- Email: [email protected]
Moving beyond the white cane: building an online learning environment for the visually impaired professional
Internet and Higher Education 3 (2000) 117 ± 124
Moving beyond the white cane Building an online learning environment for the visually impaired professional Donald P. Mitchell, John A. Scigliano* School of Computer and Information Sciences, Nova Southeastern University, 6100 Griffin Road, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33314-4416, USA Received 1 August 2000; accepted 1 November 2000
Abstract This article is about the development of an online learning environment (OLE) for a retired, visually impaired professional named Donald Mitchell. He has macular degeneration (MD). Because of this he is legally blind. The article deals with his fight to overcome the barriers, threats, and challenges posed by the reduction of his visual capacities. The article is organized into four main areas of concern or barriers. The first is physical, the second is intellectual, the third is psychological, and the fourth is technological. The authors place special emphasis on the psychological, intellectual, and technological barriers. In addition, the authors relate the steps Mitchell took in building his personalized OLE that included a laborious process of selecting the right hardware and software as well as harnessing an array of technologies such as personal computing tools, Web-based resources, network resources, audio tapes, voice recognition software, and non-print support devices, including the audio features of broadcast and cable television. This development is especially relevant to this special issue of IHE since Dr. Mitchell's work was done in the early days of online learning beginning in the late eighties. D 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Macular degeneration; Low vision enhancement; Online environment; Visually impaired
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +1-954-262-2081; fax: +1-954-262-3915. E-mail address: [email protected] (J.A. Scigliano). 1096-7516/00/$ ± see front matter D 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved. PII: S 1 0 9 6 - 7 5 1 6 ( 0 0 ) 0 0 0 3 6 - 1
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1. Introduction Donald Mitchell, the co-author of this article, has macular degeneration (MD). He has had it for over 10 years. Because of this he is legally blind, and the purpose of this article is to present the system he developed to cope with it. Macular degeneration is the major cause of vision loss in persons over age 60, and the risk of developing it increases dramatically with aging. The macula is the point of central vision on the retina needed for reading, driving, identifying faces, watching TV, and most other routine activities. Macular degeneration damages the macula, resulting in a diminution or a complete loss of central vision. Peripheral vision may be retained but it is blurred and not adequate to allow for reading or clear vision. http:// discoveryfund.org/maculardegeneration.html (August 24, 2000).
The magnitude of the MD problem and the need to develop some means of coping with it was brought out clearly by the American Foundation for Macular Degeneration: According to a recent poll, Americans dread blindness more than any other disability. Recent studies indicate that by the year 2025, the population of people over the age 65 in the United States will be six times higher than in 1990. The reason Ð ``baby boomers'' are aging and overall life expectancy is increasing. Since many people diagnosed with macular degeneration are over age 55, the number of cases of macular degeneration in the US will increase significantly as baby boomers age. In January 1997, Dr. Carl Kupfer, the Director of the National Eye Institute, National Institutes of Health, stated publicly that macular degeneration will soon take on aspects of an epidemic. http://www.macular.org/ thedisease.html (August 24, 2000).
What better way to utilize online information technology than in helping deal with this significant problem? In this article, the authors present an approach to one professional's attempt to cope. Dr. Mitchell is a retired professor and administrator from Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, FL. He has been retired for over two decades. Throughout his working career he developed numerous educational programs and networks of associates that brought him national recognition. He maintained constant communication with his associates for the first half of his retirement, but when MD overtook him, he had to reconsider what his future would be. Mitchell decided that he was not going to be defeated by his vision loss, so he designed an online learning environment (OLE) that enabled him to organize the resources to keep him actively involved with his peers and on a steady path to learning. These resources were needed so that he could continue communicating and learning within the new physical limits imposed on him by his illness. This article is about his fight to overcome the barriers, threats, and challenges posed by the reduction of his visual capacities posed by MD. This is remarkable because Mitchell accomplished this at a time when online learning was just emerging, in the mid- to late eighties. Donald Mitchell chose to re-organize his life around a set of strategies based on the Internet and the World Wide Web. What Mitchell accomplished was to design his own OLE to not only cope with the MD problem of a drastic reduction in sight but to strike out building a set of new intellectual capabilities. The alternative was to accept only the
