Tagged: education

International Handbook of Psychology in Education out in Paperback


International Handbook of Psychology in Education (cover)
International Handbook of Psychology in Education

I’m pleased to say that the International Handbook of Psychology in Education is just about to be released in paperback, halving it’s original cost (in the UK from £99.99 to £50.00).

This collection includes a chapter that I co-authored with Professor Charles Crook, Director of the Learning Sciences Research Institute at the University of Nottingham. Our chapter “the Networked Student: a socio-cultural perspective” reviews the distinct phases of educational technology in students lives and wider educational research from a socio-cultural perspective.

 

International Handbook of Psychology in Education: Synopsis

“The International Handbook of Psychology in Education” provides researchers, practitioners and advisers working in the fields of psychology and education with an overview of cutting-edge research across a broad spectrum of work within the domain of psychology of education. The chapters in the handbook are authored by internationally recognised researchers, from across Europe, North America and the Pacific Rim. As well as covering the latest thinking within established areas of enquiry, the handbook includes chapters on recently emerging, yet important, topics within the field and explicitly considers the inter-relationship between theory and practice. A strong unifying theme is the volume’s emphasis on processes of teaching and learning. The work discussed in the handbook focuses on typically developing school-age children, although issues relating to specific learning difficulties are also addressed.

You can discover more about the book as a whole via Emerald or Amazon. The paperback is available for Pre-Order from Emerald and will be available via other major retailers soon.

With a significantly lower price, I’m hoping new audiences will now have access to this work. The publishers have also indicated that they are happy to hear from instructors who are interested in receiving an inspection copy for possible use on a course. If you think this is relevant to you, contact books@emeraldinsight.com. If you want to recommend the book for your library, or request my chapter for inter-library loan, the two relevant references are below.

  • Littleton, C., Wood, & J., Kleine Staarman (Eds.) International Handbook of Psychology in Education. Emerald: UK.
  • Crook, C. & Lewthwaite, S. (2010) The Networked Student, a socio-cultural perspective. IN K. Littleton, C., Wood, & J., Kleine Staarman (Eds.) International Handbook of Psychology in Education. Emerald: UK.

Free access to Education, Tech and Disability research: Fill your boots!


The letters OMG are carved into a dense encyclopedia
Detail photo by See-Ming Lee of book sculpture "OMG LOL". From Eyebeam Art & Technology Center Open Studios.

Last year, academic publisher Routledge offered 30 days of free access to their education journals.  This year, they’re offering similar access with a couple of additional constraints. Firstly, to access the journals you have to register on their site, secondly, articles are only available for 14 days this time around. On the plus side – you can register and begin the 14 days  of access at any point up until the 30th June 2012.

Dedicated readers may remember that last year I highlighted a set of papers that I felt would be of interest to education, technology and disability professionals outside of academia. Normally, the cost of accessing closed, subscription journal articles is far too much for people to bear, with articles usually retailing at around £23 ($36). So my advice? Sign up and take two weeks to fill your boots!

To recap: some great (mind expanding) papers for people working in the area of disability, technology, user experience, accessibility, technology enhanced learning and human computer interaction will be available. I still heartily recommend these papers and special issues, I’ve blogged about each as follows:

  1. Aversive Disablism: subtle prejudice towards disabled people by Mark Deal
  2. Identity and Disability by Nick Watson
  3. The use and non-use of technology assistive technologies by Soderstrom and Ytterhus
  4. Disability, Technology and e-Learning edited by Jane Seale… Note: Jane is currently editing a second special collection of papers about digital inclusion and learning for Research in Learning Technology with William Dutton of the Oxford Internet Institute. Peer-review is underway. As Research in Learning Technology is now an open access journal this will be freely available when it is published.
  5. Hierarchies of Impairment by Mark Deal
  6. The anti-social model of disability by Dewsberry et al
  7. Three papers on disability and the internet including: Disability Discourses for Online Identities by Bowker and Tuffin, Holding the line online: exploring wired relationships for people with disabilities by Seymour and Lupton and Being there by Anderberg and Jonsson.
  8. Digital agility and disabled learners by Seale, Draffan and Wald
  9. Critical approaches to accessibility for technology enhanced learning by me, Sarah Lewthwaite.

Next week I’ll be recommending ALL NEW additional research papers that Routledge have published in the field since last year’s Open Access festival. If you have any additional papers you’d like to list, or any other comments, please post, I’d love to hear from you.

Blogging Against Disablism Day!


