INTERNET IN THE EDUCATION OF PEOPLE WITH APHASIA

Johnny Lundell, Sanga Saby Folk-High School, project-leader
e-mail: johnnyl@sanga-saby.se
Brita Lifvergren, Sanga Saby Folk-High School, project-coordinator
e-mail: brita@hagagymnasiet.norrkoping.se
Magnus Magnusson, University College of Karlstad, speech pathologist
e-mail: Magnus.Magnusson@hks.se

Web Posted on: December 12, 1997

Background

Aphasia rehabilitation can take many different forms. In Sweden and other of the Scandinavian countries a special very functionalistic form of rehabilitation is given in the form of daytime or evening courses. A network of hundreds of schools - so called folk-high schools and other folk-tuition organizations offer non- graded courses to adults all over the country. The typical folk -high school offer courses with boarding facilities for longer periods of time, one semester or more or between 30 - 34 weeks. (The typical school year in Sweden consists of two semesters and two long holidays - summer and Christmas) The other organizations offer non-graded evening-time courses. The typical folk-high school might also have a special profile (often political or religious). The goal for all types of "folk-education" activities concentrate on giving insight, maturity, responsibility and skill. One result of this is the fact that pupils in the courses are able to change and develop their curriculae, continously.

Eight folk-high schools in Sweden specialize on long-time and short-time courses for people with Aphasia. A typical course lasts two semesters or one year and offers the participants the possibility to live in a "communication-intense" environment 24 hours a day. The average folk-high school course for people with Aphasia was evaluated in two research projects in the late 1980's (Borenstein & al, 1987; Eriksson, 1991). Pupils pay for their courses but health insurance and former employers and others support the costs so very few participants are forced to pay the total fee. All courses at all folk- high schools offer continuous computer aided rehabilitation in their curriculae, through well-stocked computer rooms, mostly using a software called LEXIA, which is used in Aphasia rehabilitation all over Scandinavia. LEXIA contains a set of 80 different exercises. Every exercise can be performed on different levels and the therapist or the user him/herself can change different parameters in the program and use it over a longer time and for different types of problems. LEXIA is also available in English and Spanish.

Most folk-high schools get their pupils from a wide geographical area since the population density differs so much in our country. This is also the fact as regards the Aphasia courses. The aim of the present project is to find and develop new methods to give folk-high school courses to people with Aphasia and to create networks between the pupils using new technology.

The folk-high school

Sanga-Saby is a folk-high school with the profile to give courses about environment and areas related to the political party connected with the farmers and to the liberal party. It also concentrates on Aphasia rehabilitation courses since 1988. It is situated 45 kilometres (27 miles) outside of Stockholm, in rural surroundings. They have offered three types of Aphasia courses:

• weekend courses
• short courses (14 days or so)
• long courses (two semestres/one year)

All types of courses include boarding, which means that the pupils or participants of the long courses become very well acquainted with each other so as to form a sort of network. Sofar they have given six long courses to a total of about 80 pupils. This idea of the network has been the foundation for all folk-high school courses for people with Aphasia, including the course in the present project.

The course

The present course has 14 pupils - seven men and seven women between the ages 24 - 60. The pupils all come from earlier courses at the school and this special course is really a special project financed by the Swedish government through a framework for distance education. The course and the project started on the 16th of September 1996 and will end on the 16th of May 1997. All the pupils can read or write, at least partially. The speech ability is more widespread and ranges from a few words to more or less fluent speech.

The Project

The name of the project is "Network for people with Aphasia" and the goal is to make the contacts between former pupils at the folk-high school firmer and to build an interactive network with the help of modern technology, using computers, modems and Internet via the common narrow-band telecommunication network. The secondary aim is to give a course to the pupils using InterNet where the course really becomes the tool whereby the network is established.

All the pupils are accustomed to using computers, especially DOS-computers and the Windows- environment. Half of them come from the greater Stockholm-area and the other half comes from different parts of Sweden. The project has furnished the pupils with computers and modems in case they do not own a computer privately. A total number of eight computers were needed. The project also pays for Internet- use but not for the telephone-costs. 10 teachers and administrators are involved in the project.

Different methods of education are developed in the project and the course concentrates on the subjects reading, writing, society, environment and mathematics.

