Open Education and Accessibility

The Open Edu­ca­tion Con­fer­ence is hap­pen­ing right now in Van­cou­ver, but is also offer­ing a num­ber of ways to par­tic­i­pate remotely, includ­ing live and archived streams of the event, or sim­ply fol­low the tag opened09 just about any­where (Twit­ter opened09, Flickr opened09, Deli­cious opened09, Blogsearch opened09, etc…)

The theme of this year’s con­fer­ence is “Cross­ing the Chasm” and while I was dis­ap­pointed that there weren’t more ses­sions address­ing dis­abil­ity acces­si­bil­ity directly, there is a tremen­dous amount of value in almost every ses­sion I have watched to any­one inter­ested in any kind of acces­si­bil­ity. Through the con­fer­ence web­site I was able to find a cou­ple of good resources on the acces­si­bil­ity of open edu­ca­tional resources for peo­ple with disabilities:

• Open Source Acces­si­bil­ity Meet­ing (Check out the draft doc­u­ments and presentations)
• The Open Course­ware Con­sor­tium Acces­si­bil­ity Work­ing Group

One of the resources I learned about today is folk­se­man­tic, a ser­vice and set of tools to help iden­tify open edu­ca­tional resources. A quick search for acces­si­bil­ity resources yielded the fol­low­ing share­able learn­ing resources:

• Acces­si­bil­ity of eLearning
• Acces­si­bil­ity in inter­ac­tion design
• Access E-Learning
• Acces­si­bil­ity in Dis­tance Education

If you do join in the con­ver­sa­tion, be sure to add your­self to the vir­tual attendee list!

Access Means Different Things to Different People

“‘Access’ isn’t just yes or no, but really shades of acces­si­bil­ity, and has dif­fer­ent dime­sions.” (Access to Open Edu­ca­tional Resources Wiki)

The def­i­n­i­tion of access from Merriam-Webster:

a: per­mis­sion, lib­erty, or abil­ity to enter, approach, or pass to and from a place or to approach or com­mu­ni­cate with a per­son or thing b: free­dom or abil­ity to obtain or make use of some­thing c: a way or means of access d: the act or an instance of accessing

Depend­ing on who you are or where you are at in life, the word access has dif­fer­ent mean­ings. UNESCO has a fan­tas­tic wiki page on Access to Open Edu­ca­tional Resources where they define a num­ber of dif­fer­ent types of access. Although writ­ten for a spe­cific type of con­tent (open edu­ca­tional resources), the types of access they have iden­ti­fied can be applied generally :

• Aware­ness, Pol­icy, Atti­tude, Cultural:
  • Access in terms of awareness.
  • Access in terms of local policy/attitude.
  • Access in terms of languages.
• Legal
  • Access in terms of licensing.
• Tech­ni­cal (Deliv­ery Method)
  • Access in terms of file formats.
  • Access in terms of disability.
• Tech­ni­cal (Receiving)
  • Access in terms of infrastructure.
  • Access in terms of inter­net connectivity/bandwidth.
  • Access in terms of discovery.
  • Access in terms of abil­ity and skills.

Read­ing through the com­ments on the page, it is evi­dent that in many parts of the world, access for users with dis­abil­i­ties is a sec­ondary con­cern (at best). With­out power, band­width or an even an Inter­net connnec­tion no con­tent can­not be accessed, so who care if is it acces­si­ble to users with disabilities?

When con­sid­er­ing all of the dif­fer­ent bar­ri­ers that keep peo­ple from access­ing con­tent on the Inter­net, all of the sud­den adding alter­na­tive text to an image doesn’t feel like such a big deal. Let’s keep work­ing on an acces­si­ble web, but in the mean­time let’s not for­get that lots of peo­ple don’t have access to that con­tent whether it is “acces­si­ble” or not.

Via Stephen Downes

Also of Interest

• Acces­si­bil­ity, Avail­abil­ity and Affordability
• Access to the Web for Peo­ple with Intel­lec­tual Disabilities

Open Social Network Roundup

There seems to be more and more dis­cus­sion regard­ing the open­ness of social net­works of late. In try­ing to fol­low the dis­cus­sion, it seems that there are a num­ber of dif­fer­ent types of ‘open­ness’ being dis­cussed. Dare Obasanjo has pro­vided a good overview of the dif­fer­ent con­sid­er­a­tions of what it means to be an open social net­work.

Regard­less of what def­i­n­i­tion of open­ness you are using, Fred Wil­son, reminds that:

…most of Facebook’s tra­di­tional users (like my two daugh­ters) don’t care that their data is locked up in Face­book. I’ll show them my Face­book run­ning in Netvibes when they wake up this morn­ing and they’ll say “that’s nice dad but why would you want to do that?

For­tu­nately, there are a num­ber of peo­ple inter­ested in portable, open social net­works includ­ing Marc Can­ter who pro­vides us with an overview of some of the peo­ple and pol­i­tics involved in the open social net­work dis­cus­sions that are hap­pen­ing. Marc is work­ing on the Peo­ple Aggre­ga­tor to be a stand along sys­tem and is dream­ing of dreams of aggre­gat­ing aggre­ga­tors, aggre­gat­ing con­ver­sa­tions and aggre­gat­ing groups”

Stephen Downes has also done some think­ing in this area and defines three areas of need for social net­work porta­bil­ity and names some of the tech­nolo­gies that may get us there.