Blogging Against Disablism Day 2012
Blogging Against Disablism Day 2012

Yesterday was May 1st, a day notable for many things – but foremost in my mind for the 7th Annual Blogging Against Disablism Day. If you’d like to read my contribution to this excellent online festival, curated by the Goldfish, read my inaugural post to the King’s Learning Institutes new Technology Enhanced Learning Blog. This is a new blog at King’s College London that sits within the KLI’s Higher Education Research Network.

Regular readers will know I’ve taken part in Blogging Against Disablism Day for the last two years, blogging about Aversive Disablism and Web Design and the closure of the Disabled Student’s BureauSKILL. This year my writing has taken a more academic turn, responding to new contributions to Critical Disability Studies emerging from Science and Technology Studies.

To catch up on all the contributions to this great online festival, I urge you to visit the Blogging Against Disablism Day 2012 webpages . There you will find a huge (and still growing) number of thought-provoking articles from across the world. As Goldfish states:

 This is the day where all around the world, disabled and non-disabled people blog about their experiences, observations and thoughts about disability discrimination. In this way, we hope to raise awareness of inequality, promote equality and celebrate the progress we’ve made.

Once again, Goldfish has achieved a huge event – managing a great success. Three Cheers for Diary of A Goldfish!!

Paper Accepted for #W4A12 Conference


Earlier this week I returned from San Diego to receive news that my joint paper “A Challenge to Web Accessibility Metrics and Guidelines: Putting People and Processes First” has been peer-reviewed and accepted for the 9th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility – 16/17th April 2012 – Lyon, France. This year’s conference theme is “Web of Data”. The conference is notably co-located with WWW2012. Web Accessibility people may also be interested to know that select papers from this years’ conference will be published in a special issue of  Universal Access in the Information Society.

Our communications paper was written in collaboration. Martyn Cooper (Open University) was lead author, working alongside Brian Kelly (Bath University) David Sloan (Dundee University) and myself. Those of you with sharp memories will know that Brian, David and I worked together on a previous W4A paper, Developing Countries; Developing Experiences: Approaches to Accessibility for the Real World which won the John Slatin award for best communications paper back in 2010.  Perhaps interestingly, I still haven’t actually met Brian (or Martyn), but I’m sure that day will come!

“A Challenge to Web Accessibility Metrics and Guidelines: Putting People and Processes First” will be publicly available next month. The paper itself argues that web accessibility is not an intrinsic characteristic of a digital resource by highlighting political, social and contextual factors that shape user experiences in combination with technical aspects.  As a result, it can be inappropriate to develop legislation or focus on metric that deal with the properties of a resource regardless of context.  From this point we describe the value of standards such as BS 8878 and use a case study illustrating how learning analytics could provide data to support the improvement of inclusive learning resources, developing a broader perspective of the resource in-use.

Brian Kelly will deliver a post on the UK Web Focus blog which will discuss these ideas, and the challenges which are presented to legislators,  policy makers and practitioners who develop practices based on a view that web accessibility is an intrinsic property of a resource at a later date. Watch that space!

In Memoriam: On the closure of SKILL, the UKs National Bureau for Students with Disabilities


I’ve written this post as part of Blogging Against Disablism Day, an annual event hosted by the Goldfish. Be sure to check out other contributions via her excellent blog.  This post is about the closure of Skill, the National Bureau for Students with Disabilities in the UK, the only pan-disability organisation dedicated to promoting equality for disabled people in education, training and employment.  Approximately two weeks ago the following message was posted to their website:

It is with great sadness that Skill: National Bureau for Students with Disabilities announces that it has ceased operating. Following a period of financial difficulty, Skill’s Board of Trustees has decided that it is no longer viable to keep the charity open. The Chair of Skills’ Board of Trustees, Peter Little OBE said “This is sad day for all of us. We had recently appointed an outstanding new Chief Executive and agreed a clear strategy to reduce our costs and turn around our finances, but in the end time was against us” […] It is hoped that others may step in to fill the gap this has left in the support available.

Blogging Against Disablism Day, May 1st 2011
Blogging Against Disablism Day, May 1st 2011

Does this constitute a suitable topic for Blogging Against Disablism? Well, read on. Unfortunately, I believe this loss will result in a kind of structural disablism rising unchecked.  In the first place, I had hoped that this closure would elicit some coverage in national Education media, but it appears, to me at least, that current news frenzy dedicated to rises in tuition fees and wider issues of university funding have foreclosed on any coverage of this significant loss to the sector as a whole, and disabled students in particular. And this is a significant loss.

