Landmark Wrap-Up

Earlier:
Intro
UDI Broken Down
Arrival
Day 1: Inspiration
Landmark by the Numbers

A half-day session Friday, having mostly to do with matters facing faculty and staff: curriculum design, professional training, and programs that Landmark has in place to reach out to students, faculty, and staff outside little Putney, Vermont.

I spent a good deal of time brainstorming about tech directions, especially after spending time on Friday with Steve Fadden taking a cook's tour of Landmarks' Usability Lab.

The lab is just big enough for one workstation and a desk with audio production equipment, but the gem inside is the eyetracker...

It's hard to make out in this shot, but you sit in front of a computer screen and put your chin on a little cup, see, and these big metal rings sit in front of your eyeballs while a digital imaging device helps the computer figure out what you're looking at.

It looks a little Clockwork Orange, or like that awful Schwarzenegger movie about clones, but what it does is really compelling.

Here are images, used with Steve's permission, of eyetracking data from two people reading a passage from War of the Worlds.

Here's the legend:

Red lines = Path of the eyes from point to point
Blue dots = Places where the eyes dwell for more than about 0.1 second; the larger the dot, the longer the stay.

The difference? The reader of the bottom passage is dyslexic. The larger dots mean about 1.5 seconds spent looking at the same spot on the page.

Is this not heart-rending? It certainly puts the standard sort of LD-accommodation for reading-intensive tests -- "time-and-a-half" -- in a new light, and it tells me that one of my priorities back home will be making Kurzweil, or screen reading of one variety or another, available for testing needs.

With people like Steve Fadden and Ben Mitchell on staff, Landmark is a national leader in pushing usability and accessibility of learning resources for people with learning and executive function disabilities. And the word from both of them is that it's a young, wide-open field with lots of roads leading to collaboration and grant money.

Even on a smaller scale, I think an eyetracker would be a fantastic thing to have around. Eye movement is like breath and heartrate -- we can control it consciously, but only up to a point -- a good deal of what goes on is involuntary or deeply conditioned. For instance, notice how neither of the two readers in the example above looks at the far left or right edges of each line? Turns out we use our near-peripheral vision for that.

Landmark's approach to learning is all about making the implicit explicit, about drilling self-understanding down to the finest grain from which you can squeeze out practical value. Would it be remarkable -- for LD and non-LD populations alike -- to understand what our eyeballs are up to when we read?

Landmark by the Numbers

• Number of students in 1987: About 50
• Number of students today: About 450
• Female students: About 25%
• Students with executive function (EF) challenges: About 75%
• Students at 4-year institutions who persist to graduation -- nationally: About 50%
• Students with LD/ADHD who persist -- nationally: About 40%
• Students who leave Landmark for 4-year institutions and persist to graduation: About 80%
• Annual tuition: About $50,000

Earlier:
Intro
UDI Broken Down
Arrival
Day 1: Inspiration

Landmark College Day 1: Inspiration by the Bucketful

Think of it as the Little College That Does It All. Teaching, Research, Advocacy, Outreach -- oh, and changing lives.

I've been to many academic gatherings in my time. This is the first one where I've gone all day and not gotten tired.

Earlier:
Intro
UDI Broken Down
Arrival

Heard from several Landmark people today -- Steve Fadden on Universal Design for Instruction (UDI), Mac Gander on the cognitive science underpinning the Landmark model, Karen Boutelle on coaching students with executive function challenges, John Nissen on Landmark students transferring to 4-year institutions.

The most memorable presentations were from Landmark students themselves, who spoke after lunch to the fifty or so academics and support staff who've come here -- chatty, outgoing people all, kibbitzing and slurping our way into the afternoon.

But when the students started talking, you could hear a pin drop. No one stirred.

"I Don't Know How to Teach Your Kind"

We heard stories from five students. All of them struggled through high school, squeaking by -- or sometimes coasting by -- after black-and-white diagnoses of dyslexia, ADHD, mood disorders, then hitting college and feeling the ground drop out beneath them. Flunking out, sometimes multiple times at multiple institutions, their paths lined with misdiagnoses and blank incomprehension on the part of people charged with their education.

"'I don't know how to teach your kind,'" one student reported hearing from an instructor.

"All my life," the same student told us, "all I'd heard was 'you're crazy' or 'you're retarded,' but then I came here and they just got me."

"I came into my own," she said.

Story after story. I have never felt such depth so quickly in people so young.

From Disability ... to Understanding

"From the time I was diagnosed in third grade," another student related, "all I'd seen were lists. This is what's wrong with you. This is what you can't do. This, and this, and this, and this."

I'll admit, when I heard about Landmark College, the uninvited image that first came into my head was of a bunch of little buildings staffed by people who knew how to handle kids with LD/ADHD. Remedial education in a resort-like setting.

The heart of it all, instead, is understanding. Understanding -- at a guts-and-nuts-and-bolts level -- how people learn with atypical brains. And it goes way beyond "oh, ADHD kids don't take well to x, so we'll give them y."

