The is currently just a dump of ideas from my blog and needs serious re-factoring. Please dive in if you are interested.

Discussion on Development ideas.

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Martin Littler MD of Inclusive Technology posted this paper on Every Child Matters in response to the disappearance of Special Needs from the e-learning agenda Becta have disbanded their SEN Team.

Martin suggests work researching Learning Platforms for children with Severe and Complex SEN which is an excellent idea, especially if it also allows all students to interact equally.

www.OATSsoft.org could easily act as the focus for such a project and general AT provision. It can play a part in bringing users and developers together on such a project and also disseminating knowledge gained and artifacts created to other projects. It can help by facilitating both technical innovation and an active community of users and developers. Open Source and Web 2.0 social software both offer the means to allow people with disabilities to be involved as equals. Admittedly AT is only part of the issue and is of less benefit at present to some groups but by ensuring we have good AT tools that are available for use in education e-Learning may be made more inclusive.

Moodle is Open Source and is a very popular VLE with educationalists, having good pedagogical underpinnings so is ideally placed to be the foundation for such a platform. As a popular VLE it would be inclusive as all students could interact through it. Obviously a fuller analysis would be required and there are a few obvious architectureal questions but a Moodle based prototype would be great for research and user testing. Developing AT tools that work with web services is needed now anyway and could be a useful spin off. Adding Elgg's social 'Personal Learning Landscape' web 2.0 features will be of interest too. 

I expect ACE are perfectly placed to manage such a project and perhaps it would get some funding their way again.

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This can feed back to the Becta specifications Learning platform functional requirements and Learning platform technical specifications from a SEN perspective. Phil Driscoll, Miles Berry and others at Moodle and Schoolforge did so from a Moodle/FOSS perspective.

"Both the learning platform functional requirements and technical specifications will be subject to regular review and update, as requirements, technologies and specifications develop and change.

Although supposedly open for review many include Miles Berry and Martin Littler feel that Becta have made little effort to ask schools, teachers and pupils what they want from a learning platform. 

Martin says: 

"Needless to say the Assistive Technology industry was not involved in the Learning Platform consultation at all and nobody at the DfES or Becta (I’ve asked them) has any notion of what benefits a Learning Platform can offer a learner with Severe and Complex SEN – even though all learners must have them by March 2008. Every child matters?"

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This is obviously more than just ensuring LPs are accessible and are fully supported by Assistive Technology and Accessibility tools, though that is an important part of the requirements.

In his Every Child Matters? paper Martin suggests: 

They could, for the first time ever choose and load the resources they use. The complex set-ups they each need (e.g: post acceptance switch delay or font size and colour) could be communicated to each programme to so the teacher or speech therapists expertise would follow them, through the ether, when they used the same resources at home. The most used aspect of LPs, the calendar, plays a huge part in the lives of many learners with SEN from CP to Autism as they plan their day and think ahead.

This seemsto boil down to having user centred personalisation of the user interface that roams with the user and providing tools that are learner needs focussed and of use outside the class room. 

In the case of a heterogenus collection of applications making a LP that is quite a tall order but will be mitigated by Open Standards for accessibility interfaces and operating system support. An approach like to have more immediate success would be to concentrate on adding features to one system, 'start small' especially as an large element of research and exploration is needed. One part of such a Learning platform could be a standard interface for other tools to hook into to exchange AT information and communicate application state and user preferences. Asa vital parto of all LP perhaps a VLE could provide that service, though on fist thoughts it should be seperate.

SchoolTools Calendar may be useful as a calender in this case. It has many compex features for shared calendars but may be lacking in simplicity need for users planning their day.

I would like to see a Learning platform that  is an exemplar in this area and leads the way. My current thinking is that it will be best done as a Open Source community project and that leads to something based on Moodle. Should it be part of the main Moodle project or a seperate project? It could even be a temporary fork.

As mentioned before the new www.oatsoft.org  is perfectly place to act as a centre for this including input from researchers, users, volunterrs and other projects.

As usually any features added for 'accessibility' will actually improve the utility and usablility for all users.

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Having users complex UI settings automatically available is a good idea as is providing user centred tools for daily use but I think we could go further. Recent web developments such as social software offer fantastic possibilities for collaborative inclusion and self expression. Apart from the uses in education for constructivist learning as championed by Moodle, elgg and others, the more adhoc grass roots social activity seen in sites like MySpace and flikr are being picked up by many. As usualy the point will be to make sure all can access them easily.