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?