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I think that children like my daughter (who’s in the autistic spectrum) can transfer the skills they acquire online in a real-world environment. She’s actually learning a lot on how to interact with her peers…by watching videos on YouTube! She can pretend she’s part of the action and memorize cool words or common teen expressions that she then reuses in an appropriate context with kids her own age. The Internet allows her, in a way, to ‘practice’ in a safe environment. I have seen her evolve in the past few months and even weeks. Getting familiar with common teen expressions and behaviors has helped her, I feel, integrate in her Grade 7 class. She seems way happier in Grade 7 than she was in Grade 6. Her classmates are a little more mature – which surely helps – but she is also more confident in her social abilities.

I believe the social skills learned in school are overrated – we believe it works because we all did it, but in reality, the immaturity of the students, the parental influences, and being forced to work with others may not be the best learning environment. There are other ways to gain social skills besides attending a ground school. If you are schooled online at a young age, the possibility to “try on” personalities without it doing lasting damage to your social image is possible. Your intelligence, not your hair or clothes or demeanor, shine through.

For students with disabilities online learning can provide an element of sameness, which puts those students on the same level as the others in the class. For example, a wheelchair bound, visually impaired child can fly as an avatar without glasses in 2nd life. When she meets people there, they don’t know (or care) that she has little motor control or her typing is done with the only two fingers she still controls. They assume that she is “normal.”

Maybe we are doing children a real disservice by sending them to school to interact with their peers.

If we give them all online learning they will probably excel at academics. But by removing the social part that is harder for them to learn, are we doing them a disservice? How will they learn to navigate all the social cues and noise?

I’m still thinking out loud. I think a blended approach is probably the best way. But how do you get the right blend?

With online learning, you can potentially control your learning environment to better suit you. You can set your browser to override the fonts and colors of websites so you have a more uniform look; you can turn off images and animation, turning them on only when you need to and can focus on them. I’m not sure about Asperger’s, but with some learning disabilities a screen reading program can be helpful even for people who can see fine.

From the broader perspective of accessibility (not just autism and Asperger’s), online learning and online networks seem to have a lot of potential for getting people involved in ways that will work for them. If we have more learning that allows multiple ways to participate, letting people choose what works best for them as individuals, that’s a huge benefit for accessibility.