You Need
October Odyssey
Martin Littler sets off to the States for October
October 2000
Sunday 1st October I fly to San Diego. I really like America and Americans. This is a holiday with my wife Dorothy, but I am driving up from Mayer-Johnson Inc. in San Diego via IntelliTools Inc. north of San Francisco to Seattle and then Vancouver where Bytes of Learning (publishers of UltraKey) have a presence. Then on by ferry (there is no road) to Sechelt on Canada's Sunshine Coast. Sam Weller is Town Treasurer of Sechelt and was best man at our wedding 30 years ago. This will be a drive of 1500 miles through three the three states with a Pacific shoreline and three countries (if I take the tram from San Diego to Tijuana).
From Vancouver I fly on alone to Minneapolis (home of the awesome
AbleNet Inc.) to meet up with
Trish Hornsey and
Roger Bates for our annual week at the
Closing the Gap
conference. I hope also to get up to Duluth on the northern reaches of
Minnesota to meet Secret Seven Inc. suppliers of the Little Mouse and
the Tiny Mouse featured in our new
October 2000 catalogue.
Assistive
technology, access devices, special needs resources. Whatever they are called,
almost all of these resources originate in America, Canada, Great Britain,
Australia or Sweden. In each case it is important that the best of each
countries development quickly finds a place across the whole market. In the end
development costs have to be shared between the people who buy the product. The
more low-incidence the disability the more global the market needs to be. This
is why we all spend so much time overseas harvesting the best of the world's
crop of assistive gizmos and early learning software and then showing them what
we have. Early learning does not always mean young learners. Our new catalogue
now has an older learners' section with
more grown-up looking resources which meet many of the same learning needs.
The market for special needs resources does not spread much further afield than the countries where resources are developed. New Zealand, Finland and Norway punch well above their weight. (It is now a tradition for hundreds of Norwegians to meet up each year at BETT). Sales of these products in Japan are also growing. Elsewhere take-up of what is available is low. And this includes rich countries like France and Germany. Really useful access products like Penny & Giles Rollers don't have anything like the use south of Stockholm or east of Essex.
Of course many countries just cannot afford the current range of resources - but wider markets can make things more affordable. We need to spread the word world-wide.
We have started. Inclusive Technology were major sponsors of ISEC 2000 - the International Special Needs Congress which meets every five years. Among other things we have provided the Conference Web site which will burgeon over the coming months as we steadily add the eight hundred ISEC conference papers.
This year Princess Anne opened the Congress. There were over a thousand delegates from ninety-eight countries. This is a good starting point to begin to tell the world just what is now available to help learners with special needs.
Back in Britain there are still thousands of learners whose teachers want to know what is available to meet their special needs. Ever since I started in the world of computers and special needs I have wanted to get the experts together to set down and share their expertise in an accessible form.
We made it! The two ACE Centres, The Advisory Unit, Cenmac, The CALL Centre, the Down's Syndrome Association, The Royal National Institute for the Blind and Manchester Metropolitan University have pooled their knowledge and expertise. Our friend at Cynnal will make this more inclusive still when these materials are published in the Welsh language. This is now distilled into twelve distance learning units (570 pages in total) and edited by Trish Hornsey and Simon Melhuish. These organisations have formed a training consortium, ICTS, led by Inclusive Technology. This is part of and national training programme funded by our national lottery to train all 450,000 UK teachers in the effective use of computers in their classrooms. ICTS specialises in working with teachers working with learners who have Severe and Complex special educational needs. If you want to know more try the ICTS training web site: www.inclusive.net.
In two days now I'll be on that plane to America. A land where exhibitions are "conferences"; exhibition stands are "booths"; companies like us work in the "exhibit hall or "vendor hall" and give "vendor preesentations". This is a good idea that I have copied. Have a look at SpecialneedsIT and the How-IT-Works seminar programme for the best of British vendor presentations in London on 5/6/7 November 2000. I'll be certain to be back for that.
Martin Littler