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``usual'' help provided by the many centers for the blind set up around the country to help the blind cope with life (learning Braille, making a bed, and walking with a white cane). Mitchell knew that these activities were not the solution to his vision problem; he wanted more, and this is the story of how he moved beyond the white cane. 2. Approach and premise The approach taken in the article is based on the premise that the threats and barriers users face in going online with various programs are the same types of threats and barriers that all innovators face. This is the plight of the change agent. It is a state of mind that must be present no matter what is being changed. All worthwhile change grows out of disaster areas, and that is what existed in the eighties when information technology did little in the way of helping the visually challenged. The approach in the following sections of this article follows an adaptation of Maslow's (1968) hierarchy of needs with a special emphasis on developing a system to handle the need for self-actualization. 3. Overcoming the barriers This section is organized into four main areas of concern or barriers. The first is physical, the second is intellectual, the third is psychological, and the fourth is technological. The authors place special emphasis on the psychological, intellectual, and technological barriers since these seem to be most the challenging. The psychological barrier has great potential to make one feel powerless since to a person with low vision, the most ordinary tasks become difficult to perform (driving a car, cutting the grass, and walking down the street). These ordinary tasks such as cutting the grass must be taken over by someone else. The burden of these service tasks in service to the disabled person is added to ``another person's'' that is added to the usual things like house maintenance, finance, etc. For the person with MD, the inability to do these normal things can easily promote a lack of confidence about being able to function in the real world. When the physical challenges are coupled with the technological barriers presented by personal computers, networks, and online resources, it is easy to see how one could get discouraged. 3.1. Physical barriers Mitchell was sighted until he was 70 years old. He is now 82. After Mitchell retired he started to explore the field of art and he tried to gain skills and a feeling of achievement in the use of materials and concepts in art. It was in the midst of exploring watercolors that the wet kind of MD took over and lowered his sight to 20/400 or 1/20 of the usual 20/20. Mitchell started developing his OLE immediately after he noticed a problem with his vision. Before he could begin to reconstruct his way of life, he had to overcome numerous physical barriers and problems. With his low vision, Mitchell could not even dial a number on the telephone. He could not cut the grass or drive a car. He tried Braille but it slowed him down too much. His first experience with people outside his home was at the Blind Center
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(now called the Lighthouse). They taught him how to make a bed and walk with a white cane. But Mitchell wanted to go beyond the white cane. This left him with a dilemma. He needed to rebuild confidence in his physical abilities at the same time he had to overcome the limits to his ability to learn and grow intellectually. Before these higher levels could be achieved, he faced psychological problems that could have easily left him in despair. The Blind Center did get him started on the road to success by helping him with keyboarding skills. The Blind Center also provided transportation and exposure to younger persons that were completely blind. Mitchell found out early that those that were completely blind were the true ``noncomplainers'' and helped him realize that he should be thankful for his partial sight. 3.2. Psychological/social barriers The psychological and social barriers he faced had the effect of making one feel powerless or impotent. He wanted to achieve at higher intellectual levels and continue to grow mentally. This was to be his most difficult challenge, because in the beginning his confidence was shot. He had to gain confidence in himself and his ability to acquire skills from this new perspective of low vision. He relearned how to dial a telephone, he learned how to walk on the street with a white cane, and he learned how to make a bed. Gradually, his confidence grew and he knew he was ready to grow intellectually as well. A major task in this category was re-establishing relationships with that people that Mitchell had worked with before his loss of sight. The first barrier was dealing with his own physical limitations and not with people. Now, he had to rebuild his people network to accommodate his new online environment. Currently, Mitchell regularly communicates through e-mail with his favorite associates and authors that he continually challenges to use their influence to help build more effective support for the blind (Negroponte, 1995). 3.3. Intellectual barriers The intellectual barriers posed the biggest threat to Mitchell. He did not want to lose his thirst for knowledge that he had developed throughout his career in higher education as a professor and administrator. Intellectual challenges were his way of life. In one sense, the barriers posed just another intellectual problem for him to solve, albeit a really big one. The first thing that struck him after initial experiences with the state-operated system of support for visually challenged people is that it focuses on bringing the individual to a level where he or she can function in the immediate environment (making a bed, walking with a cane, and reading in Braille). These are things that stagnate people and are not the things that humans need to grow and maintain a vibrant lifestyle. This is not uncharacteristic of many other forms of opportunity offered by any organization in the industrial age as stated by Isaac Asimov in an article in MIS Week. This is a quote from one of Asimov's speeches: Instead of moving toward intellectually challenging work, humans moved toward service and industrial occupations that were repetitious and required little brainpower, essentially ``destroying your brain'' (Coursey, 1989, p. 44).
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When Mitchell started the journey to re-establish his world the way it was before he got MD, there was little thought given by the existing support system to bringing blind people back to the quality of life they had before losing their sight. This was a disservice that has since undergone major improvements. However, the support system was not this way back in the mid-eighties. Mitchell used the learning process as a strategy to regain what he lost through MD. He focused on the thing that makes humans tick. In the article in MIS Week, Isaac Asimov made it clear what the human brain was created to do. The year was 1989, about the time Mitchell started building his online learning system: What is it that our brain does better than any other brain, what is it adapted to do, and what is its pleasure? I say the brain is adapted to learn (Coursey, 1989, p. 44).