I was not aware of the financial difficulties facing Skill, and I have had few dealings with them directly. In these dealings, however, I have had a privileged view into some of the work they undertook – work that is extremely important – but receives little publicity.  In my PhD thesis I identify Skill’s role consulting on the redefinition of UCAS and HESA’s much disputed disability codes – the cornerstone of the self assessment process that all students face when applying to Higher Education Institutions. In this consultation, they represented disabled students views, in a way no one else, seemingly, can.  But this is by no means the most important work they’ve done.  A recent response to government consultation, an evidence submission on The future funding for Higher Education is more typical of their output and their website  continues to host a myriad of important documents for students and educators.

It is the loss of their expert advisors and staff that is the most worrying development, however, especially within a climate of cuts that are disproportionately hitting disabled people and students across the country.  It is not simply that disabled students are members of both these groups. As the number of disabled students in higher education has grown under the auspices of equality legislation, a serious and unanticipated threat to disabled students’ participation has manifested in the administrative incompetence of the Student Loans Company.

On the 5th of February 2010, the BBC reported that:

Almost 12,500 disabled students in England are still waiting for grants to pay for specialist equipment, figures from the Student Loans Company show.

Disabled students wait for specialist equipment grants (BBC)

Since then, the SLCs failure to process 209,000 student’s grants and loans in autumn 2010, left half of all applicants waiting weeks, and in some cases, months for financial assistance.  This had a direct and disproportionate impact on disabled students, threatening study and subsistence. As the Guardian reports:

At one point last year [2010], 87% of the 4 million calls to the SLC were going unanswered. Disabled students were disproportionately affected, with three-quarters of the 17,000 disabled students who applied for loans failing to receive them three months into the start of term. (Guardian).

Horrifyingly, with a view to the this academic year (beginning September 2011), the same Guardian article reports that the Student Loans Company Faces Ongoing Risk.  The authors note that in 2010 the Student Loans Companry was only responsible for processing the applications of new students. From this year the SLC will be responsible for applications for grants and loans from all students in England. The system was previously administered by local authorities.

In this context, the loss of any disability advocacy seems perilous.  Who will step in to fill the gap?

***update*** As of the 6th July 2011 the Disability Alliance has adopted Skill’s critical services for Disabled Students. Their Skill web space is under construction

Thoughts and comments are very welcome, as always.

#5 ‘Hierarchies of Impairment’ by Mark Deal


DEAL, M. (2003) Disabled people’s attitudes toward other impairment groups: a hierarchy of impairments. Disability & Society, 18, 7, 13.

Disability and Society
Disability and Society

This is the second paper I’ve nominated from the pen of Mark Deal, and it’s another cracker. In this paper Deal discusses Hierarchies of Impairment. Once again, this term is essential to building an analytic vocabulary of disability for lay people, academics and techies alike. Hierarchies of Impairment have been researched since the 1970s, however, where previous work has explored how different impairments receive different status in society (and, as a result, with regard to technology, different resources and research attention) Deal extends this analysis to incorporate the attitudes of disabled people themselves. Deal’s research has powerful applied implications – particularly for those of us seeking to create inclusive environments. It identifies how we might desconstruct mainstream notions of ‘disability’ to identify those most marginalised within society. It also highlights how disablism (and aversive disablism) can function between disabled groups, allowing an analysis of representation. For those of us in technical disciplines, Deal’s thesis also allows us to evaluate the ways in which hierarchies of impairment are re-orientated by new contexts (for example, the internet) and different cultures.

A forthcoming publication co-authored with Henny Swan pushes this envelope with respect to Web Standards and the Majority World. Watch this space.

A final word: Hierarchies of Impairment is only available for free via Routledge this month to non-subscribers (April, 2011). If you’re accessing this page outside these dates, investigate Mark Deal’s excellent PhD thesis (2006) Attitudes of Disabled People Toward Other Disabled People and Impairment Groups which is available through the Enham website.

#4 ‘Disability, Technology and e-Learning’ edited by Jane Seale


Disability, Technology and e-Learning, a Special Issue of Research in Learning Technology, edited by Jane Seale.

Research in Learning Technology
Research in Learning Technology

So far this month, I’ve introduced three influential research papers from Disability and Society to highlight academic research that is free to all readers this month as part of Routledge’s Education Free For All event. Today, we divert to a new journal – Research in Learning Technology. [update: 5th Jan 2011] Research in Learning Technology is now Open Access and all back issues are available. Research in Learning Technology is the journal of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) previously entitled ALT-J, and more specifically, I’d like to highlight a special issue of the journal devoted to accessibility and edited by Jane Seale (Vol 14, Issue 1).