Wired recently made head­lines with their cri­tique of the walled gar­den approach that many ven­dors are using to con­trol cus­tomer data. The arti­cle came along with a nice how to page from their wiki on how to Replace Face­book using Open Social Toos that gave some good ideas on aggre­gat­ing con­tent from your net­work of friends, but read­ily admit­ted the dif­fi­culty of pro­vid­ing the key com­po­nent of social net­work­ing– rela­tion­ship man­age­ment tools.

For­ward into the future we go– with mis­matched def­i­n­i­tions of what it means to be “open”, busi­nesses who build mar­ket share by walling their cus­tomers in and many cus­tomers who don’t feel any need for things to change.
Hope­less?
Hardly. As com­mon def­i­n­i­tions emerge, busi­nesses mod­els are adapted and the need for social net­work porta­bil­ity is rec­og­nized then solu­tions will come for­ward, it just may be a lit­tle bit of a wait.

Other resources:

• Social Net­work Porta­bil­ity Google Group

Accessibility, Availability and Affordability

Of these three, which is the largest obsta­cle to the free and open flow of online information?

Con­sider the following:

1. A 12-year old boy in West­ern Africa has learned how to read Braille. He has also recently received an inex­pen­sive lap­top as part of a cor­po­rate ini­tia­tive to save the world with cheap com­put­ers. Unfor­tu­nately, he is unable to access the infor­ma­tion on his own because he was born blind and the com­puter did not come with any soft­ware that can read the con­tent of web pages.
2. In rural Idaho a high school stu­dent has an inex­plic­a­ble desire to “make web­sites”. There are no tech­nol­ogy classes at her school, but a teacher allows her to use a school com­puter dur­ing the last part of lunch to prac­tice her craft. She has found a cou­ple of online com­mu­ni­ties that the school fil­ter allows where she is able to find answers to many of her ques­tions. After school she has a 50 minute bus ride to a small home at the bot­tom of a hill bor­der­ing a National For­est in Cen­tral Idaho. Her fam­ily does have an older com­puter, but they haven’t been able to find local Inter­net ser­vice provider.
3. A young woman in Alba­nia con­stantly hears her friends talk about peo­ple that they have met online. She found a job at a local byrek stand where she earns enough money to accom­pany her friends to a local Inter­net Cafe to par­tic­i­pate in their online activ­i­ties. How­ever, her father recently lost his job because of ill­ness and her fam­ily expects her to con­tribute all of her earn­ings to the fam­ily pot. She occa­sion­ally gets a few min­utes to check her email by tag­ging along with her friends, but by and large she no longer able to use the Internet.

Each of the above prob­lems might be over­come with some com­bi­na­tion of tech­nol­ogy, aware­ness or money. How­ever, each sit­u­a­tion does present a prob­lem of acces­si­bil­ity, avail­abil­ity or afford­abil­ity that might be gen­er­al­ized to include a larger num­ber of people.

Which of these is the most sig­nif­i­cant obsta­cle to ubiq­ui­tous, afford­able tech­nol­ogy to allow every­one to con­nect to this vast col­lec­tion of tubes that we call the Internet?

What other obsta­cles keep peo­ple from access­ing the Internet?

Access for EVERYONE

I’ve been think­ing about acces­si­bil­ity in lit­tle dif­fer­ent terms lately. More and more I’m embrac­ing a wider con­cept of acces­si­bil­ity and access that extends far beyond the dis­abil­ity com­mu­nity. It is the idea that wher­ever con­tent can eas­ily be made freely acces­si­bly to be used by the masses, it should be. Too often, the free exchange of infor­ma­tion is being sti­fled by copy­rights, password-protected direc­to­ries and con­tent dis­trib­u­tors. How­ever, there is a lot going on to cre­ate more open con­tent, with projects such as Cre­ative Com­mons and MIT Open­Course­Ware and thinkers such as Lawrence Lessig, Stephen Downes and David Wiley .

It seems that bat­tle lines are being drawn, one side being those who want more con­trol over how their con­tent is dis­trib­uted and used vs. those advo­cat­ing for grant­ing more access and usage rights for users. While the free con­tent move­ment has been some­what on the fringes, it is show­ing up more and more in main­stream media. Over the next few years there will be more and more dis­cus­sion around this topic as both sides seek to defend their posi­tion and con­vince (or con­strain) the gen­eral pub­lic to adopt one way of think­ing or the other.

Some learn­ers are faced with a dou­ble bar­rier. They may 1) be unable to access and use con­tent because of cost or copy­right and 2) there may still be acces­si­bil­ity issuess once those bar­ri­ers are over­come . Hope­fully in the con­tin­u­ing dia­logue on these issues soci­ety and our law­mak­ers can forge and accept new ideas about the way we think about con­tent in the 21st century.