Children with disabilities face the problem of achieving what they are capable of conceiving. They have ideas, but things won't come out the way they want them to. Physical or language disabilities may restrict their ability to express themselves. Learning disabilities may prevent them from recalling information on demand. Assistive technology is helping to alleviate many of these frustrations. Students can download materials from Mosaic and manipulate them with assistive devises to produce products that more accurately reflect their ability. With advanced planning and direction, its multimedia, mouse-driven capabilities allow for usage by the print impaired and physically disabled student. Those with limitations can achieve success.
How often have you heard students ask, "Why do I have to learn this stuff?" No matter how patiently you try to explain to them how they will need to use it when they grow up, you can tell by the glazed look on their faces they don't believe you. Mosaic is a window into the adult world. Instead of blowing words at them, challenge the students to find sites providing information about the subjects they are studying and they can see how the "real world", the "adult world", is actually using that knowledge-- it does have applicability. Arithmetic is used at sites that display access statistics. Spelling and grammar are used on every page containing text. You don't have to look very long to find applications of almost any subject. Discuss who would be accessing the pages the students find and have them contact the sites and ask about the usage. It's much more fun for you to sit back and let your students tell you why they have to learn something than for you to waste time trying to convince them.
The "I won't do it" kids are a real challenge. I have observed less opposition when I simply ask them to see what they can find out about a topic than if I give them a specific reading assignment. Frequently they will surpass my objectives and stay on task longer. Mosaic is a marvelous repository of easily accessible knowledge for them to explore. Hypermedia enables the students to participate in "whim learning" (Duchastel, 1989); it is more a learning tool than a teaching tool in that the student controls the learning process of gathering information, restructuring it into their own semantic network and tuning it to meet specific tasks (Rumelhart and Norman, 1978). One criticism of today's education is that our increasing reliance on mass delivery systems is producing a generation of passive learners. When a student merely sits in front of a computer and does little more than hit the return key when prompted, or sits in a darkened room watching a video, or fills in blanks on worksheets, or gives teachers the responses they want to hear, he learns little about the joy of learning. Gone is the satisfaction of self-directed incidental learning. It is replaced too frequently with apathy and either passive or active aggression. Students, however, become their own pilots in cyberspace as they navigate through star repositories of knowledge.
Not only does the student increase his enjoyment of learning as he takes the controls of his cyberspace vehicle, studies confirm that usage of hypermedia improves the student's ability to make his own cognitive connections, handle large amounts of information (Yankelovich, 1988), use critical, relational thinking (Beeman 1988), participate in class discussions, and ability to read (Landow, 1989). Some are concerned that the "hypertext reader might flit about between the trees with greater ease and yet still not perceive the shape of wood any better than before" (Whalley, in Jonassen 1989 pg 65) and that Mosaic is feeding into the public's increasing dependence on sound bytes. Most of my students may never pore over volumes in search of information but I do expect of them an awareness that a world of knowledge is accessible to them. As a special education teacher, my goals are to help my students see that they can find information, and learning is not a drudgery. I want them to be filled with curiosity and empowered to pursue their own questionings. I rejoice over their newly developed wings and ability to flit anywhere, and am confident that their excursions will bring a greater appreciation of not only the wood but the forest to which they were previously blinded.