Asimov went on to say that interactive devices will emerge to fill time and take over the process of education and amusement by doing both at once. This was at a time when few interactive devices (i.e., Web browsers) were in existence. But Mitchell had a vision of the learning system that would bring him to equity with the state he had before he lost his sight. Mitchell's innate sense told him that learning was going to be his way out of the morass he found himself in. Asimov said: The brain has to be occupied and everyone who is in the business of occupying human brains is fulfilling an important medical and psychological function. They are keeping the human species from going entirely mad or entirely vicious (Coursey, 1989, p. 44).
The OLE that Mitchell designed did this. He got his brain occupied and he was able to rise above the dangers mentioned by Asimov. However, Mitchell went beyond just keeping his brain occupied. He made it into a game, an adventure, and in a major way, he made it fun. Of all the forms of life that have existed on earth as far as we know, the human has the greatest capacity for learning. And this process of learning has got be fun. It's what the brain was designed to do. And, yet, as we look around the world, it seems people don't want to learn. They don't like to go to school. They don't like to study (Coursey, 1989, p. 44).
The learning environment that Mitchell designed brought out his human traits to the fullest. Donald Mitchell has become a more tolerant person, less impatient, and has a new understanding of the things that are important to people. In addition, because of the online learning system, he has developed a new set of intellectual interests. He has used the World Wide Web as a vehicle for learning about science and other fields that an educated person should know about and continually explore. All of these newly developed capabilities did not come easy. There was a price, and it was paid in trying to overcome the technological barriers. 3.4. Technological barriers In the early stages of his low vision without any technological help, Mitchell had to shift from visual input to aural input. He could not read regular type in newspapers or journals or even large print in books. His vision deteriorated in a matter of weeks to the level of blindness. The loss of vision slows the quantity of input to the brain. To begin adapting to the reduction in vision, he took steps to maintain communication with his associates and friends. For him, the
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solution was in technology and that meant going online. The first thing he had to learn was keyboarding skills. He thought he could get those skills by going to the local community college and enrolling in a typing course. However, the local college staff told him that they could only help him if he was going to assume a job after the training. They considered his needs as ``recreational.'' He eventually got the training he needed at the Blind Center; they helped him learn keyboarding. His next barrier was finding the right software that would enable him to read written material on the computer screen. The initial search for magnifying software was difficult since the most popular personal computer was based on IBM hardware and Microsoft software. The Windows operating system had a screen magnification program, but it magnified only the text and not the graphics. In order to break through this barrier, Mitchell made several visits to the computer labs at Nova Southeastern University and became acquainted with the Macintosh. In the Macintosh computer, he found the magnification program that worked for him. It is called CloseView and it solved the problem of magnifying the entire interface, not just the text. CloseView1 is free with the Macintosh operating system: CloseView is a control panel that magnifies the image on the Mac's screen. Though it is primarily for users who have difficulty seeing what is on the screen, it can also be used for magnification of images in graphics or even a spreadsheet. http://www.people.cornell.edu/ pages/nls8/webpage/sysfldr/closview.html (August 25, 2000).
To this day, Mitchell uses the Mac and its CloseView software. He did not stop with just magnifying things on the screen. He wanted more. He was searching for technology that would enable him to function in the world outside of cyberspace. His explorations took him into speech recognition software. His latest adoption is ViaVoice (Graven, 1998). Mitchell tried just about everything he could find that was promoted as a solution to the problems of low vision. The technology ranged from various types of glasses to devices in the field of virtual reality. The complexity of the challenges posed by technology is best illustrated by a personal communication sent by Donald Mitchell to the co-author about LVES (low vision enhancement system). This system was developed at Johns Hopkins University and is based on virtual reality (1995). I am at the point of closure on LVES in early June. The LVES headset weighs about two pounds and certainly gives one the appearance of outer space as compared to what glasses might do. The most appealing thing to me about LVES is the fact that they can handle contrast and are not simple magnification tools as are so many devices. Also, they do emphasize that they can be used with computers. I have a CD for Chess but I have to magnify the board so much that I can't see the opposition moves when they are announced, and I can't see the whole board at once so it becomes a frustrating project.
Mitchell went to one of the demonstration sites and tried LVES, but he decided not to continue with the system. He said that the headgear gave him vertigo. He was told by the LVES staff members at the demonstration that this was not unusual. For other patients, LVES has been effective. The LVES has demonstrated success in research trials (Thierfelder, Lege, & Ulrich, 2000). However, it was not the right solution for Mitchell.
1
CloseView is manufactured by Apple Computer (Cupertino, CA).
