Aphasic Communities of Learning on the Web

Abstract

This article presents the case study of a cooperative Web-learning environment-SOCRATESto foster barrier-free learning on the Web. While the growth of the Internet was exponential in the last years, still many communities don't benefit from Web-learning technology due to improper tools and constricted communication processes. These problems increase when developing applications for communities of people with special needs. SOCRATES supports a community of learning comprising patients suffering from aphasia (aphasics), therapists, researchers on linguistics, and system developers. Aphasics can improve their conversation skills with a specially designed talk/chat tool, while therapists and linguistic researchers can monitor conversations from automatically generated transcripts. Aphasics in remote areas using SOCRATES are now able to communicate freely among each other without being afraid that they might get lost in rapid conversation in a distributed privacy protecting virtual community.

Increasing Access to Higher Education Through E-Learning

“…1) E-Learning in higher education has reached many unique populations. Students who have accessed higher education through E-Learning include (a) students with disabilities [2][3][4][5][6][7], (b) rural students who find it difficult to relocate [8][9][10][11][12][13], (c) parents with children [6,14,15], (d) military personnel [16][17][18], (e) students working full time [6,19], and (f) urban students who find it easier to time-shift rather than space-shift [20,21]. Renes and Strange [22] pointed out, "The National Center for Education Statistics reported in the 2006-07 academic year, 66 percent of the 4,160 2-year and 4-year Title IV degree-granting postsecondary institutions in the nation offered college-level distance education courses" (p. 204).…”

Using Technology to Enhance Higher Education

“…The students taking advantage of educational opportunities made available by new technology include (a) students with physical disabilities (Crow 2008;McNab 2005;Musick 2001;Spaniol et al 2006), (b) students in rural areas who would find it difficult to relocate (Chaney et al 2008;Majeski and Stover 2007;Owens et al 2009;Ozdemir and Abrevaya 2007), (c) parents with children who find it difficult to leave the home (Carnevale 2002;Ke and Xie 2009), (d) military personnel serving their country in remote locations (McMurry 2007), (e) students working full time who have no flexibility in their schedule (Talbert 2009), and (f) urban students who find it easier to time-shift rather than space-shift (Whitaker 2007;Zhao et al 2009). …”

Consumer language, patient language, and thesauri: a review of the literature

“…Decades of informatics work on clinical data standards makes clear that symptoms, like other expressions of the lived patient experience, are both ''unconscious and procedural…hard to formalize and communicate to others'' [109]. Forsythe commented on the same problem for representing clinical information: ''the tacit, taken-for-granted, non-standardized information so essential to comprehension in particular situations'' [110].…”