Second Life To Teach Social Skills to People on the Autistic Spectrum

Image by Ravenelle under a Attribution 2.0 License

Image: Torley Linden is a well-known Second Life resident with Asperger’s Syndrome. Here he’s speaking in Second Life at the Bounce for Autism event in 2008.

Last night I went to an event that combines several of my interests: gaming and virtual worlds with teaching and accessibility. The new Animation and Games Development Specialist Group of the British Computing Society was holding a talk in London with four speakers on the topic of virtual world and gaming for health professionals. Of particular interest were the following two talks:

Nigel Newbutt will present a brief overview of assistive technologies: virtual environments for people with autism. This will include an analysis of VEs that have been developed with the specific aim for users with autism. Within this talk a very brief overview of what autism is will be presented, and some of the advantages and issues that surround the development and use of VEs for users with autism.

Mick Donegan will present on the use of computer technology for people with ‘locked in syndrome’. This will include an overview of assistive technology for people with communication difficulties and how existing and new technologies can help people with physical disabilities.

Unfortunately, two of the four planned speakers were not there, including Mick Donegan. Emmanuel Pourreuix, one of my current H810 students attended. He recorded the session with the permission of the presenters, so a transcript might be available at a later date.

Report Planning: An Approach

Image by neonarcade under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 License

This article on how to approach report or essay planning is based on a posting I made in one of my tutor group forums recently. I know that several of my students are new to the Open University and possibly new to postgraduate work. That probably applies to students in the other groups as well, so I thought I’d make a public version of my advice.

Most people don’t think logically enough to just sit down and write a really good piece of work off the top of their head. I know I don’t. Even when writing a blog post earlier today, I omitted things I’d intended to include because I didn’t have a plan and check things off as I went along. A plan helps you structure how you’re going to tell the story you want to tell and then tell it in a compelling, focussed way.

Our Progress and TMA 1

Image by Michelle A. Hoyle under a Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License

It’s hard to believe it’s already week 5 in H810. I commented at the end of week 2 that I thought my group was off to a quiet start, with people working on H800 ECAs, getting married, and being on vacation. My impression was that, since then, things have been even quieter, so I spent part of Sunday afternoon doing looking to see where people were and doing some analysis.

The result of my analysis is the above colour-coded image of people’s participation. The seven green blocks represent people from our tutor group who have posted in Week 3 forum activities. The eight red blocks represent people who haven’t posted in any of the week 3 activities. As it turns out, the image looks the same for week 4 participation.  Week 5 had no postings at the time of my analysis.  So, out of a group of 15, we just under half who who are more or less up to date and a slightly larger group who look to be about two weeks behind based on their forum postings. That’s a lot of behind people and explains why it feels so quiet.

The New H810 Paper

Image by Michelle A. Hoyle under a Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License

Being a Web 2.0 kind of person, I’m always keen to try out new things and use them in an educational context. I’ve been aware of of the Paper.li service for awhile now and I’ve seen it used for other courses I’m involved in around the world. I’ve therefore created an H810 paper for us at http://paper.li/tag/H810 (and case is important. That’s a capital aitch in H810).

Here’s how it works. Every 24 hours, Paper.li scans Twitter and finds any uses of the #H810 hashtag. If there is any sort of link associated with a tweet, it makes those into “stories” for the paper. A story is a brief summary excerpt from the link associated with the Tweet and you can then go off and read the rest if it’s interesting to you.

Reflection: The First Two Weeks… Or It’s Quiet!

Image by Trey Ratcliff (Stuck in Customs)
under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License

We’re just finishing off the first two weeks of this year’s H810 presentation.   Our group, including me, has 15 people, but it’s been pretty quiet.  Well, that’s not completely true.  Our introductory thread, taking place in the Canadian Rockies, was fairly active and the “context” thread, where people described their context, saw a fair bit of traffic.  However, the topics related to the course content itself, especially for Week 2, have been slow.

If you’ve been looking at other forums in the course and wondering why ours is so quiet in comparison, I think it’s because a number of people are actually essentially away for the first two weeks of the course.  Some are on vacation.  Some are travelling.  Some are working on their ECAs for other courses that end this month.

If you’re one of the people who has been busy and especially if you’re new to the OU, I think it’s important to get a good handle on some of the topics for the first two weeks, as they’ll form the basis of your thoughts when it comes to TMA 1.