if somebody has given you a
little information it in between
when you remake it, you may make
25 him a little bit I think you've
85
1 heard all these experiments that
just give you a little bit of
information say didn't you like
Brad Pitt's moustache? And then
5 you come in back in and remember
Brad Pitt, you remember him with
a moustache. We're able to
distort because we're able to
get in the way of you
10 reconstructing it, you making it
again. OK, is everybody with
me? So that's one of the things
because and I'll come to you in
one second, the enormous
15 individual differences in kids'
ability to make those things,
and the reason I paused there
was that they've just done a
study of kids' reading, and
20 they've shown that if it's high
visual imagery reading and
you're a good reader, visual
cortex lights up like crazy in
exactly the places you would
25 imagine that. I'm sorry, you
86
1 would perceive that so if it's
about a purple Dragon, the very
cells that would code purple if
you look at them, start firing
5 like crazy, and what we can see
is which kids are able to
imagine what they're reading,
because they're essentially
remaking it inside their brains.
10 But some kids are not. Some
kids are not doing that at all.
They're not reimagining it and
you can watch it in their brains
and see it's not happening.
15
>> >>: go ahead, question.
>> >>: well, this might take us
too far afield, but your verbs
20 make -- where is making located
in the brain?
>> >>: I want to get there. Can
we go just a little bit further?
25 Because you're right. It sounds
87
1 like is there a person in there?
>> >>: exactly. OK, so when I
use the word make, who's making
5 it? But I want you to get that
sense of it's a construction.
OK? It is not a -- the next
thing and it's been coming for
now a few years, is the
10 realization that there is no
box, there's nothing stored in
memory. It's because it's that
you become better and better at
reconstructing things and in
15 some cases, in a lot of cases
you're constructing them anew,
OK? But it if you give me one
more round, then we'll come back
to it, OK? And it's a good
20 question.
>> >>: so but I've just talked
briefly about about this part of
the brain that allows you to
25 perceive the world, to recreate
88
1 it, to even dream it. This is
your construction. And I
realize you know what I wanted
to say, is that in fact, it's
5 not ever a picture, even when
you perceive it. It is
something that you are
constructing. And that would
take a longer argument, but the
10 neuroscientists, the more they
look at it, they realize you're
not receiving. You're not
receiving a picture. You are
actually making up stuff on the
15 basis of what happens on your
retina. And the more they look
at it, the closer they look,
they realize oh, my gosh, the
brain is making it up. And
20 things like illusions are the
dead give aways to see that, oh,
my gosh you're seeing things
that aren't there but those are
just the tell tales that show us
25 it doesn't receive information.
89
1 It's making it up if if it's
working well and so the dreams
are like that.
5 >> >>: you do you mean real time
or --
>> >>: real time.
10 >> >>: yeah, so for example,
and --
>> >>: repeat the question?
15 >> >>: oh, real time are you
making it up? Yeah. And I'll
just give you an example so you
can get a feel for what the
neuroscientists look at. The
20 color orange. So you can all
picture, the color orange feels
like it's out there but in fact
there's a whole book called
the -- by ZEKI if you want to
25 read just a dramatic thing, he
90
1 looks at how color is perceived
by the brain. Whole book on it
t fabulous, DEKI and you know
what he comes up? You don't
5 actually perceive color, you
make it up and how you make it
up is you take in a ton of
information because what he
shows us is that orange is not
10 stable, that in different
lighting conditions it changes
drastically what your retina
does and what your THALAMUS does
and even what your cortex does.
15 What your brain says is I know
it doesn't have the same
angstroms as orange but in this
light it is orange. But your
eye perceives two things that
20 are not orange. Your brain
says, oh, that's just a lighting
effect and it cancels it out,
does it beautifully for you. I
know I went too fast but I don't
25 want to stick here long enough.
91
1 So you make up orange and you
know why that works? You can
see why evolution did it, excuse
the expression. All of your
5 ancestors that thought yellow
was a specific thing on your
retina are dead because when the
lion was in less light, it said,
oh, it looks like a lion but
10 it's not yellow. I wonder what
it is. Those people all died.
And the people who survived
said, it's yellow, even though
it doesn't look yellow. And
15 that's a lionment OK? And you
do that all the time.
>> >>: we did the Koffka ring
yesterday.
20
>> >>: OK. Front part of the
brain. Different networks.
They allow you to plan, organize
and initiate purposeful actions
25 on the environment.
92
1 >> >>: now, to your connection
where's the maker, I would
actually change this slide.
Plan, organize and initiate
5 purposeful actions on the
environment or the rest of the
brain. In a way that we'll come
to, OK?
10 >> >>: so when you looked at
this picture, did you do this?
>> >>: yeah, a little bit but
there's people here who have not
15 seen it, either.
>> >>: so when you looked at
that picture, the front part of
your brain made a plan. In a
20 half a second for how it is
you're going to look at that
picture, and people have studied
this, and these are recordings
to see what did you look at.
25 And we've done some of these
93
1 studies, too, at cast. And
these are a plan, these are a
strategy for how to look at that
picture that sampled 60 times a
5 second. And here's a bunch
more. And the question is, wow,
why are they so different
because these are the same
picture, each time, a very
10 different plan or strategy to
open your eyes to what makes
them so different and just
because I want to go quickly, I
won't pause for the question of,
15 this is actually the same person
looking seven times at that
picture. Why so different? And
the answer is, because a
different question was asked.
20 In a half a second and now we
can watch the brain mobilize,
challenge to say, oh, given that
question, this is how I would
look, including like for example
25 how are the people in this room
94
1 related and you go boom, boom
being, boom, boom, skipping
everything else and if I ask you
something like, is there a cat
5 in the room, you go all over the
place, it could be anywhere.
And that planful ability to make
intentional acts is what the
front part of the brain allows
10 you to do. OK, to make a good
plan and to execute it. And if
we cut off the very front of
your brain, this is the same
task and ask you different
15 questions, you actually don't
have a different plan. You do
the same, no matter what
question I ask, if you have
prefront quail damage, you look
20 at the picture the same way.
That ability to be planful,
strategic about how you look at
a picture is part of the same
cortex that grows late in the
25 adolescent. It's a very
95
1 late-developing structure, so
young children and lots of
adults, are not mature in the
way that they can be strategic
5 about how they get information.
Whether it's from text or an
image, a image is sort of
dramatic but the same is true of
text. So they actually don't
10 differentiate what they do by
the question. They don't have a
purpose driving. You know
what's driving? The outside
world is driving. They're
15 reactive, responsive to the
outside world, whereas people
who are affective adults are
strategic in dominating the
world. That is, they go after
20 it and say I'm here for a
purpose and you have lots of
students who don't read for
purpose. They don't know why
they're reading the text,
25 they're just working their way
96
1 through it and you are hoping,
I'm hoping they're reading this
to get what I want out of it and
a lot of them aren't. And some
5 actually would have great
difficulty doing that.
>> >>: watching ciz as they
actually look at a textbook, so
10 here's the first second and a
half, I think, you can see what
the person looks at first. And
what these studies showed us was
that in fact, if you really
15 trace the eye movements of
students who have quote-unquote
reading disabilities and we
replay this like a movie and
show what did they look at and
20 you play it back in the order,
it's incomprehensible. You find
out that they never had a good
strategy for how to look at this
page. They were distracted by
25 all these images and things,
97
1 they didn't know where to go
next. So it goes like this, it
sort of jumps around and realize
oh, my gosh if I gave them that
5 information in that order which
is what's happening I wouldn't
understand it. So the new kinds
of textbooks are actually very
problematic for kids that don't
10 have good executive functions in
order to make their own plan.