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At times, the research and development efforts that Mitchell conducted got to be frustrating. He illustrated this by recalling the early talking watches. He said they were great for people like him to get the time through audio. However, the designers of these devices eventually decided to add on alarms and time on the hour, etc. So, they just about made the watch unusable by people with low vision, since they put in numerous side buttons to manage all of the bells and whistles. A visually challenged person could not just get the time by audio without getting mixed up with the things he or she did not need and could not even see. Mitchell has gone through similar problems in upgrading his Mac. He has had four Macs. Even now, in trying to get his higher performance Mac G4 to work with ViaVoice, he had to upgrade to Netscape Communicator 4.7. He was satisfied with Netscape 3.0, but in upgrading one component of his system, he found out that many other components had to move with it. Through this all, Mitchell never lost his courage. Even though his physical vision had failed him, the internal vision that he had gave him heart to overcome any of these barriers to achieving a high quality of life. For Mitchell, a high quality of life included intellectual stimulation and growth. 4. Developing the OLE As explained in the four barriers above, the digital computer played a key role in helping Mitchell continue to learn and grow within the constraints of his illness. In this section, the authors relate the steps Mitchell took in building his personalized OLE and the barriers he had to cross in doing it. The OLE included an extensive process of selecting the right hardware and software as well as harnessing an array of technologies such as personal computing tools, Webbased resources, network resources, audio tapes, speech recognition devices, and non-print support services including the sound feature of broadcast and cable television. In one sense, Dr. Mitchell set up his own research center in order to make decisions about what would work best in his online environment. The innovator must also be a researcher in order to move forward. At the time Mitchell began his online journey, there just were no any good tools or enough knowledge in the beginning of the Internet era to make everything work right the first time. The research and development that he conducted helped make improvements that gradually made the whole system work for him. The computer was not the only component of Mitchell's personalized learning system. Mitchell conducted research on additional resources that included audio tapes, broadcast radio and television programs, and personal contacts with experts in the field of both MD and technology in general. He worked hand-in-hand with the co-author of this article and gave him the label of 911. For others that launch their own OLE, making contact with a ``911 for technology'' is a good idea. Contact between Mitchell and his 911 were usually by e-mail and telephone, but face-to-face contact was frequent. The array of resources that Mitchell developed around his computer included Talking Books, the sound of CSPAN on cable television, Recordings for the Blind, National Public Radio, and other radio and television programs helped him keep in touch with the outside world through audio. He continued to explore the World Wide Web for information about treatments for his illness as well as developments in the area of appropriate technology. The Internet helped him maintain regular contact with researchers in the field as well as physicians that published material about vision problems and solutions. Mitchell has taken a deep interest in high definition
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television and continues to follow developments in this area. Some of the innovations and devices that have been filtered and evaluated through Mitchell's system include not only the LVES explained above, but also a host of magnifier programs that did not work very well. In addition, in Mitchell's research, he examined a host of voice synthesizers until he settled on ViaVoice. 5. New capabilities and future challenges Dr. Mitchell was the benefactor of his own system. It brought him a set of new capabilities that were facilitated by the OLE. These were developed because of his lack of sight and his struggle with the design of a system to help him continue to function as a professional. These new capabilities and interests have provided him with a keen sense of the future and what needs to be developed to make life online a better place for all users. The method used by Dr. Mitchell and described in this article could perhaps be useful in helping us cope with the evolving educational problems brought on by the impact of the Net Generation coming into the public schools. What will be required of teachers because of the capabilities that the new kids are acquiring? Faced with these many new challenges, will teachers be able to adapt? Will teachers be up to designing systems that facilitate their own learning? The world may be rapidly approaching a ``new'' disaster area that may well require the kinds of skills used by Donald Mitchell in building his personalized online learning system. The traditional system may not be able to cope. In Dr. Mitchell's own words, ``The more you concede to the traditional, the more you impede progress in the utilization of technology'' (personal communication with the co-author, May 24, 2000). The traditional system gave him a white cane and taught him how to make a bed. His OLE went beyond this to help him continue to learn and growth intellectually with little interruption in his involvement with the world around him. References Coursey, D. (1989). Asimov: future computers will make work fun. MIS Week, 44 (November 6). Graven, M. (1998). ViaVoice 98 Executive: IBM's next generation of speech recognition software improves on the first. PC Magazine (Online, June 30). Available at: http://www.zdnet.com/products/content/pcmf/0630/ 334554.html. Accessed August 25, 2000. Maslow, A. H. (1968). Toward a psychology of being. New York, NY: Van Nostrand. Negroponte, N. (1995). Being digital. New York, NY: Knopf. Thierfelder, S., Lege, B., & Ulrich, F. (2000). First clinical experience concerning the low-vision enhancement system (LVES): a new opto-electronic rehabilitation device (Online). Available at: http://www.dog.org/engl/ abstract97/V368.html. Accessed August 25, 2000.
Resources American Council of the Blind. (Online). Available at: http://www.acb.org/Resources/index.htm. Accessed August 24, 2000. Associated Services for the Blind Information Center. (Online). Available at: http://www.eticomm.net/~asb/. Accessed August 24, 2000. Watson, B., & McMillan, J. J. (1998). Macular degeneration: living positively with vision loss. Alameda, CA: Hunter House.