In essence, students take classes on their own brains, starting day one with the faculty passing along what they know from research. If that isn't self-empowerment, what is?

The Technology Trinity

Several people asked the students who spoke to us what the key to it all was. What one thing, they asked, made the biggest difference?

With all that I'd learned about the philosophy and science of Landmark, I was surprised when most of the five replied with two magic words: assistive technology.

Three programs in particular: Kurzweil 3000, a text-to-speech reader with interactive graphics. Dragon Naturally Speaking, a speech-to-text tool. Inspiration, a graphical idea-mapping program.

Here's a short demo of Kurzweil 3000, for instance:



None of this software is on the burning forefront of Web 2.0 or anything -- just solid, practical 'ware used all over the place for years. And for these kids, totally liberating.

"I can write a 10-page paper in an hour as long as I don't have to type it," said one student.

"If I had to type a 10-page paper," he explained, "I'd still be working on it, and I've been here for two years."

Cornerstone has all three programs in various states of use, but you can bet that when I get back, I'll be fired up to become their local evangelist.

More to follow...

Landmark College Visit: Arrival in Brattleboro

I think there's a divide of sorts at WashU. By and large, students tends to be insulated from the culture of St. Louis, faculty a little more or less so, depending on the individual, while staff tend to be more embedded.

Wherever we fall on the spectrum, there's nothing like an out-of-town trip to teach us how embedded we are. It's been about four years since I left St. Louis for someplace new, and without leaving the States, it would be hard to find a more arresting departure point than where I am now.

I seem to be in a place with an embarassment of riches -- quirky little locally owned shops, local organic produce, bicycles, and interesting people from far-flung places. St. Louis makes much ado about displaying half the diversity one sees in this little Vermont town.

Universal Design for Instruction ... Broken Down

Since starting at Cornerstone, I've been working closely with Dr. David Parker, Learning Specialist, on developing online tools for enriching student learning.

Dr. Parker re-introduced me to the idea of "UDI," or Universal Design for Instruction, which I'd heard about in passing before but never gotten into deeply.

There are links on the subject, but not many, and a few settled-on statements of principle, including this one from a team at the University of Connecticut.

The principles boil down things that are, at heart, matters of common sense. But like most common-sensical matters, they gain a lot when you put them into words.

What you see down below is yet another boiling down, no doubt a dreadful simplification but one I found easier to keep in my head.

The Principals for Universal Design for Instruction
Original language is (c) 2002 by the Center on Postsecondary Education and Disability, University of Connecticut

1. "Equitable Use"
   
   Try to make things useful and easy to get at for people with all kinds of different abilities.
   
   
2. "Flexibility in Use"
   
   Try to give people choices in how they use things so they can pick what's best for them.
   
   
3. "Simplicity"
   
   Speaks for itself.
   
   
4. "Perceptibility"
   
   Try to get your point across in ways that won't be undercut by what's going on around you. Think about noise levels and visual clutter.
   
   
5. "Tolerance for Error"
   
   Try to show people that when you're learning something, it's really okay to make mistakes or not get things right off the bat.
   
   
6. "Low Physical Effort"
   
   If there's any way around it, try to not make people move around or use their hands.
   
   
7. "Size and Space for Approach and Use"
   
   Try to keep it easy for people to reach and handle things no matter what they can or can't do using their bodies.
   
   
8. "A Community of Learners"
   
   Try to keep people working and learning together.
   
   
9. "Instructional Climate"
   
   Try to get people to feel at home and at ease while making sure they know you expect a lot out of them.

Maybe easier to understand, but probably no less difficult to get right!

I'm starting to understand that the real power of these principles is the "universal" part. They're things that make good teaching sense no matter who you're working with, making short work of any fences there might be between "people with disabilities" and whoever that phrase happens to not include.

Heading to Landmark College April 24-25

Later this month, I'll be going to little Putney, Vermont, spending two days visiting Landmark College, which describes itself this way:

While many colleges offer special programs for students with learning difficulties, Landmark College is one of the only accredited colleges in the United States designed exclusively for students with dyslexia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (AD/HD), or other specific learning disabilities.

Why does Landmark's approach succeed? Because we take a different path. We teach the skills and strategies necessary for success in college and the workforce. Here at Landmark, you learn how to learn, and this knowledge helps you become more confident and independent.

Students at Landmark get far more personal, directed assistance than at other colleges. Each student receives individualized attention from classroom instructors — in courses tailored to meet your educational needs.

We have courses for skills development, college credit, and an Associate Degree Program for individuals who have average — to superior — intellectual potential. Our experienced advisors meet frequently with you to review and guide your progress. All instructors are trained professional educators, not teaching assistants or peer tutors.

I'll be "liveblogging" about how Landmark uses technology to support students with LD/ADHD and to report back more generally about their approach, methods, successes, and challenges.