Can technology enhance social communication?

Ed gets a lift to his new school with his mother every morning. In the car, they use the sat nav every time they take a new route. Ed tends to listen to his iPod on the way to school and sometimes plays a quick game on his mobile phone. At school, teachers use the interactive whiteboard in most lessons, and the class regularly do group work using iPads. The school has a separate timetabled computer room where they work on the PCs. In the entrance to the school, there is a plasma screen, which displays photos of the work the children have been engaged with throughout the day. The school has a website with a parent portal which enables communication between Ed’s parents and the school. When Ed gets home, he communicates with his friends on Facebook, and plays on the Xbox for a while. He completes most of his homework on his laptop.

Ed’s everyday life is shaped by the technology that has become a central part of his world. His experiences are by no means unusual. Television, computers, gaming and mobile devices exist in most homes. In schools, Interactive Whiteboards, computers and IPads are all commonly used and technology is integral to teaching in most schools. There is no doubt that technology is affecting the way pupils interact with one another and with the world, and that it is also having an effect on how teachers teach. Whatever we think of technology, it is here to stay and it is a natural and almost invisible part of children’s lives.

DIGITAL DIVIDE
Yet the digital divide means that those who have a difficulty accessing technology, for whatever reason, are at a serious disadvantage. Many educational professionals also worry that increasing use of technology is impacting on the communication and comprehension skills of pupils in a negative way. Without effective support for these areas of development, children are at risk of underachievement in many other areas of learning.

It ought therefore to be a priority to investigate how technology can enhance children’s social communication skills and understandings. One way of doing this is to focus on how technology can best support a group of learners who have particular difficulties in these areas of development, so that we can understand more about how we can harness the use of technology to enhance communication and interaction for all children.

SOCIAL COMMUNICATION
The Shape project is a project where researchers from a number of Universities are working with schools to investigate how a range of technologies can support the development of social communication and peer interaction for children on the autism spectrum. The premise of this work is that an inclusive education system should meet the needs of all learners and that technology has a role in enabling access and inclusion.

A focus on the needs of children with autism, who have significant difficulties in the areas of social communication, can give insights into ways of using technology to support the communication skills of all children. Rather than make a distinction between teaching practices that are available to all learners and separate interventions for children with additional needs, the project therefore explores the notion that an inclusive curriculum is about its applicability to all from its inception and not about adaptations and extensions to make a non-inclusive curriculum more applicable to excluded groups.

We therefore use the diversity of learner needs embodied in the needs of children with autism as a starting point for providing rich Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) opportunities for all children by addressing how newly developed technologies can respond to learner differences in a way that can support inclusion.

AUTISM AND COMMUNICATION
Pupils with autism have difficulties in functional communication and language, social understanding and joint attention, peer interaction and play. Many children on the autism spectrum have language delay and limited non-verbal communication in terms of their use of an understanding of gesture facial expression and body language. They show little joint attention, are often delayed in development of pointing, with showing and gaze following often being absent. A focus on teaching these early communicative behaviours can offer potential for later development of social and communication skills. Learning through interacting with peers is also an important area of development for all children, and children on the autism spectrum need interventions that can explicitly support them to do this. The provision of this support is critical because children on the autism spectrum often do not interact spontaneously with other children due to their difficulties and social understanding.

Technology is an excellent medium for reaching this group of learners. Most pupils with autism find technology safe and motivating. The predictability has the potential to make TEL environments ideal for pupils on the autism spectrum who typically experience discomfort at unexpected change and the uncertainty of face-to-face communication. Technology can also reduce anxiety because it can offer a controllable medium where various multisensory inputs of the real world can be reduced.

Activities can approximate the real world in a way that can take away some of the dangers that are detrimental to children’s learning. The learner can also abstract from realistic situations to be able to concentrate on relevant issues. TEL environments can E 
F also provide a pedagogically safe space in which to try out new actions and alternatives, with consequences that remain restricted to the virtual world. Learners can repeat actions in order to practice them, and they can try out new actions. Through this they can develop an awareness of alternatives and resulting consequences.