Nine papers and articles are included. As this issue is now five years old, many of the authors have substantially developed their positions as contexts and discourses in the field have developed. Nonetheless, many of these papers remain relevant to the field with implications for wider uses of technology, and I recommend this issue as a Who’s Who of significant authors in Accessibility in e-Learning. In the UK and elsewhere, Universities frequently represent key sites of cutting edge accessibility research. As such, this offers an excellent spring board into more recent accessibility literature across the education journals freely available this month – so flex your search operators!

Note: Many of these authors are on Twitter (for example, @briankelly @sloandr @lawrie @EADraffan @janeseale and others). Be sure to seek them out. If you are accessing this blog post after Routledge’s Open Access period finishes.  In addition,  many of the authors above have also published freely available research elsewhere. For example, Brian Kelly’s stellar back catalogue can be found at UK Web Focus.  Enjoy!

#3 ‘The use and non-use of assistive technologies’ by Soderstrom and Ytterhus


The third instalment in an academic free for all.

SÖDERSTRÖM, S. & YTTERHUS, B. (2010) The use and non-use of assistive technologies from the world of information and communication technology by visually impaired young people: a walk on the tightrope of peer inclusion. Disability & Society, 25, 3, 303-315.

Disability and Society
Disability and Society

This paper by Sylvia Soderstrom and Borgunn Ytterhus presents an essential insight into the importance of social context for the take up of technology, and the place of assistive technologies within this matrix. They remind us that users do not exist in a vaccuum, that, in affluent societies ‘how people use technology is symbolic of various values and identities’. This qualitative study is relatively small, but its results are referent to a swathe of complex socio-technical relations. In this sense it is powerfully illustrative. Where ICT is found to broadly symbolise competence, belonging and independence – the specific nature of specialised assistive technologies can symbolise restriction, difference and dependency. The implications of such findings have resonance across Human Factors, HCI and education, and emphasise the peer-to-peer nature of in/accessibility and its delivery.

#2 ‘Identity and Disability’ by Nick Watson


The second post in my solo April blog festival.

WATSON, N. (2002) Well, I know this is going to sound very strange to you, but I don’t see myself as a disabled person: identity and disability. Disability & Society, 17, 5, 18.

Disability and Society
Disability and Society

In March 2011 Aleks Krotoski, UK technology journalist and researcher wrote a piece about Disability and the Internet for the Observer. Although I recognised many of her arguments and observations, I disagreed with several key aspects of her analysis. In particular, her assertion that disabled people ‘pass’ as non-disabled online. Hers is a very blunt statement – and it is this concern, that disabled people who do not present themselves (or see themselves) as disabled online might in some way be complicit in maintaining, rather than challenging a disabling status quo that Watson’s research tears into.

Here Watson challenges a ‘passing’ interpretation of the actions of disabled people – presenting disabled people’s own accounts and identifying in the process an opposite interpretation, a political assertion of disability as normal. Watson’s research gives important nuance to this crucial area. For anyone writing, designing or researching disability and technology – this paper makes essential reading.

Note: My PhD explores this territory with respect to Social Networks. For an additional alternative reponse to Kotoski’s article, see how Ouch’s Disability Bitch goes into CyberSpasm

#1 ‘Aversive disablism: subtle prejudice toward disabled people’ by Mark Deal


To take advantage of Routledge’s free Education journal access over the course of April 2011, I’m presenting papers to highlight research with powerful applications in the fields of technology, disability and education. Comments and suggestions are, as always, welcome.

DEAL, M. (2007) Aversive disablism: subtle prejudice toward disabled people. Disability & Society, 22, 1, 14.

Disability and Society
Disability and Society

Aversive Disablism is a little-known social phenomenon that exerts huge influence in the lives of people with disability. Deal’s paper highlights the importance of understanding and challenging this form of subtle disablism to ensure (amongst other aims) that design communities responsible for our built (or digital) environment do not perpetuate a society that actively disables people with impairments. In this sense, aversive disablism represents an important concept, without which any vocabulary of disability or design is incomplete. I drew on this paper for my 2010 Blogging Against Disablism post and Web4All joint paper with Brian Kelly and David Sloan last year, applying Deal’s arguments to incorporate online environments. Deal writes lucidly for a broad audience, as such this paper represents essential reading for all.

Further reading:

  • Consider Goggin and Newell’s groundbreaking 2003 book Digital Disability. This identifies the outcomes of web developer’s disregard for disabled users requirements  as “doing production”, resulting in a disabling web that enacts disability. The authors arguments are developed for contemporary Web 2.0 discourse by Ellis and Kent (2010) in their book Disability and New Media. Ellis and Kent develop this notion of “doing production” with regard to Social Networking Sites – their insights into the structural production of disability in social networks, I feel, resonates strongly with Deal’s notion of aversive disablism.

Next post out on Monday 4th.