Moving beyond the white cane Building an online learning environment for the visually impaired professional Donald P. Mitchell, John A. Scigliano* School of Computer and Information Sciences, Nova Southeastern University, 6100 Griffin Road, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33314-4416, USA Received 1 August 2000; accepted 1 November 2000
Abstract This article is about the development of an online learning environment (OLE) for a retired, visually impaired professional named Donald Mitchell. He has macular degeneration (MD). Because of this he is legally blind. The article deals with his fight to overcome the barriers, threats, and challenges posed by the reduction of his visual capacities. The article is organized into four main areas of concern or barriers. The first is physical, the second is intellectual, the third is psychological, and the fourth is technological. The authors place special emphasis on the psychological, intellectual, and technological barriers. In addition, the authors relate the steps Mitchell took in building his personalized OLE that included a laborious process of selecting the right hardware and software as well as harnessing an array of technologies such as personal computing tools, Web-based resources, network resources, audio tapes, voice recognition software, and non-print support devices, including the audio features of broadcast and cable television. This development is especially relevant to this special issue of IHE since Dr. Mitchell's work was done in the early days of online learning beginning in the late eighties. D 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Macular degeneration; Low vision enhancement; Online environment; Visually impaired
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +1-954-262-2081; fax: +1-954-262-3915. E-mail address: [email protected] (J.A. Scigliano). 1096-7516/00/$ ± see front matter D 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved. PII: S 1 0 9 6 - 7 5 1 6 ( 0 0 ) 0 0 0 3 6 - 1
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1. Introduction Donald Mitchell, the co-author of this article, has macular degeneration (MD). He has had it for over 10 years. Because of this he is legally blind, and the purpose of this article is to present the system he developed to cope with it. Macular degeneration is the major cause of vision loss in persons over age 60, and the risk of developing it increases dramatically with aging. The macula is the point of central vision on the retina needed for reading, driving, identifying faces, watching TV, and most other routine activities. Macular degeneration damages the macula, resulting in a diminution or a complete loss of central vision. Peripheral vision may be retained but it is blurred and not adequate to allow for reading or clear vision. http:// discoveryfund.org/maculardegeneration.html (August 24, 2000).
The magnitude of the MD problem and the need to develop some means of coping with it was brought out clearly by the American Foundation for Macular Degeneration: According to a recent poll, Americans dread blindness more than any other disability. Recent studies indicate that by the year 2025, the population of people over the age 65 in the United States will be six times higher than in 1990. The reason Ð ``baby boomers'' are aging and overall life expectancy is increasing. Since many people diagnosed with macular degeneration are over age 55, the number of cases of macular degeneration in the US will increase significantly as baby boomers age. In January 1997, Dr. Carl Kupfer, the Director of the National Eye Institute, National Institutes of Health, stated publicly that macular degeneration will soon take on aspects of an epidemic. http://www.macular.org/ thedisease.html (August 24, 2000).
What better way to utilize online information technology than in helping deal with this significant problem? In this article, the authors present an approach to one professional's attempt to cope. Dr. Mitchell is a retired professor and administrator from Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, FL. He has been retired for over two decades. Throughout his working career he developed numerous educational programs and networks of associates that brought him national recognition. He maintained constant communication with his associates for the first half of his retirement, but when MD overtook him, he had to reconsider what his future would be. Mitchell decided that he was not going to be defeated by his vision loss, so he designed an online learning environment (OLE) that enabled him to organize the resources to keep him actively involved with his peers and on a steady path to learning. These resources were needed so that he could continue communicating and learning within the new physical limits imposed on him by his illness. This article is about his fight to overcome the barriers, threats, and challenges posed by the reduction of his visual capacities posed by MD. This is remarkable because Mitchell accomplished this at a time when online learning was just emerging, in the mid- to late eighties. Donald Mitchell chose to re-organize his life around a set of strategies based on the Internet and the World Wide Web. What Mitchell accomplished was to design his own OLE to not only cope with the MD problem of a drastic reduction in sight but to strike out building a set of new intellectual capabilities. The alternative was to accept only the
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119