They don't know where to go and
so it's really kind of a
hopeless jumble.
15
>> >>: the last part of the
brain, I'm going to come back
and say what's next in that part
in a minute. Oh, but I want to
20 go back to your question. So
when we ask you to remember the
simpsons, two things light up.
>> >>: actually, three things as
25 we'll see in a minute. But for
98
1 the reasons I just talked about,
visual cortex would light up,
the very parts that allowed you
to perceive it, the right
5 colors, the right shapes, all of
that would light up. But also,
free prefrontal cortex lights
up.S executive that says this is
what I'm after to recreate that.
10 It says make that image of the
Simpson's again. So we'll see
two things light U7 and this
will light up and in fact I'll
see if I can queue it up for the
15 afternoon. Have a wonderful
time of seeing it actually
happen. First you see the
image, it jumps up to prefrontal
cortex to get a plan and you'll
20 take that away and you'll see
the prefrontal cortex first and
then the visual cortex lights
up. It's just fabulous stuff.
So you have a plan that you make
25 that image and that's how you
99
1 remember it, so it's an
intentional act of remembering.
>> >>: OK. Much deeper than
5 probably you want to go. We'll
get to this.
>> >>: how did I get way back
here? Ah. Oh, I'm going
10 backwards. I still haven't
figured out this. Yeah, review
part is too hard for me. The
last and favorite part the is
the middle part of your nervous
15 system which allows you to
monitor the internal and
external environment to set
priorities and to motivate
learning and behavior. This is
20 the critical thing, and people
at cast are always angry that I
don't start with this because
this is what really is the
center, and the nice thing is it
25 is in the center of your brain.
100
1 This is the center of who you
are. It's the part of your
brain that defines for you
what's important. This above
5 all the other things happening
in the universe, this is what
you want to pay attention to.
This is the food you're going to
eat. This is who you're going
10 to look at. This is what you're
going to be afraid of. What
this does is color your
experience and say, this is --
you experience it as feeling.
15 This is how I feel about it.
But your nervous system is
actually feeling about
everything. It never is not
doing that. It is always
20 looking -- when you look at
something, this part of your
nervous system goes to work
immediately to figure out, of
what importance is it? Not what
25 is it, which the back part of
101
1 your brain does, not what would
I do with it or do to look at it
which the front part of your
brain does, but what importance
5 is it to me? Why do I care
about this? And if I don't
care, I'm going to move on.
>> >>: and I've had some recent
10 experiences. I've really taught
me a lot about this. When
you -- the what next part. I
think that people now realize, I
know you're worried I'm going to
15 get closer and closer. But
the -- when you walk around this
university, if you've been here
before, your nervous system is
recognizing objects, which is a
20 construction, you say oh, yeah,
yeah, I saw that before. I
remember I did that and I can do
it again. The front part of
your brain, what's my strategy,
25 what am I trying to do here,
102
1 what's my plan, where am I
going, all those things. This
middle will part is sampling
this entire university for spots
5 that are important, places where
you have affect, where things
that were important and mighting
important might be important for
you might happen again. You can
10 see evolutionarily why it's
important. When you had a good
meal, you are your nervous
system says this is where I had
a good meal. If you saw lion
15 tracks there before. Your
nervous system says look at it
more, run away from it, remember
it. All of those things, this
part of the nervous system is
20 saying, it's important.
>> >>: and I'm going to el tell
you just a personal anecdote
that has taught me how powerful
25 this is, that we don't think of
103
1 ourselves as walking around in
an emotional landscape. We
picture a pictorial visual
landscape and an auditory
5 landscape. If you shut your
eyes you'll recognize where you
are by the sounds and all those
things, and similarly by an
action landscape but you also
10 are moving in this emotional
landscape and I don't know if
this is the -- well, this will
tie two together. So I had a
surgery for cancer about six or
15 eight years ago, and had a
surgery which damaged by
bladder, OK? You don't care
about this, right? There's a
story there. So it so I'm
20 healed, I don't have cancer,
it's cool, OK of the but I have
scar tissue there. OK? And
that scar tissue is muscle
tissue, but if it crunches like
25 a you know, a scar that you have
104
1 on the skin, if it crunches it's
painful, OK? Now I never knew
this, but preptory to your going
to the bathroom, you have a
5 little sphincter that tightens
up so that you're preparing to
go to the bathroom. It tightens
so you can urinate. So when
that happens to me, I have an
10 instant little sharp pain, OK?
Because it's just the scar
tissue is right there, so I'll
get pain if I am about to go to
the bathroom. But here's the
15 shocking -- I don't know if
shocking is the right word, but
I actually find I get that pain
in lots of places, like every
time I go to a gas station, I'll
20 get a pain in my bladder.
Because my nervous system is
going, hey, this is a good place
to go to the bathroom. And it
just alerts me. You know, this
25 is important. You've got to
105
1 keep track, David, sometimes you
forget. So here it is. And if
it's a regular place, like I get
a little pain when I go by the
5 men's room in the university
where my class is. Every time I
go by. Whether I have to go to
the bathroom or not I'll get
this little blip and it's just
10 like my nervous system is going
all the time I'm checking what
are the important things there.
Oh, there's that bathroom, Davy,
you know you like that. And you
15 all know that there are parts of
Cambridge all of a sudden you
feel emotion coming over, you
realize oh, my God that's when I
was walking with Ruth when we
20 discovered she was pregnant or
something and if we put the
wires on you, you'd see that
emotion. And you'd see your
emotions going all over the
25 place as you're traveling
106
1 through Cambridge. Some parts
are frightening and your nervous
system would go oh, stay away
from there, and over there is
5 where you had your first kiss or
whatever and your nervous sis it
tem is keeping track of this so
you'll know the important places
just like animals learn to avoid
10 some and go somewhere else. And
I wanted to point that out just
to say that so much happens that
our nervous system is doing this
we're unconscious of. I never
15 knew that my nervous system was
keeping track of bathrooms until
I had the scar tissue and your
nervous system is keeping track
of things like that and you feel
20 you've got all this free will
and you're just saying I think
I'd like to go to the bathroom
down but actually your nervous
system is saying hey, you've got
25 a little down there and this
107
1 would be a good time and you're
going you know, I feel like I
need to go to the bathroom and
your students are sitting there
5 in the class and you think
you're giving the most important
point and their nervous systems
are saying all kinds of things
to them. So it mon does the
10 internal, do I got a lot of
water in my bladder, is there to
external environment, is there a
bathroom nearby and learning and
behavior, this is a good time to
15 go to the bathroom and when you
look at this picture, the
nervous system is calculating
immediately what's important
here? What do I care about here
20 and that varies by who you are,
what's been happening to you.
If you're pregnant you tend to
look over here, it looks like a
baby over here, child, if you're
25 angry, you say that good looks
108
1 angry and coming a at me and
Rorschach's of course are a way
to measure all of this.
5 >> >>: so when we do anything,
these three networks are
engaged. Almost anything. It's
very hard to separate them in
reality. And in fact, I just
10 realized we're back to your
question about who makes it.
