"OLPC" - MIT's $100 Laptops

"OLPC" (or "One Laptop Per Child") relates to what we talked about in section today in that it addresses the possibility of making the Internet accessible to all kids, regardless of their education, geographic location, or economic status. Check out the following link for more information: http://laptop.media.mit.edu/

What to do for Project Two...?

While thinking about my lesson plan/prototype for a schizophrenic learner, I keep reminding myself that my former student, Gavin (see entry from 3/1/06), learned best when I worked with him one-on-one after class. As soon as the classroom environment changed from chaotic (full of 20 fifteen year-olds) to calm, Gavin suddenly became attentive and eager to learn. In other words, it was imperative that all outside distraction disappeared before he was capable of concentrating on me or the subject matter. This makes perfect sense since back in 1997, the first neuropsychological assessment of adolescent schizophrenics revealed that the greatest impairment pertained to their "focused and divided attention as well as working memory" (source: http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/reprint/154/11/1613).

While it's very difficult to find research related to schizophrenia and foreign language acquisition, I can't say that I'm surprised. In fact, I think I remember the school administration strongly discouraging Gavin's parents from enrolling him in my Spanish class. His mother argued, however, that he was smart enough to handle it.

I often equate learning Spanish to solving a math problem. Both require the process of translation. Pieces have to be broken apart and rearranged before they can make any sense. Take the passage above, for example. Without an image of Curious George, a beginning language learner might have a hard time deciphering the passage in Spanish. By identifying proper nouns like "Jorge" and "Africa" as well as cognates like "curioso", the image helps the learner to figure out what "monito" means through a process of elimination. The image is helpful to the average learner but might go so far as to reduce stress for the schizophrenic learner.

UDL & Images

In class yesterday, I realized how important images are to students with learning disabilities. While this seems like a relatively simple concept, I hadn't really given much thought to it before! Not only does it makes me realize that I should have incorporated more images into my first project, but I hadn't considered how images are just as powerful as text (if not more so) at conveying a message to learners. Since schizophrenic students often struggle with paying attention and staying on task, reading long passages in a textbook is one of the hardest things for them to do. This is where images would come in hand. While I briefly mention a schizophrenic artist in my first project, I thought I would show an example of his art in this entry (see above).

David Marsh is a schizophrenic artist who credits his artistic talent and creativity to his disease. In fact, studies have shown that people with mental illnesses (like schizophrenia) have a creative advantage because of their ability to continually absorb outside stimuli. Unlike people who do not have a mental illness, schizophrenics do not possess "latent inhibition". In other words, they are incapable of censoring the information they receive. In terms of art, they then have the power to translate this uncensored and raw information from their environment into their art.

(source: http://www.healthyplace.com/Communities/Thought_Disorders/schizo/news/creativity_mental_illness.asp