``usual'' help provided by the many centers for the blind set up around the country to help the blind cope with life (learning Braille, making a bed, and walking with a white cane). Mitchell knew that these activities were not the solution to his vision problem; he wanted more, and this is the story of how he moved beyond the white cane. 2. Approach and premise The approach taken in the article is based on the premise that the threats and barriers users face in going online with various programs are the same types of threats and barriers that all innovators face. This is the plight of the change agent. It is a state of mind that must be present no matter what is being changed. All worthwhile change grows out of disaster areas, and that is what existed in the eighties when information technology did little in the way of helping the visually challenged. The approach in the following sections of this article follows an adaptation of Maslow's (1968) hierarchy of needs with a special emphasis on developing a system to handle the need for self-actualization. 3. Overcoming the barriers This section is organized into four main areas of concern or barriers. The first is physical, the second is intellectual, the third is psychological, and the fourth is technological. The authors place special emphasis on the psychological, intellectual, and technological barriers since these seem to be most the challenging. The psychological barrier has great potential to make one feel powerless since to a person with low vision, the most ordinary tasks become difficult to perform (driving a car, cutting the grass, and walking down the street). These ordinary tasks such as cutting the grass must be taken over by someone else. The burden of these service tasks in service to the disabled person is added to ``another person's'' that is added to the usual things like house maintenance, finance, etc. For the person with MD, the inability to do these normal things can easily promote a lack of confidence about being able to function in the real world. When the physical challenges are coupled with the technological barriers presented by personal computers, networks, and online resources, it is easy to see how one could get discouraged. 3.1. Physical barriers Mitchell was sighted until he was 70 years old. He is now 82. After Mitchell retired he started to explore the field of art and he tried to gain skills and a feeling of achievement in the use of materials and concepts in art. It was in the midst of exploring watercolors that the wet kind of MD took over and lowered his sight to 20/400 or 1/20 of the usual 20/20. Mitchell started developing his OLE immediately after he noticed a problem with his vision. Before he could begin to reconstruct his way of life, he had to overcome numerous physical barriers and problems. With his low vision, Mitchell could not even dial a number on the telephone. He could not cut the grass or drive a car. He tried Braille but it slowed him down too much. His first experience with people outside his home was at the Blind Center
120
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(now called the Lighthouse). They taught him how to make a bed and walk with a white cane. But Mitchell wanted to go beyond the white cane. This left him with a dilemma. He needed to rebuild confidence in his physical abilities at the same time he had to overcome the limits to his ability to learn and grow intellectually. Before these higher levels could be achieved, he faced psychological problems that could have easily left him in despair. The Blind Center did get him started on the road to success by helping him with keyboarding skills. The Blind Center also provided transportation and exposure to younger persons that were completely blind. Mitchell found out early that those that were completely blind were the true ``noncomplainers'' and helped him realize that he should be thankful for his partial sight. 3.2. Psychological/social barriers The psychological and social barriers he faced had the effect of making one feel powerless or impotent. He wanted to achieve at higher intellectual levels and continue to grow mentally. This was to be his most difficult challenge, because in the beginning his confidence was shot. He had to gain confidence in himself and his ability to acquire skills from this new perspective of low vision. He relearned how to dial a telephone, he learned how to walk on the street with a white cane, and he learned how to make a bed. Gradually, his confidence grew and he knew he was ready to grow intellectually as well. A major task in this category was re-establishing relationships with that people that Mitchell had worked with before his loss of sight. The first barrier was dealing with his own physical limitations and not with people. Now, he had to rebuild his people network to accommodate his new online environment. Currently, Mitchell regularly communicates through e-mail with his favorite associates and authors that he continually challenges to use their influence to help build more effective support for the blind (Negroponte, 1995). 3.3. Intellectual barriers The intellectual barriers posed the biggest threat to Mitchell. He did not want to lose his thirst for knowledge that he had developed throughout his career in higher education as a professor and administrator. Intellectual challenges were his way of life. In one sense, the barriers posed just another intellectual problem for him to solve, albeit a really big one. The first thing that struck him after initial experiences with the state-operated system of support for visually challenged people is that it focuses on bringing the individual to a level where he or she can function in the immediate environment (making a bed, walking with a cane, and reading in Braille). These are things that stagnate people and are not the things that humans need to grow and maintain a vibrant lifestyle. This is not uncharacteristic of many other forms of opportunity offered by any organization in the industrial age as stated by Isaac Asimov in an article in MIS Week. This is a quote from one of Asimov's speeches: Instead of moving toward intellectually challenging work, humans moved toward service and industrial occupations that were repetitious and required little brainpower, essentially ``destroying your brain'' (Coursey, 1989, p. 44).
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When Mitchell started the journey to re-establish his world the way it was before he got MD, there was little thought given by the existing support system to bringing blind people back to the quality of life they had before losing their sight. This was a disservice that has since undergone major improvements. However, the support system was not this way back in the mid-eighties. Mitchell used the learning process as a strategy to regain what he lost through MD. He focused on the thing that makes humans tick. In the article in MIS Week, Isaac Asimov made it clear what the human brain was created to do. The year was 1989, about the time Mitchell started building his online learning system: What is it that our brain does better than any other brain, what is it adapted to do, and what is its pleasure? I say the brain is adapted to learn (Coursey, 1989, p. 44).