When you remember something, the
back part of your brain
reconstructs it, and by the way,
15 not perfectly, like we said,
front part of your brain is the
one that's trying to choose what
it is you're going to remake,
and I hope you'll see, now, too,
20 that if I remake it, I'll also
feel it. So if I reconstruct
something in the past that had
strong emotion, this part of my
nervous system will say, oh,
25 part of your memory is the
109
1 feeling itself. So this part is
tracking everything that's
happening to you, everything
literally, to judge whether it's
5 important or not, and when you
remember it, that comes with it.
Because they stay connected. So
it goes, so when you dream, it's
really cool. The visual stuff
10 is going crazy. And your
emotions are going crazy and
that's what you experience in
your dreams. You are dreaming
with both and we'll do one more
15 thing and we'll bring those
together. But so people can
have trouble with reading,
because they have trouble
recognizing the patterns of
20 reading because they don't have
good strategies for reading, or
pause they don't think the
reading is important. Or in
some cases as SAMMY's research
25 shows, SAMMY's kids have had
110
1 threats when they've read
before. So their nervous system
remembers it. So when they come
in and you say. Don't worry
5 about it, this isn't going to
count for your grades. Their
nervous system is going to they
can't stop it and you can say
all you want to the kid, don't
10 worry, this isn't a big deal,
you'll do fine, the nervous
system is saying forget that,
every time we do something like
this, bad things have happened.
15 And it is powerful, very strong
thing. OK. And this is
probably a place that you it
shall some of you may feel like
you need to go to the bathroom,
20 so I'm a little bit behind, so
how long do you usually take?
Ten minutes, no longer than ten
minutes, OK? Thanks ... ...
...: Test test test test test
25 test test test we're going to
111
1 begin again in one minute.
Those of you in conversation and
those of you in the hall, come
on back. We have a little lost
5 and found department at the
registration table. We have a
VGA adapter that was left in the
room yesterday, so if you're
missing your VGA adapter for
10 your laptop check the
registration table in the hall.
OK, part two ... ...:
>> >>: the preceding section was
15 just to say, I want to make a
summary, actually ... the more
we understand about what happens
to the brain with learning, the
more we realize that again,
20 going back to that original
definition, organic, that in
fact, the very act of learning
is an organic change in the
brain. It really isn't a way to
25 get around. You can't separate
112
1 things that are organic from
things that aren't organic, that
the taxicab drivers in London
are making an organic change to
5 their brain. When your students
are in your class, they're
making an organic change to the
brain. That's the way we
remember things. Glucose and
10 the oxygen are burned to make
those connections change, so all
learning is an organic change in
the brain and everything that we
call disability is also an
15 organic change, so if I stress
you, and you damage your
hippocampus, it's an organic
change. So the old view from
seven years ago that you could
20 separate people into those that
had some kind of organic damage
and those that didn't have
organic damage, to a
neuroscientist it's impossible
25 to figure out. Right now in the
113
1 last hour you've made organic
changes to your brain and all of
you that drank coffee hey, you
know, did a little damage.
5
>> >>: so that is a criterion
for kids who should get NIMSA
versions isn't going to hold up
to where is this going, because
10 sooner or later there will be a
big court case and they're going
to trot in ouro scientists in
and they're going to say hey,
it's all organic. There are
15 brains that look entirely normal
that are incredibly disabled to
our present way of thinking and
brains that are the very first
neurological case that I saw was
20 called an orange rind case where
most of the kid's brain were
missing except for the outer
surface and they were in
college, you know, had a little
25 bit of a learning disability but
114
1 you know, we're doing fine with
mostly no brain there so they're
going to bring those slides in
and they're going to say, OK,
5 here's organic brain damage of
the severest kind and this kid
is doing fine and here's a kid
that looks perfectly normal in
any way you could look at it and
10 they're having trouble learning
something. There's not any
slides that you could put up
that say OK here's a kid that
should get a nimas version. So
15 we wouldn't write it that way
now and we have to think about
and skip will probably talk
about things like the market and
stuff, what are we going to do
20 if that kind of distinction
isn't criteria by which kids can
have better books. All right,
the second change that's
happened in the last seven years
25 is our view of disability itself
115
1 has changed very dramatically.
And in the old days, disability
was something that resided in
the individual. In
5 architecture, the movement for
universal design began first,
and this, too, began a change in
our understanding of how to
think about these things. So
10 Ron MACE, the architect
introduced universal design to
architecture, but by doing that,
it started to subtly change.
When you started to see the
15 building as part of a problem
and part of the definition of
who is disit abled, who is
handicapped, inevitably a shift
with only its slightest evidence
20 then began that we're going to
run through. I'm going to do
this very quickly but this is
the kid who started us off on
our work. Very physically
25 disabled, unable to move
116
1 anything but his eyes and his
chin. And this, you know, we
got him moving and communicating
with his chin, because he can
5 use fabulous computers and do
things. Without those, devices,
he was bound for a profoundly
retarded institution. And
because he couldn't speak, he
10 couldn't hold up his head, he
couldn't point, he couldn't talk
or walk or and he just looked
inert. But if we gave him a
little switch on his chin that
15 went out to a computer, he was
able to learn Morse code very
quickly and we realized oh, my
God, he could communicate and
then he was able to learn to
20 drive a wheelchair, as skip
remembers somewhat wreck lessly,
but at any rate, he was actually
mobile and all that and he's
actually at Community College
25 now. But his disability changed
117
1 drastically when he had an
output channel that could work
for him and then we had to deal
with the school which was meant
5 to be accessible but of course
wasn't, and the fixing it up
after is of course problematic,
expensive, damaging, et cetera,
all of those, so movement toward
10 universal design that says build
a building right from the start
and the louver has a nice
combination of elevator and
stairway. Providing
15 alternatives, but those
alternatives change inevitably
the view of who is disabled and
who is not, but the building is
part of that handicapping
20 condition, not just what a kid
does, just like Mount Everest.
>> >>: and what you are doing
and I'm doing is part of a
25 change I think that's going to
118
1 be very dramatic. And that is a
change away from seeing people
as coming in a standard variety,
and then unusual or marginal or
5 nominalist cases. And the more
you look at the nervous system
and this is what the disability
movement said, is that people
are always on a spectrum., a
10 wide spectrum, and what we need
to do is look at what's the
normal variation in humans? And
the what do we need to pay
attention to that people vary
15 on? This movement is -- how
many people for how many people
is the word neurodiversity a
word in your language? Oh, not
many. So this is a what's next
20 part of this, neurodiversity.
There's two new books coming out
this spring, maybe one came out
already, on neurodiversity. New
term. I think this will be a
25 very sticky thing, and it's huge
119
1 in some circles. And
neurodiversity is saying that we
all differ in a lot of
interesting ways, and it's only
5 when confronted with a specific
situation like school, like
Mount Everest, like a building,
that things get cut off as this
is says you have a disability in
10 this environment. And the
neurodiversity movement is about
making sure we pay attention to
what diversity really looks like
so that the environment will not
15 be disabling, and so I'll give
Charlie these slides so you can
click on these things, but this
is, I think, just a website you
can quickly go to if you want to
20 see these arguments. There's
lots of them. And this is an
aggregator site, and if you type
brain .HE you'll to it and
what's the upside of the fact
25 that we're diverse? And what --
120
1 you'll find here is some amazing
things. This is not even the
best site, necessarily, but I'm
going to -- I want to play just
5 a moment, because here's someone
I like listening to.