Methods

The project is coordinated from a central www-site on the internet. On this page, all the participants and the teachers are presented with pictures and everyone is accessible through their pictures which are linked to individual e-mail addresses. On the page, new exercises for the participants are presented every week and sites of interest are linked to the central site. By the end of the project, every pupil will be offered a home- page of their own. The pupils also use a local version of the First Class Message Handling System as an internal information system.

The project was started with an initial week of education where the pupils learnt to handle Internet and First Class and e-mail. A speech pathologist participated during the week to recommend suitable methods for language stimulation. After that, the computers and the modems were distributed and installed during a period of four months. During the rest of the project two occasions of meetings between the pupils are planned to give them the possibility to exchange experiences as directly as possible. The project will be evaluated within the framework of the governmental mother-project. All official electronic communication is saved as a sort of log for the evaluation.

Results

During the first two months of the project the main type of communication has consisted of e-mails. During this time, 111 e-mail letters have been exchanged between the pupils and the project-leader. However, the first letters were sent between the project leader and the project coordinator. 40 of them discussed technological problems, 25 discussed problems in getting software and hardware, 18 of them were discussing pupils and pedagogical problems, six were about the evaluation, 8 discussed the weather and the rest more or less dicussed the agenda. A lot of these letters, however, were written as a means to learn to handle the technology and the system. The telephone seems to have been excluded as a communication tool because pupils wanted to learn by usage.

Since it took three months before all the pupils were connected to the network, during the first months of the project, the pupils have interacted mostly with the project-leader and the coordinator. Some of them have also "surfed" on the Internet, making questions and looking for places of interest. All participants have visited the home-page regularly when connected to do the exercises.

The project has recognized a few initial problems. The lack of computers of the pupils delayed the connection much longer than planned, which has delayed the expected network-effect. The lack of "computer maturity" of the teachers has caused some problems and also their being unaccustomed to the medium. A general problem seems to be the fact that most interfaces are not specially suited for people with Aphasia, or even more basic, that it is difficult to define a general Aphasia interface.

Since the project recommended the use of one word processing program and since the pupils had experiences of different word processors, there were some difficulties in giving support. There were similar but less difficulties because two types of computers were used. During the rest of the project, the relation between experienced stress and blocking will be studied.

There have been several very positive experiences as well. For instance, one of the pupils wrote the first letter for five years and another participant discovered a site with information about his favorite place of vacation, all on his own.

Finally a few quotes from the pupils:

• It's difficult to be funny in an e-mail.
• How are we going to make use of the First Class base in a sensible way?
• There is a telephone cost when you use First Class, it is cheaper to use e-mail since you don't need to connected all the time.
• This was really fun

Conclusion

During the nineties, several projects have discovered the need for telematical development for people with Aphasia. Several projects in Sweden have made pilot trials into the use of telefax, still picture telephones and ISDN-based videophones. At the moment one large Swedish project is looking into language training of people with Aphasia, using 64 kb/s videotelephony (Magnusson, 1995) and another Swedish folk-high school will start a similar Internet-project as the one presented above. The conclusion seems to be that it is important to study and analyze the needs of telematics by people with Aphasia.

References

Borenstein, Peter, Linell, Stina, Wahrborg, Peter, Ahlsén, Elisabeth (1987) Education in 'Folk High School' for Younger Aphasic People Aphasiology, 1(1987)3, pp 263 - 266

Eriksson, Gunnel (1991) Hur en folkbildningspedagogik kan paverka och fsrandra afatikers fsrmaga (How Folk-High School Education Can Act on and Change the Ability of People with Aphasia) Lunds Universitet, Inst fsr Pedagogik, 38 ppg

Gunnilstam, Olle (1992) Utforming av program (Structuring programs)hus, Via Datch (1992)augusti, ppg 14-15

Magnusson, Magnus (1995) VideotelePhony for People with Aphasia San Francisco, In Murphy, Harry (Ed) "Virtual Reality and Persons with Disabilities", 3rd Conference, 1995

http://www.lio.se/logoped/ (Information about speech pathology in Sweden)
http://www.sanga.saby.se/ (Site for Sanga-Saby Folk-high school)
http://www.hagagymnasiet.norrkoping.se/~brita/ (Home-page for project)

| CSUN 97 Page |