Asimov went on to say that interactive devices will emerge to fill time and take over the process of education and amusement by doing both at once. This was at a time when few interactive devices (i.e., Web browsers) were in existence. But Mitchell had a vision of the learning system that would bring him to equity with the state he had before he lost his sight. Mitchell's innate sense told him that learning was going to be his way out of the morass he found himself in. Asimov said: The brain has to be occupied and everyone who is in the business of occupying human brains is fulfilling an important medical and psychological function. They are keeping the human species from going entirely mad or entirely vicious (Coursey, 1989, p. 44).
The OLE that Mitchell designed did this. He got his brain occupied and he was able to rise above the dangers mentioned by Asimov. However, Mitchell went beyond just keeping his brain occupied. He made it into a game, an adventure, and in a major way, he made it fun. Of all the forms of life that have existed on earth as far as we know, the human has the greatest capacity for learning. And this process of learning has got be fun. It's what the brain was designed to do. And, yet, as we look around the world, it seems people don't want to learn. They don't like to go to school. They don't like to study (Coursey, 1989, p. 44).
The learning environment that Mitchell designed brought out his human traits to the fullest. Donald Mitchell has become a more tolerant person, less impatient, and has a new understanding of the things that are important to people. In addition, because of the online learning system, he has developed a new set of intellectual interests. He has used the World Wide Web as a vehicle for learning about science and other fields that an educated person should know about and continually explore. All of these newly developed capabilities did not come easy. There was a price, and it was paid in trying to overcome the technological barriers. 3.4. Technological barriers In the early stages of his low vision without any technological help, Mitchell had to shift from visual input to aural input. He could not read regular type in newspapers or journals or even large print in books. His vision deteriorated in a matter of weeks to the level of blindness. The loss of vision slows the quantity of input to the brain. To begin adapting to the reduction in vision, he took steps to maintain communication with his associates and friends. For him, the
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solution was in technology and that meant going online. The first thing he had to learn was keyboarding skills. He thought he could get those skills by going to the local community college and enrolling in a typing course. However, the local college staff told him that they could only help him if he was going to assume a job after the training. They considered his needs as ``recreational.'' He eventually got the training he needed at the Blind Center; they helped him learn keyboarding. His next barrier was finding the right software that would enable him to read written material on the computer screen. The initial search for magnifying software was difficult since the most popular personal computer was based on IBM hardware and Microsoft software. The Windows operating system had a screen magnification program, but it magnified only the text and not the graphics. In order to break through this barrier, Mitchell made several visits to the computer labs at Nova Southeastern University and became acquainted with the Macintosh. In the Macintosh computer, he found the magnification program that worked for him. It is called CloseView and it solved the problem of magnifying the entire interface, not just the text. CloseView1 is free with the Macintosh operating system: CloseView is a control panel that magnifies the image on the Mac's screen. Though it is primarily for users who have difficulty seeing what is on the screen, it can also be used for magnification of images in graphics or even a spreadsheet. http://www.people.cornell.edu/ pages/nls8/webpage/sysfldr/closview.html (August 25, 2000).
To this day, Mitchell uses the Mac and its CloseView software. He did not stop with just magnifying things on the screen. He wanted more. He was searching for technology that would enable him to function in the world outside of cyberspace. His explorations took him into speech recognition software. His latest adoption is ViaVoice (Graven, 1998). Mitchell tried just about everything he could find that was promoted as a solution to the problems of low vision. The technology ranged from various types of glasses to devices in the field of virtual reality. The complexity of the challenges posed by technology is best illustrated by a personal communication sent by Donald Mitchell to the co-author about LVES (low vision enhancement system). This system was developed at Johns Hopkins University and is based on virtual reality (1995). I am at the point of closure on LVES in early June. The LVES headset weighs about two pounds and certainly gives one the appearance of outer space as compared to what glasses might do. The most appealing thing to me about LVES is the fact that they can handle contrast and are not simple magnification tools as are so many devices. Also, they do emphasize that they can be used with computers. I have a CD for Chess but I have to magnify the board so much that I can't see the opposition moves when they are announced, and I can't see the whole board at once so it becomes a frustrating project.
Mitchell went to one of the demonstration sites and tried LVES, but he decided not to continue with the system. He said that the headgear gave him vertigo. He was told by the LVES staff members at the demonstration that this was not unusual. For other patients, LVES has been effective. The LVES has demonstrated success in research trials (Thierfelder, Lege, & Ulrich, 2000). However, it was not the right solution for Mitchell.
1
CloseView is manufactured by Apple Computer (Cupertino, CA).