>> >>: hi, my name is Emily. I
am 25 years old, and I have
10 Asperger's syndrome. Um, I
decided maybe since I have such
a hard time talking to people
about it, it might be a good
idea to make videos about it on
15 the computer. So I'm going to.
It's true. I guess the first
thing I would like to tell you
about Asperger's syndrome is
what it is. Asperger's syndrome
20 is a mild form of autism. That
means you're not exactly rain
Rainman but for all intents and
purposes out in the world, you
seem a little odd. I was first
25 diagnosed officially with
121
1 Asperger's syndrome when I was
23, so I went through my entire
childhood and my teenage years
and the beginning of my
5 adulthood without actually
having a name for this
condition. I have a little
brother, and he was actually
diagnosed when he was about 12
10 or 13. We're eight years apart.
So it was around the same time.
Mostly we were just thought of
as weird in school. We didn't
pay attention very well, we
15 didn't make friends very easily,
and concentrating was hard.
Asperger's syndrome is different
from everybody.
20 >> >>: she takes out a
cigarette, you weren't expecting
that, were you sh
>> >>: I know for me, it
25 involves being unable to read
122
1 facial expressions easily and
also being unable to present the
proper facial expression. A lot
of my friends say that when they
5 come up to me quickly and they
have a piece of news, be it
exciting or bad or happy, I have
this sort of surprised, confused
look on my face and one thing if
10 you know me and you know what's
going on, it isn't a big
problem, but when you're trying
to make friends in school or
network ...
15
>> >>: I'm sorry. She's
wonderful. She's got a bunch of
videos. I just want to
introduce you to her for two
20 reasons. One is because there's
this vibrant network of people
with Asperger's. It's
unbelievable. She's got 159,000
views and she's not the most
25 popular, actually. And people
123
1 with Asperger's and people in
the autism spectrum have found,
because of the new media, next
topic we're going to, this
5 ability to communicate that just
was not there and find each
other, so it's been just an
astonishing thing and I wanted
mostly to show you so here's all
10 of these are people with awes
autism. I don't know when that
is. So don't look at that. The
bikini ... But any way, these
are mostly people with autism,
15 and look at this word, because
this is the word that you'll
here more and more,
neurotypicals and the myth of
Asperger's. So within the
20 Asperger's community, which is
now a community, didn't used to
exist, because they didn't have
ways that they found each other,
we're called -- well, I'm sorry,
25 I shouldn't even think, probably
124
1 many of you are not
neurotypicals. But at any rate
it's a derogatory term for
people like you, neurotypicals
5 are said like oh, she's a
neurotypical and that means oh,
I get it, and that means too
emotional, can't concentrate on
you know, the substance of the
10 matter, not very good
truth-tellers, they have all a
long list of neurotypicals, and
how the difficulties they have,
and the kinds of jobs they can
15 do, they're good receptionists,
but you wouldn't want to really
hire them for an tural job,
actuarial job and fabulous. And
they're just charming, charming
20 people. But this will -- I
think, thrive, as people begin
to see the diversity as what's
really there and the problem is
when you confront standardizing
25 conditions, then some people,
125
1 various kinds, will get
marginalized as nonappropriate.
So the actually on my way up, I
was hearing a story that I
5 wanted to tell you which I think
some of you have heard on Simon
BEHREN Cohen who does research
on autism spectrum disorders,
he's actually SASCHA's brother
10 or cousin. So anyway, one is a
neuroscientist and the other is
rich. Here's how Simon BEHREN
Cohen got interested in. He's a
cognitive scientist at Oxford
15 union university and he noticed
that a lot of his colleagues had
kids who had autism and he was
thinking, wow, why so many? Is
it in the water? So then he did
20 a study, how many do, and most
of his colleagues were in
computer science, in linguistic
science and these kinds of
things, and the incidence was
25 very high, and like a good
126
1 scientist, he thought, well,
what about other departments?
Is it just Oxford so he goes to
you know, English, history,
5 things like that. Very few
autistic kids. A lot of manic
depressive kids in those
families and he goes whoa, what
is that about? Huge amount of
10 autism and Asperger's in these
mathematics, science, et cetera,
huge amount of depression, manic
depression, et cetera, in all of
the liberal arts. And that
15 began a long set of studies.
The point of which is to say,
and the radio show was about
this, if you go to Microsoft,
not to speak out of turn, an
20 enormous number of people and
their children have Asperger's,
OK? Seattle schools have
special people come in because
they have so many kids with
25 Asperger's and autism. And
127
1 Simon BEHREN Cohen thing is
they're part of the spectrum and
you're going to see inevitably
people that are very good at
5 some things and not so good at
others and it's no surprise to
you to know that it's a huge
overproportion of people who
have emotional problems who are
10 writers and poets and artists
and filmmakers and stuff. That
that's part of the gift, as well
as the disability. That this
variation is a normal part of
15 the human condition, and that
people with autism and
Asperger's are part of a
spectrum of which there's great
strengths and I don't want to go
20 through a lot of examples. This
is just a recent article I
picked out to more to show you
that there's hundreds coming out
like this, which looks at the
25 structural brain differences
128
1 between kids with autism and
kids without, but instead of
looking for what's broken in
their brains, it's looking for
5 what are their brains good at
and what they find, in lots of
fields now, is that of course
their brains are very good, and
I don't mean just very good for
10 someone who's disabled, I mean
they're better than you. And
they're finding this in all
kinds of, one of our people that
works with us at cast is just is
15 going to come out in science
soon, science is the top of the
runk kind rung kind of hard-core
science journal showing that
there's a. Astro physicists.
20 What they did was they looked at
what are the abilities require
in astrophysics and they did
tests and they show that
actually, yeah, they're not good
25 readers, but they're really good
129
1 at the things that an astro
physicist needs to do and he
didn't have any trouble
recruiting subjects, sent out an
5 email. Do any of you you know,
the famous astro physicist
dyslexia, he was flooded with
all these people who are astro
physicists, not considered a
10 low-level occupation,
overrecommendation. And they
said you know what, to be an
astro physicist, you need the
kind of things that dyslexic
15 kids have. And similarly, I'll
tell you one more example. I
think what you're going to see
is this is in the what next
category you'll see thousands of
20 things like this. So another
recent one came out, done by an
neurologist who was taking my
class, fabulous. There's this
TMS it's called, transcranial
25 stimulation, you can give
130
1 someone a temporary lesion, you
just put this little pad, it's
it kind of gives them a jolt.
It it's like giving them a
5 little modern electroshock to
their brain. Sounds horrible,
but for as long as it's applied,
that part of the brain stops
working. It's just like giving
10 a temporary lesion but then you
stop and it goes back to normal.
So it's kind of this new way to
study what the different parts
of our brain do. So he was
15 interested in autistic kids and
in particular, autistic kids, if
you throw out 100 things,
roughly 100 things, and you have
a lot of things on a table and
20 you say to people how many of
them are there, you're terrible
at it. You say something like I
don't know, 37, 400, you don't
have a clue and someone noticed
25 if you throw them down and you
131
1 have autistic kids, they say 87,
32 and they're right. And
people went what, how could you
do that? And they did it and
5 showed yup, they're really good.
