Upcoming events: September-October 2011

I'm going to be attending all kinds of exciting stuff this fall semester! Even though I'm not officially in school (Uni, whatever), I can still work on getting edumacated. This is not to say that I don't learn anything the rest of the time-- I read academic papers and reference books for work just about every week, and have the highly illuminating the hands-on experiences of working with children + technology, and playing project politics.

Tomorrow, September 8th: SCERTS framework follow-up day 
(University of Birmingham)
 I am a big fan of the SCERTS framework for autism intervention, having gone to the big three-day training session last September with one of the SCERTS founders and authors, Emily Rubin, and then having used elements of SCERTS within the ECHOES project. Emily Rubin will also be leading this day, with many of the same attendees from last time. The goal is for people to present examples of using SCERTS in practice and to get feedback. ECHOES has submitted some video/written material for Emily to view and comment on later, at the end of the day. I am a bit nervous, as she will look at the ECHOES video coding scheme (which we have based on the assessment process and behavioural goals in SCERTS). As I have written almost the entirety of that document, I feel like I am somewhat on the line here-- I really hope she approves!

A few words describing SCERTS, excerpted from my intro to the video coding document:

SCERTS is most accurately called a framework rather than an intervention programme in its own right, because it is compatible with a range of other approaches and interventions already in use with people on the autism spectrum, such as TEACCH (Schopler & Mesibov, 1995), the Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS, Bondy & Frost 1994), and many others.

SCERTS stands for Social Communication, Emotional Regulation, and Transactional support, the three main areas on which it focuses for helping children to achieve social and communicative competence, and for helping social partners (e.g. teachers, parents, peers) to support the child in achieving this competence. The SCERTS curriculum targets the “core deficits” of autism which are usually an impediment to social and communicative competence by setting specific, developmentally appropriate goals. These may be both educational goals, and identifying transactional supports (changes to child’s environment, and to social partners’ interactions) which help the child to achieve the target goals. For a summary of some of the main goals/targeted areas in the SCERTS framework, see Table 1, reproduced from a paper by Prizant, Wetherby, Rubin, and Laurent (2003). The curriculum is designed to be administered by a team across all of the child’s usual settings—not only the child’s teacher and other school staff, but family members and even peers. The entire team ideally uses the same methods for supporting and communicating with the child, and is aware of that child’s behavioural goals and progress toward them.

Friday, September 9th: One-day conference on Autism Education
(University of Birmingham)
From the official conference materials: "This conference on autism and education brings together leading experts from the UK and the USA who will present some of the latest developments in education research and practice. The particular focus of this event will be to showcase and discuss some of the critical ways in which children with autism can be assessed in school settings and how these assessments of progress can be related to meaningful targets, particularly for adult life."

I am hoping to further inform one of my still-nebulous PhD project ideas. Specifically, finding out about good resources and strategies for embedding technology and other intervention programmes into classroom practice. "Embedding" technology in educational practice is a current big topic in the AIED (artificial intelligence in education) community, partly because it has been realised that the most successful project are those which are embedded, and also because that community is becoming savvier to what the education research people have known all along: teachers are an invaluable research resource in terms of contributing to what you build, and how, not just what to do with it now it's finished. Anyway, I digress.

October 12th, SICSA Workshop for Technology on Health & Wellbeing
Glasgow Caledonian University
I don't know as much about this event as yet, but I will say that I am not presenting anything, and I don't think anyone else from ECHOES will be either. However, it still  might be useful/informative to me so I am happy to go along and be the attentive audience! Health technology seems like it will be increasingly important in the future, especially as the population ages. I also think it is likely to mutate significantly, along with other changes in the fields of pervasive, ubiquitous and mobile computing in increasingly "smart" environments.