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At times, the research and development efforts that Mitchell conducted got to be frustrating. He illustrated this by recalling the early talking watches. He said they were great for people like him to get the time through audio. However, the designers of these devices eventually decided to add on alarms and time on the hour, etc. So, they just about made the watch unusable by people with low vision, since they put in numerous side buttons to manage all of the bells and whistles. A visually challenged person could not just get the time by audio without getting mixed up with the things he or she did not need and could not even see. Mitchell has gone through similar problems in upgrading his Mac. He has had four Macs. Even now, in trying to get his higher performance Mac G4 to work with ViaVoice, he had to upgrade to Netscape Communicator 4.7. He was satisfied with Netscape 3.0, but in upgrading one component of his system, he found out that many other components had to move with it. Through this all, Mitchell never lost his courage. Even though his physical vision had failed him, the internal vision that he had gave him heart to overcome any of these barriers to achieving a high quality of life. For Mitchell, a high quality of life included intellectual stimulation and growth. 4. Developing the OLE As explained in the four barriers above, the digital computer played a key role in helping Mitchell continue to learn and grow within the constraints of his illness. In this section, the authors relate the steps Mitchell took in building his personalized OLE and the barriers he had to cross in doing it. The OLE included an extensive process of selecting the right hardware and software as well as harnessing an array of technologies such as personal computing tools, Webbased resources, network resources, audio tapes, speech recognition devices, and non-print support services including the sound feature of broadcast and cable television. In one sense, Dr. Mitchell set up his own research center in order to make decisions about what would work best in his online environment. The innovator must also be a researcher in order to move forward. At the time Mitchell began his online journey, there just were no any good tools or enough knowledge in the beginning of the Internet era to make everything work right the first time. The research and development that he conducted helped make improvements that gradually made the whole system work for him. The computer was not the only component of Mitchell's personalized learning system. Mitchell conducted research on additional resources that included audio tapes, broadcast radio and television programs, and personal contacts with experts in the field of both MD and technology in general. He worked hand-in-hand with the co-author of this article and gave him the label of 911. For others that launch their own OLE, making contact with a ``911 for technology'' is a good idea. Contact between Mitchell and his 911 were usually by e-mail and telephone, but face-to-face contact was frequent. The array of resources that Mitchell developed around his computer included Talking Books, the sound of CSPAN on cable television, Recordings for the Blind, National Public Radio, and other radio and television programs helped him keep in touch with the outside world through audio. He continued to explore the World Wide Web for information about treatments for his illness as well as developments in the area of appropriate technology. The Internet helped him maintain regular contact with researchers in the field as well as physicians that published material about vision problems and solutions. Mitchell has taken a deep interest in high definition
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television and continues to follow developments in this area. Some of the innovations and devices that have been filtered and evaluated through Mitchell's system include not only the LVES explained above, but also a host of magnifier programs that did not work very well. In addition, in Mitchell's research, he examined a host of voice synthesizers until he settled on ViaVoice. 5. New capabilities and future challenges Dr. Mitchell was the benefactor of his own system. It brought him a set of new capabilities that were facilitated by the OLE. These were developed because of his lack of sight and his struggle with the design of a system to help him continue to function as a professional. These new capabilities and interests have provided him with a keen sense of the future and what needs to be developed to make life online a better place for all users. The method used by Dr. Mitchell and described in this article could perhaps be useful in helping us cope with the evolving educational problems brought on by the impact of the Net Generation coming into the public schools. What will be required of teachers because of the capabilities that the new kids are acquiring? Faced with these many new challenges, will teachers be able to adapt? Will teachers be up to designing systems that facilitate their own learning? The world may be rapidly approaching a ``new'' disaster area that may well require the kinds of skills used by Donald Mitchell in building his personalized online learning system. The traditional system may not be able to cope. In Dr. Mitchell's own words, ``The more you concede to the traditional, the more you impede progress in the utilization of technology'' (personal communication with the co-author, May 24, 2000). The traditional system gave him a white cane and taught him how to make a bed. His OLE went beyond this to help him continue to learn and growth intellectually with little interruption in his involvement with the world around him. References Coursey, D. (1989). Asimov: future computers will make work fun. MIS Week, 44 (November 6). Graven, M. (1998). ViaVoice 98 Executive: IBM's next generation of speech recognition software improves on the first. PC Magazine (Online, June 30). Available at: http://www.zdnet.com/products/content/pcmf/0630/ 334554.html. Accessed August 25, 2000. Maslow, A. H. (1968). Toward a psychology of being. New York, NY: Van Nostrand. Negroponte, N. (1995). Being digital. New York, NY: Knopf. Thierfelder, S., Lege, B., & Ulrich, F. (2000). First clinical experience concerning the low-vision enhancement system (LVES): a new opto-electronic rehabilitation device (Online). Available at: http://www.dog.org/engl/ abstract97/V368.html. Accessed August 25, 2000.
Resources American Council of the Blind. (Online). Available at: http://www.acb.org/Resources/index.htm. Accessed August 24, 2000. Associated Services for the Blind Information Center. (Online). Available at: http://www.eticomm.net/~asb/. Accessed August 24, 2000. Watson, B., & McMillan, J. J. (1998). Macular degeneration: living positively with vision loss. Alameda, CA: Hunter House.