Not every autistic kid but this
astonishing ability to recognize
pneumo NUMEROSITY is a
high-level thing and you know
10 what they found out if you take
your brain and electrostimulate
it in the right place, all of a
sudden you can do it and they
were like, what? So actually
15 inside of each of you is a
really smart autistic brain that
could do, you could be an astro
physicist p you could be an
actuarial table. It's just that
20 your brain is getting in the way
of some of these incredible
skills p because you have
decided and your parents have
decided that you want to be a
25 different type of thing, which
132
1 is a little bit more of a
generalist, rather than a
specialist at S and so there's
going to be literally thousands
5 of these, so here you can make
someone all of a sudden be able
to recognize 100 objects, know
exactly how many there are, and
it's latent in all of you it's
10 in your brain, but you have
grown up in such a way that
you've made yourself stupid in
that way, OK? Fabulous. So for
most jobs you don't need to know
15 how many things there are, so
we're fine. And God good
receptionists, don't remember
that NUMEROSITY. But being an
astro physicist. It's really
20 going to happen. So the
argument in this field now is
before we start fixing people
and saying you have a disability
and you don't, we need to think
25 what is the diversity here in
133
1 the kinds of skills people have,
and are we underrecognizing
things that are really valuable
and not finding the kinds of
5 jobs and the kinds of things and
doing teaching the way you do in
ways that actually are
responsive to differences which
are very strong and are not just
10 worse. People are walking
around that do poorly in your
classes who are smarter than you
by far in other ways. That's
what's the striking finding.
15 And it's coming out everywhere.
OK, so the argument is
neurodiversity and if you look
up neurotypicals, Google
neurotypicals, you'll find
20 hysterical people talking about
you as if you have major
problems and don't you wish you
could be as da da da da da as
people on autism spectrum
25 disorder?
134
1 >> >>: lastly, oh, so sorry, to
make that point, that from the
days in which the nimas laws
were written, where we saw
5 disability as broken and as
resonant in children or adults,
something they have like an
illness, the movement of
universal design, the movement
10 of science, is toward a
recognition that there's great
diversity amongst us. And the
idea that you can separate out
and say, those are disabled and
15 those are not, isn't going to
hold water in the future. So
we're not going to be able to
define them by organic. We're
not even going to be able to
20 define them by you have to have
a disability, because someone's
going to come up to you and say
OK, tell me how many things I
threw on the table and you're
25 going to go I don't know, 3434?
135
1 No, it's 97, you have a
disability. That we're not
going to be able to do this in
the long run. There isn't going
5 to be any bright line between
ability and dissality, which is
a good thing.
>> >>: OK, and the big change
10 that cast focused on more than
any other, is that the whole
reason nimas points back to 1933
was the library of Congress, the
recognition that books were not
15 usable by some people who had
disabilities, and until there
were alternatives, though, you
really didn't -- you had to
continue to think of a person as
20 having a disability and needing
to the fixed and all of that.
And with new media, we in fact
have a different alternative,
which is to say, actually books
25 aren't very good as
136
1 instructional media for anybody,
and we need to change the kinds
of things we use for
instruction, which is what we're
5 looking at. So this I'm going
to blitz through. The power of
the media is the flexibility, we
can store information in them,
keep it permanent, but display
10 it in many ways, blah blah blah,
we can take the same information
and make it in in different
colors, different fonts,
anything like that as you know,
15 but you can also make it
immediately into something you
can touch as opposed to look.
You can make it into something
you can listen to by turning on
20 text to speech, you can turn it
into ASL and that's the genius
of nimas, will you give us one
good digital version, we can
from that make countless
25 versions, versions that talk,
137
1 versions that are bigger,
versions that you can touch,
versions that can talk to you
with their hands, et cetera.
5 Those things are all possible if
we start with a digital source
rather than starting with a
printed source. And for cast
we're very interested in not
10 only can you make it physically
and sense oral accessible, but
can we provide supports directly
in the material so we can in
fact reduce threat. We can
15 increase challenges by saying
you know what there are more
resources, there's more help in
the document itself so you don't
have to go into threat. We also
20 think they make the better
environments for learning, which
is a longer argument. And I
want to give a flavor of what
are environments that are very
25 supportive look like. What are
138
1 these new environments going to
look like. And I've forgotten,
skip you told me and I don't
remember. Did you show any of
5 the reading environments.
>> >>: I went through just the
sonnet yesterday
10 >> >>: and did that live,
though?
>> >>: yes. So I want to skip
the universal learning editions
15 whereby you can say I need it to
read to me, I need help with the
vocabulary, all of those things.
We can easily do that and this
is just to show the guidelines
20 that talk about them. We want
to make sure everybody can see
it. So we can and I don't mean
see t sorry, we want to make
sure everybody can perceive it
25 so we can easily make things
139
1 talk, we can easily make them
bigger, we can make them a
different color, all of those
things. We also want to make
5 sure that the language and
symbols doesn't prevent kids.
Some kids daunt decode. Easy
enough to have a computer
decode. It may be that English
10 is not their first language. As
some of you know we're doing a
project with Google will now and
there's automatic translation to
42 languages instantaneous so
15 you can just so give that to me
in my language and there's all
sorts of other things we can do
here, including not using
language and symbols at all and
20 to provide options to make sure
that the language and symbols
around getting in the way and
lastly things that we can do for
comprehension. And a lot of
25 people don't have the same
140
1 background knowledge, something
I talked about earlier, that the
reason they can't understand it
isn't because they can't see it,
5 isn't because they don't
understand the language and
symbols, but they don't have the
background knowledge, but we can
build that in. It's very simple
10 to build that in nowadays and we
can highlight critical features,
so that you can have a start to
get into things and so on. Lots
of options. So the UDL
15 guidelines which I'll show you
how to get, talk about how do
you present information with
enough options that everybody
can get to it, that we're not
20 decreasing the oxygen? So just
in the spirit of what's next, I
want to show you not one of our
own, but something that's come
out fairly recently from
25 scholastic for -- let's see
141
1 where is it? Sorry, one second.
I guess I shut down by mistake.
Don't look at my codes. So I
just want to give you a sense of
5 what is this world coming to in
terms of how the things we use
to learn in look different than
a print world? And I'm sorry,
I'm on a -- I seem to be on a
10 bit of a slow line here. So
this is called expert space.
And expert space is an
information -- it's a -- the
idea is how are we going to
15 teach students to be good at it,
finding, evaluation and using
information in this sort of
media-rich world, all right?
And you'll see here -- sorry.
20
>> >>: so here's topics. These
they've done the most typical
topics that people look at in
middle school and high school,
25 you know, energy, da da da,
142
1 things pop up when you roll over
them. There's many more.
There's hundreds of them.
Here's the interesting thing
5 about them. When I go to
one, -- so let's see, I probably
should be careful, but we'll go
to one endangered species, and
sorry things are slow. When it
10 opens up, this opens up into an
environment where students can
learn about endangered species.
I've never seen it be quite this
slow. I wonder if I'm really
15 on. It keeps making and losing
my connection. So this doesn't
for some reason, can someone get
the tech person just to see why
I dome don't seem to be -- do
20 you know what's happening in a
way that I don't?
>> >>: it's updating.
25 >> >>: oh, it's up now. OK, all
143
1 right, thank you. I probably
won't try to do everything.
>> >>: let me show you how this
5 works. Because it has a lot of.
How do you begin? It begins
with a gorgeous video, Hollywood
style. I'm not going to play it
because it feels like the line
10 is slow for some reason, but it
orant you to endangered species,
get out the vocabulary get out
some ideas, so you're in a space
where you feel like you have
15 some resourcesment remember what
I was talking about earlier. So
it says not starting by reading,
let's give you some background
information and then the next
20 thing it does is says OK, you
want to read some more about it,
and we come down here and say
yeah, I want to read some more.
