Interactions - January/February 2019

the world as the only ones that matter.

Rather than focusing on improving short-term test results, Brulé and Bailly [ 6] sought to understand how it changed the learning experience by analyzing students’ and teachers’ discourses and interactions before, during, and after the learning activity. Taking and bridging multiple perspectives was useful in understanding the type of knowledge each party yielded from the design intervention: For instance, when teachers listened to children’s accounts of using the prototype and the audio material they recorded, they realized it could be useful to understand how students construct meaning, which in turn influenced the researchers’ understanding.

Long-term evaluations, however, remain difficult. Many (HCI) prototypes are not robust enough to be tested over prolonged periods of time, and few devices so far have been steadily commercialized (e.g., braille notetakers). Workshop participants outlined that going forward would require developing a strong set of qualitative evaluation approaches, using different points of view and assessing technologies more holistically.

Generally, they advocated for closer collaboration with learning scientists, highlighting methods from this research field that proved useful, alongside multimodal analysis and design-based research with iterative evaluations. In either case, the aim is not generalization but rather to provide explanations for the phenomenon observed, espousing the complexity of learning contexts rather than reducing it.

CONCLUSION

Through the discussions and examples outlined here, we are advocating that truly supportive and inclusive learning environments should prioritize and foster social connections with others.

This is best achieved when people with VI are supported as creative agents and become teachers and leaders of inclusive technology design and research. We are also advocating that designers and practitioners should develop approaches that promote and evaluate understanding and augmenting peoples’ unique abilities and their ways of making sense of the world. Readers will notice overlap between accessible co-design to create inclusive education environments and accessible inclusive classrooms

T
exchange was the participants’ natural
tendency to move toward balancing
the asymmetry engendered by the
“accessible” artifacts.

What this example illustrates is that accessibility should not mean enforcing dominant metaphors and ways of relating to materials onto people with disabilities. Instead, we suggest starting with people’s lived experiences and abilities to inspire inclusive and comfortable design activities for everyone.

EFFECTIVELY ASSESSING EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGIES

Finally, we need to encourage the research and study of educational technology within their context of use.

Still today, we rarely find examples of AT being studied outside the lab in real-world educational settings; hence, we are failing to understand how they (re)shape classroom relationships. This is all the more important considering that successful inclusion at school is multifaceted. Schooling is more than the acquisition of knowledge and skills: It enables socialization and the acquisition of cultural norms and social integration, as well as social placement toward different professional careers [ 6]. Yet the majority of technology evaluations rarely account for these other functions of schooling.

Discussing challenges for evaluation, workshop participants further described: the inaccessibility of many standard academic skills tests; the complexity of in-the-wild studies that involve triangulating multiple stakeholders’ perspectives; and the need to better acknowledge heterogeneity in schooling experiences. The workshop focused on the first two aspects, with discussions about how to achieve a more nuanced, empathic engagement with students’ progress in learning that may be achieved through qualitative and longer-term evaluations. For instance, Emeline Brulé and Gilles Bailly [ 6] adopted a comprehensive evaluation to understand whether and how technologies could help establish students with visual impairments’ expertise in learning about geography through the sense of hearing. They postulated that bringing attention to this embodied knowledge could change the teacher’s perceptions of their students’ skills, as well as students’ perceptions of tactile representations of

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