The Shape project builds on knowledge about the learning needs of pupils with autism, and on the positive potential of technology by working with four different technologies that have been developed specifically for children with autism. All the technologies have shared a focus on participatory design and have empowered children, their carers and teachers, to have a voice as software co-designers, users and learners from the outset. This, in turn, has helped researchers and practitioners explore how research and development of TEL can be embedded in practice, focusing on how processes of inclusion are encompassed in knowledge, attitudes and beliefs about learning. Researchers are achieving this by working closely with children, parents and school staff in order to explore new ways of using technology in the classroom. The technologies have major differences in terms of their pedagogical aims and the technologies used to meet these aims, which are enabling us to explore the appropriation of these different technologies in a range of classroom settings. The findings from evaluations are providing crucial information for training practitioners in how to use TEL to support learning.

THE TECHNOLOGIES
ECHOES employs artificial intelligence in innovative and unique ways. It is made up of a range of hardware and software and designed in conjunction with children, researchers, parents and teachers. Elements include a large multi touch screen, two web cams for detecting gaze and facial expressions, a virtual character that uses artificial intelligence to react to children’s actions in real time; gaze and touch tracking software that informs the environment’s reactions to the child; social signal processing and user modelling software. Initial observations from a recent study of attention and gaze following in children on the autism spectrum showed that they were able to learn to follow gaze cues or communicate with the ECHOES virtual character and that they treated the virtual character as an agent and as an equal partner in the interaction.

Some children were also able to self regulate during the interactions, which surprised and delighted the daily carers. In particular, children showed improvement in sustained focus of attention, anticipation as well as knowingly searching for interaction cues from the virtual character. This learning environment is now being developed for IPads and other devices, with the focus being on how the virtual character in ECHOES can support children to attend to instructions, to engage with a virtual character and to work with other children to complete tasks.

COSPATIAL
COSPATIAL focuses on the development and application of innovative technologies to support children’s social and communication skills in the domains of collaboration and social conversation. The emphasis of COSPATIAL is in finding new ways to adapt existing classroom technology, including laptop computers, to engage children on the autism spectrum in learning social skills. In the UK, this has been achieved through the use of collaborative learning environments, which allow more than one user to interact with the virtual space at any one time. Two main applications have been developed: ‘Bloc party’ which is a perspective taking task that requires peer pairs to communicate and cooperate with each other to achieve a shared goal in the game; and Talk2You’ which scaffolds children’s social conversation through software and teacher inputs. Both games attempt to support children’s understanding of the main concepts being taught as well as to allow them to practice those skills directly. The games provide structured ways of supporting children with a range of needs to develop their collaborative and conversation skills.

REACTICKLES
Reactickles is a multiplatform and open source software application that uses everyday technologies to enable users to express idiosyncratic, emergent and body interests and to value these as triggers for communication. Central to informing understanding of the expressive qualities of communication is the ability of Reactickles to reveal the perceptual and behavioural mapping of input and output, as every movement, touch or sound is amplified without the use of complex semiotic graphics. The evaluation of Reactickles, which has taken place over extensive time periods, revealed that the sensory perceptual triggers afforded by Reactickles can increase the self-awareness necessary for social communication to be meaningful for an autistic child. Reactickles magic and Somantics are new projects, informed by Reactickles. Both are designed to support play through repetition and flow, both of which underpin emotional self-regulation.

ROBOTICS
We have also been working with NAO the humanoid robot produced by Aldebaran robotics. This is a knee-high humanoid robot that can interact with children, play games, dance to music and show basic emotions through body language. We have been looking at how the robot can support children to communicate more effectively and to interact with one another. We have found that children are engaged, motivated and focused when they work with the robot and that the work with the robot increases their interactions with one another. Crucially, researchers are working with children and teachers in school and with the company that produces the robot in order to identify the kind of behaviours that it would be most useful to develop in the robot in order to maximise it as an educational tool for pupils with autism.

The work involved in investigating how these technologies can be used in the classroom is exploratory and also participatory. It has a clear aim and this is that these technologies should enable teachers to move beyond using technology to impart knowledge, to using technology as a tool for enabling interaction and engagement, not only between the teacher and pupil but between pupils themselves. The work is at the beginning stages and an important aspect of this work is to disseminate information about good practice in schools through the creation of digital stories and other resources. Furthermore, the project is creating the foundations for the development of an effective online community whereby practitioners and researchers can address how to extend the use of TEL for this group of learners and can identify future use of technology in the classroom.

The above projects have all been funded by the ESRC (Economic Social Research Council) and the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council).

Acknowledgements: With special thanks to all the children, teachers and parents who have been involved in the project, the funders and all the researchers engaged in the project.

FURTHER INFORMATION
Email Dr Karen Guldberg at K.K.Guldberg@bham.ac.uk
www.birmingham.ac.uk/shape