25 >> >>: I apologize for whatever
144
1 is making this -- look what's
interesting about this. So
here's an article. It's like an
encyclopedias article. But
5 what's the difference? For one
thing, you can say what LEXILE
level do I want to read this at?
So every article. Does
everybody know what LEXILE is?
10 LEXILE is one of the ways of
judging how difficult an article
is to read and so these are
different levels from a much
lower to a much higher so it
15 comes in at sort of an average.
Then all of these are available.
I can turn the read along. So
it will just start reading to
me. I can look up words
20 anywhere I want to, take notes,
all of those things.
Automatically I is part of it.
I just show you a couple more
things. So I'm in a standard,
25 this is like going to an
145
1 encyclopedia, and but I'm never
going to get left alone in terms
of there being lots of support
available to me. And let me go
5 back, so that's a an
introductory article, so I've
been able to see a video, now
read an article, what's next?
What's really cool about it is
10 that the next thing that happens
is you see dive deeper. Now,
what happens is then there's a
gradual release from first a
video, a very supported reading
15 environment, where every word
and there's comprehension
supports and things built into
it t but then dive deeper,
there's thousands of articles.
20 They've got GROLLIER's
encyclopedia and put them all in
here so there's plenty of
information. So it's like
saying let's say you come in
25 with a background knowledge and
146
1 you can dive deeper and ever yon
one of them is LEXILEed. So I'm
not going to get shut because of
my reading ability or I can't
5 see it or whatever, but there's
actually more than 90,000
articles that are all prepared
in this way.
10 >> >>: now, that says there's
remember three parts of the
brain so I'm just going to show
you just talk about this in
those -- first, it says this
15 information should be available
in multiple ways that you can
get to it. Watch it, you can
read it, you can read it with a
lot of support, always ask for
20 vocabulary and decoding support
et cetera. Oh, somewhere in
there, it does do you want it in
Spanish. I don't see it. So
you can say I want it in my
25 first language, et cetera. All
147
1 built in. That's only the back
part of your brain. It says
everybody ought to at least know
what this information is. We
5 can do that. The good part is
how does it deal with the front
part of the brain, helping kids
be more strategic, acting on
this information, finding good
10 stuff. So all of that is built
up here, that there are tools
and resources to help you learn
how to use them. There's a
great note-taking which allows
15 you to -- it's fabulous, because
it allows you to take notes but
essentially just dragging it but
the great thing is that it makes
sure that you cite, it drags the
20 notes over and it says where did
you get this? So it reminds
kids, this is something they've
copied. And it will help them
then make that you are
25 bibliography. But it's a
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1 teaching instrument. It says
OK, you've used these sources.
Now it's time to construct your
bibliography, and believe me, I
5 don't have time to show this but
I'm sure -- I have graduate
students who do not know how to
do proper citation, so built
into it are the common like MLA
10 and stuff citation links that
help them learn what is the way
to do a bibliography, all part
of this built in and I'll just
show you one example. If you
15 have trouble getting ideas, you
can go in here and say, ah,
we'll help you get some ideas.
There's dictionaries and things
like that and an outline builder
20 which is really cool. You can
drag things around and it's like
a concept map thing. All built
in. And I just want to show
you, I think what the kids find
25 most helpful is the strategy and
149
1 skill building stuff. Here's
some of the things that are
here. There's more coming, but
here's the things that they
5 found that students again,
middle school, high school, but
I have to say, I find it in
graduate will school, that how
to set good goals for a lesson.
10 As you know, half the time the
kids said well I want to learn
about and it's the topic that is
like impossible. Because it's
too big or sometimes too narrow.
15 Usually too big. So how do you
set even a good goal for setting
a topic? How do you search in a
web environment. And it really
tutors them and gives them
20 practice at saying what's a good
question you could ask of a
Google search engine so you get
good information instead of
crappy information. How do you
25 evaluate sources to decide
150
1 what's good and bad? I'll show
what it looks like when you do
it. These two are the best
ones, note taking, the kids are
5 terrible note takers, so there's
this fabulous long do it with
us, we're going to model how we
take notes, you do it, we do it,
you go back and forth. And then
10 it even gives you feedback,
soak, it OK, it looks like you
took too much. Outlining,
citing sources. I just want to
show you what it looks like when
15 you go into one of these.
Citing sources my graduate
students, I want them to all to
take this.
20 >> >>: hey, glad you're back the
I'm HEDRON and I'll here to help
you get your projects together.
Today we're going to go over
citing sources. If you want to
25 pause or view a section again,
151
1 click the tab up here.
>> >>: you have to cite your
sources whenever you take notes.
5 Check out the note-taking skill
builder to get a refresher on
that key skill. Signing a
source means to give credit to
the author and publisher of the
10 information you're using. We
acknowledge their ideas and the
research and citations are our
note cards. When we finish a
project, research paper or
15 homework assignment, we've put
all these citations together in
a bibliography. I think doing
research is kind of like
building a team, a team of
20 experts who help me with the
facts and ideas I need for my
paper or project. The more
experts I have, the stronger my
presentation. When I cite a
25 source, that author joins my
152
1 team of experts in my
bibliography. If I do a good
job bringing my team together,
we can't be beat, and my paper
5 will be a winner. Sometimes
people don't give credit when
they copy words, facts or ideas
from a book or a website.
That's called plagiarism.
10 Plagiarism is a serious offense
with serious consequences for
students and researchers. But
hey, don't worry, I've got a
game plan that will make it easy
15 for you to give ...
>> >>: OK, so you can see so he
talks for a while but then he
gets you doing T he says, OK,
20 you try it. I'm going to give
you an example. You try citing
some sources and then we'll get
your feedback and so on. But
what they have is a gradually
25 released space which goes from
153
1 building background knowledge
before you start it, trying out
some things, and then some
articles that are very heavily
5 and carefully scaffolded to a
broader set of articles. I left
out one more step sort of
mid-level articles that are sort
of medium in their expanse and
10 then out to 90,000 articles,
with the capacity to help you
learn how to search, learn how
to cite, learn how to gather,
learn how to take notes, all of
15 these things. So these kinds of
environment, I think I just
wanted to show you a recent
example. Every word
20 >> >>: you've got a question.
>> >>: you need to provide
captioning. You've already
included. English as a second
25 language. How we show -- then
154
1 the
>> >>: I believe they are
captioned, and I don't know how
5 to turn them on, but
>> >>: that doesn't have it. I
mean the video you showed
earlier, but this one, I don't
10 see, happens you
>> >>: all right, I'll check,
because that would be
problematic if it doesn't.
15 Because this, the yes, right,
the video, with the captions on
were the captions on the videos
when they played automatically?
I forget.
20
>> >>: no, I mean on this one.
Into it didn't have captions on.
>> >>: it didn't have captions
25 on.
155
1 >> >>: yeah, OK, well all the
videos are captioned whether
these tutorials are, I don't
know -- I'd have to check. But
5 when those opening videos came
on, they had the captions turned
on, yes?
>> >>: we watched a video.
10
>> >>: oh, I didn't turn it on.
Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't turn it
on the video. They are
captioned and so you can turn
15 the captions on and off. But
whether these are, I am sea not
sure. Whether the tutorial and
I apologize for not knowing
that. Awe all of the video
20 introductions to all of the
novels, they are all captioned.
