Making Connections - Article 1

How a company collaborates to create new assistive technology
by Adam Wing

I chose this article because throughout out this program I have heard much about collaboration. Also now most our class is split into different groups doing different research projects in which we must work together to achieve the goal of completing them and graduating. This article is about the collaboration that took place in order for the company Laureate Learning Systems to develop new software to help individuals with disablilities acquire language. It looks at how the company must work together in order to meet the needs of those who need/use assistive technology. There are many people involved in the process and collaborating with one another is essential and teamwork is one of the only ways to ensure achievement. The collaboraters in this article used different methods of research we learned during our research course and current course in management which consists of the grant writing process. This article discusses how they had to write grants and obtained funding for the project. After completing the research needed and finalizing the software, Laureate had a great new software line that student's love to use and that helps them in approving their communication skills. This is also a great article because it reitterates the information we have learned throughout different courses in our program that research is necessary when it comes to developing new tools and and essential when it comes to producing evidence-based research for these new tools. Another great point in the article is that it is important for the software to be entertaining for the users. This goes great with past discussions in 6701 about how important it is to think about the user when deciding what AT is best because if the user is not happy with the product, then most likely they are not going to use it. This article relates to one other aspect of my learning experience now which is teamwork. We have learned throughout the program that teamwork is important and most likely we (OT students) will be collaborating and working with other professionals like PTs and speech language pathologists. We must work together so we can achieve a goal that is very important to us, which is helping others.

This article can be found at www.closingthegap.com/lib/pdf/2006/Oct-Nov06/MakingConnections2.pdf