>> >>: and but thank you for
mentioning it and I'll check.
25 We told them to caption
156
1 everything. In fact, I should
say, one of the -- I'll get back
to it.
5 >> >>: OK. So let me get back
to my slides.
>> >>: similarly, you would take
and I think skip did a little
10 bit of this, look at expression,
and say what are the things that
might interfear with a person
being able to express what they
know? And we literally move
15 around the ring and say, well,
what about physical action? The
ability to actually act, so then
there are options that allow a
person who is physically
20 disabled like Matthew, the guy I
showed, to be able to do that.
Secondly, the ability to write
and draw means bothing be able
to move the instruments, to be
25 able to spell correctly, to be
157
1 able to organize and do all of
those. Are there options
available in the media, so in
the program I just showed you,
5 actually an outlining tool is
built in to provide some support
for kids and they can type and
so on in a variety of ways and
lastly, importantly, executive
10 functions. The ability to set
proper goals, to make a good
plan, so in that program I just
showed, one of the problems that
kids really have is they have
15 trouble getting a good plan for
what they're going to write
about and search for and so on
so it actually tutors them and
helps them and guides they will
20 them to how do I build a plan.
>> >>: and similarly we can look
at -- I want to skip these for a
moment. I left off the affect.
25 The program I just showed how
158
1 does it go after affect? A it
starts with the fun stuff to
start with, but it says you have
a lot of options to choose which
5 would be supportive, what would
help you, and it allows kids,
one of the most important things
is to allow kids to set thousand
those helps and I'm a little bit
10 behind and I apologize so I
wanted to just go to a few
things that get me to my course.
In this environment, though, I
want to say that print looks
15 much more disabled when we can't
do these things. Or as you
pointed out, if the videos are
not captioned, then they're
disabled. They place people in
20 a position where they can't in
fact get the information out of
them. And print has that
problem in spades. A lot of
people can't use print of
25 course, and the disabilities,
159
1 the change in the viewpoint that
we have from instead of seeing
kids as having disabilities, to
seeing the media as having
5 disabilities is an important
change. Disabilities in who
they can teach, we can't reach
all of our kids when we have
disabled media. There's not
10 enough oxygen in the air.
They're disabled in what we can
teach. There are topics which
are not well done in present.
Mathematics is not well taught
15 in printed textbooks. Most
science and so on. So they have
disabilities in the kinds of
things they can teach. They
can't teach kids, in fact, to be
20 skillful, to be able to do
things. They're really just
information retrievable devices
and lastly they don't prepare
students for their future. This
25 is a picture of my daughter
160
1 who's just finishing medical
school, and most of what she
does now is not -- they don't
even assign any textbooks.
5 Largely she's on computers the
whole time. She is -- everybody
gets a laptop. They do all
their work that day, they do
simulations, they do surgeries
10 on computer and so on. And that
by preparing kids only with
paper we're not preparing them
for the future in which they're
going to live.
15
>> >>: so in this modern world,
it's not who has print
disabilities, but the key thing
is what has print disabilities.
20 So in terms of this law back
from the beginning, the question
is who has a print disability
and I would want to reframe it
in saying our schools have print
25 disabilities. They're not able
161
1 to do the things they need to
do. They're not able to reach
all the students, they're not
able to teach all their subjects
5 and they're not preparing their
kids for the future. That's too
much disability. I want, just
to finish up, I want to talk
about my own course a little
10 bit.
>> >>: so this will look ugly
because the course just finished
and there's a lot of emails at
15 the end. But I want to show you
some things from my teaching and
talk about some things that
worked and didn't work. This is
a main blog and I know that I
20 just heard you're doing a blog,
and you can see a few things
just happened and they look
boring and they're notes and
stuff to the students. But
25 every student had a blog in the
162
1 course. So here's all my
students. And this provided an
alternate way of interacting
with the course. Which is to
5 say that there were things that
happened in lecture where we all
did them together. On their
blogs, people took a much more
individual attack on the course.
10 That is, they did the things
that made the course meaningful
to them. And in the media that
were valuable and interesting
and usable by them. So they
15 looked very different, one from
another. I'll just show a
couple of the blogs to give you
a sense of blogs from I ended up
seeing these students, and this
20 one is someone who's quite
FACILE with modern technology so
his is laden with gorgeous
videos, commentaries, he would
half of my lectures and make
25 them better by saying you know,
163
1 if David had had this, it would
have been a lot better and it's
just full of resources for my
teaching next year. I mean I
5 don't know how many probably 35
or 50 posts and it's full of
things that I could use. He
even gives me highlighting
critical features, he highlights
10 things for me, make sure I'll
see them and makes tutorials and
stuff. So that that's a, it
goes on and on, it's just
amazing. And in this realm, I
15 put much less what should I say
top-down influence on what
should be on the blog. A
basically asked them to respond
and think about things, the
20 topics in the course, respond to
each other's blogs and so on?
OK, and they're really fabulous,
I have to say. I mean I want to
go back and actually look at
25 them all, and I would say 10
164
1 percent of them will probably
keep them as their permanent
blogs. That is, that they're
already going on each other's
5 blogs and talking about p stuff
and so on. I want to go to my
slides to show you another one.
Two other tools that I used a
lot was that I used book
10 builder. How many people have
seen book builder? So quite a
few. So book builder, very
simple tool. Originally made
for first grade teachers to use
15 in making books that had
multiple supports built in for
students who have intellectual
disabilities but it's taken off
as just a think that you can
20 make cool things on the web with
that are highly supported.
Among other things, it allows
you to make a -- put a little
mentor in who talks. All you
25 have to do is type in what you
165
1 want him to say and he says it.
Multiple after avatars, you can
make your own face be the avatar
and so on. You can I am bed
5 questions and queries and so on
in these very simple books cht
and I just keep this one up
because I wanted to -- well,
this so you that sometimes
10 people have done things that are
very college-looking. Again
it's made for first graders. So
here's a book that this person
made on quadratic functions.
15 It's got you know, your joke to
begin. And here's, you just
move pages like this, you see
there's a little -- this is a
little read me this aloud, give
20 me some definition, all those
kinds of things are up here.
But this one is ugly, that is,
it's not beautifully designed,
but it's just this rich thing
25 about quadratic equations and I
166
1 just -- I didn't actually grade
this one, but I wanted to show
you what he's been able to embed
a fabulous movie videos, things
5 you couldn't possibly do in
print. I want to get to one
that I might understand it.
>> >>: I guess it was that one.
10
>> >>: and he did this so I'm
not sure, the student did this
so I'm not sure this is
captioned, either. Too slow.
15 I'm going to let that go in the
background. I don't know, from
my hotel, all this worked very
fast. Let me see if that will
load while I'm doing something
20 else. Everything is slow.
>> >>: you might have to close
some of the programs.
25 >> >>: oh, good idea. I might
167
1 have too much going here.
>> >>: I have a lot going. Are
you going to help me? That
5 would be great. I'd love it.
>> >>: oh, go to the same place
on another sheet? Uh-oh, then
I'd have to be able to give you
10 the URL.
>> : OK. He says that other
machine has a faster connection.
So that would be fabulous. Mine
15 seems to be jumping off. Oh,
it's hopelessly difficult.
>> >>: all right, I apologize.
I don't know why. See this
20 worries me, it's saying that
every little
>> >>: just turn off your
wireless connection, you won't
25 get that message any more. But
168
1 then actually leave the Internet
and turn that back on.
>> >>: I think I'm going to let
5 him play with it and let me say
some things. Two things I want
to show are book builder which I
can show later which is this
thing that makes it easy to make
10 books that are rich in media and
that have built-in supports so
that you can make them. They're
not going to be quite as richly
textured as the thing that
15 psychological asic scholastic
can do with a lot of money but
nonetheless there's 2,000 books
made by teachers that are shared
in a public library and there
20 are 18,000 books that teachers
have made that are available
just really to their classes.
So you can make digital books
that talk and breathe and all
25 that that you can share with
169
1 just your classroom or you can
share with the rest of the world
and they've become sort of a hot
thing. So just to say what's
5 next with that, we're actually
working with Google to bring out
an authoring system could he
shah so that people can make
industrial strength really rich
10 books with lots of features in
them freely available to
everybody. So that project is
not quite finished but at some
point Google will hopefully make
15 it very clear to you and that
will be something that it makes
it easy for you to both make
things and share them with your
friends and colleagues.
20
>> >>: did you switch machines?
>> >>: I didn't have the sign-on
codes.
25
170
1 >> >>: OK, so here's book
builder, you learn about UDL in
it, you can see some model
books, you can create your own
5 books, you can share books with
just our own class, or you can
look for books in the public
library. Which are ones that
have been shared by other
10 teachers, and that's where the
quadratic function, whatever
that means. Everything seems a
little slow. Here's all the
books. Sorry, here's how you
15 get to all the books. And
I'll -- let me just find one
that I don't have to think
about. Oh, look at the titles.
A brief history of assistive
20 technology in education.
There's sort of random
assortment here, but I can go
put in a title, put in an
author, put in an illustrator,
25 my school, I can ask for grade
171
1 levels, I can say I want content
areas, so we can ask for
science, and go tand get just
books on science, books for 6th
5 grade science or whatever, so
all of them have been made by
teachers, educators of some
kind, and put in the -- put here
where you can use them and add
10 to them yourself. And I'll
sorry I'll go back and just open
up a piece of one book and I
apologize for blowing my time
here. But this is something you
15 can easily pull up. Perhaps
I'll do this in the afternoon
session to get a sense for
what's here. And -- well, look
at this, who knows what this is
20 about. I mean I know what it's
about, but I don't know if it's
any good. I can just say I want
to read that book and you'll see
there's a tool bar that comes
25 up, there's support for
172
1 vocabulary and things like that
and of course this could be a
terrible book, I haven't seen
this one. A brief history.
5 There's a recording of voice
here. A dog. And no mentors
yet. All right, so so far not a
very exciting book. So this is
someone I think is experimenting
10 doing their first book. So
typically there would be mentors
and things that would support
you down here, and this one is
just beginning. And I realize
15 I'm at the end of my time. The
what I'd like to do this
afternoon is show some more
tools and things that people can
use. So there are commercially
20 available things that are
increasingly coming out that are
examples of UDL and you can
increasingly use tools. Google
will be coming out with some
25 where you can make your own
173
1 stuff, and I want to say one
thing that didn't work in my
class. Which when people have
their own blogs, I encourage
5 people to look and comment on
each other's blogs, and what was
interesting to me is that the
same cliquishness aRose that
happens in other social
10 environments. I see people
nodding so you've done this, but
some people's blogs got almost
no comments at all, and they
were just as hurt as people who
15 nobody talked to after class.
And you know, I could say
everything I wanted as a
professor up front, please
comment on lots of people's, but
20 what I saw was that they
aggregated into groups, and that
people commented back and forth
on each other's blogs and not
on, some blogs just didn't have
25 it. Now, part of that is the
174
1 user's social function, some
people knew how to make fabulous
blogs that everybody commented
on but some of it had to do with
5 the social structure that had
nothing to do with the blogs and
some kids just weren't getting
the attention. The second thing
that didn't work was I did a
10 module which worked in terms of,
it worked, but it brought up a
problem I never thought of.
Which is that people read and
they highlighted and they did
15 things within it which was much
better than a book in some ways.
It could talk, it could do all
those things. But it allowed me
to see everything a student did
20 in the book. When they
highlighted it, when they asked
for help, when they made a note
to commentary, all of those
things, which sounded great.
25 But as I was doing it, I
175
1 realized, I felt vaguely -- not
vaguely, I felt intrusive, like
I knew too much because I could
literally see when did they
5 study, how long did they read
this book? Did they get help?
Did they turn on the speech?
Did they -- I could know
everything. And I had to kind
10 of call a class and say, I'll
not going to look at that any
more. I could literally see
what they high highlighted and
make comments on their
15 highlighting and I just didn't
know whether that was OK,
because is it OK to be a stownt
and not do the reading? Because
you have other ways of doing
20 well in the course? And I would
know that they never did the
reading. Or I would know that
they don't know how to
highlight. And I didn't know.
25 So it was really kind of
176
1 something new and I knew
literally that they studied, I
couldn't tell if they studied at
midnight only because the
5 environment kept track of every
key stroke and so I had this
ethical problem of I don't know
if I should know every key
stroke that a student makes. So
10 just an interesting thing,
perhaps you'll talk about it at
the -- for those of you who come
to the afternoon session when we
talk about it, it's very
15 provocative at the college
level. What does it mean if you
know everything? Anyway, thank
you very much. Facile. Facile.
20 >> >>: thank you so much David.
It's a wonderful and exciting
morning and I'm glad that you're
going to be able to stay with us
a little bit longer after lunch.
25 Lunch will be out in the hallway
177
1 and you can come back if had
here if if you'd like or find
another location to have your
lunch. We invite you to visit
5 the exhibiter hall over the
lunch hour, and then at 1:00,
please find your way to your
breakout session. You should
have an envelope, if you're new
10 today, an envelope which has the
breakout session name and number
that you registered for, and if
you have any question about the
location of that, there are
15 schedules that indicate the room
numbers or the room names,
rather, for the breakout
session, and there are signs in
the hallway that should be
20 fairly easy to find. Feel free
to ask anyone with a yellow tag
and they'll help you to find
your way.
25 >> >>: can I say one more thing
178
1 is it
>> >>: I just realized I wanted
to say something. Thank you for
5 pointing out that that part
wasn't captioned. I wanted to
say one thing about captions,
which is really the future next
step. Because it shows where
10 universal design works. As you
probably know, Google will
videos how will automatically
caption themselves. Have you
seen that so you can just say
15 caption my video, and of course
that's a benefit for people who
are deaf. But what it also
allows you to do is to search
for videos by the words because
20 now they have words attached to
them. And I just wanted to
point out it's a good example of
the advantages of doing UDL
provide more ramps for a lot
25 more people, so in fact, now
179
1 Google has a better way and
YouTube to find the right
videos, because in fact more and
more of them are being
5 captioned. Now it's very
automatic. You should ask
people to caption the videos,
because it's actually fairly
simple to do so. Anyway,
10 thanks.
>> >>: one of your breakout
sessions is on that topic, that
captions are not just for deaf,
15 so you might want to check that
out. Those of you who were
looking for a clue about the
prize that will be given this
evening, very valuable prize,
20 there is a clue, I believe, on
the blog, so you can check out
the clue on the blog, but if
you'd liked this morning's
session, you will love this
25 prize. Enjoy your lunch ...:
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