Developers Fight to Save BBC's Suspended Learning Resource.
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- Date: Sat, 20 Oct 2007 07:14:58 -0400
Headstar.com (UK)
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Developers Fight to Save BBC's Suspended Learning Resource.
(Extract from the October 2007 E-Access Bulletin)
The developers of a free online learning resource for vision-impaired children,
originally developed by the BBC but suspended from release following
anti-competition complaints from private sector educational software suppliers,
are seeking help to make the resource publicly available.
'Benjamin's house' is a game aiming to teach literacy, Braille, and IT through
a virtual tour of British poet Benjamin Zephaniah's house. The resource is one
of hundreds of free online learning resources aimed at five- to
sixteen-year-old learners with and without a disability developed between 2003
and 2006 under the umbrella of BBC's 'digital curriculum,' also known as 'BBC
Jam'.
But the BBC Trust decided to suspend Jam a month before it was due to go live,
after legal arguments from private sector companies that it would damage their
commercial interests. "We have the first English and Braille literacy software
but we can't launch it," Jonathan Hassell, Accessibility Editor of BBC Jam
Hassell told delegates at the annual RNIB-hosted conference Techshare this
month.
Hassell and co-developer Nick Kind of not-for-profit e-learning organisation
Spark Learning
LINK:
http://www.sparklearning.com
of the development team, appealed to delegates for ideas on how to take the
programme forward. "There's a possibility we can get this out there and
transform kids' lives," Hassell said. Nick Kind has published a blog on the
suspension of Jam - originally launched in October 2006 - at:
http://nickkind.blogspot.com/ .
Benjamin's House users encounter colourful characters living in the house,
including a spider and a hoover, triggering audible poems, stories and games
about grammar and language, as they navigate rooms and furniture. "We wanted to
do things that had never been done before using the wonderful archive of BBC
materials," Hassell told delegates. The game has been tested across the
country, from "Glasgow to Cornwall," he said.
Unusually, it was designed with both vision impaired and sighted users in mind.
All Benjamin's House content has audio output and plain text descriptions of
the layout of the house including descriptions of the sights, sounds and smells
of the house are available at each step of the "tour." The game was developed
for mainly home use to "bridge the home-school divide through the internet,"
said Hassell.
NOTE: To see E-Access Bulletin's previous coverage of BBC Jam go to the
free-to-use archives and search for Issue January 2007: 'Sticky By Name, Sticky
By Nature,' Section Three at:
http://www.headstar.com/eab/archive.html .
++E-ACCESS BULLETIN
- ISSUE 94, OCTOBER 2007.
A Headstar publication.
A free, independent monthly e-mail newsletter on information technology issues
for people with visual impairment and blindness. The Bulletin covers everything
from consumer electronics to the Internet, examining design and access issues
and technical developments.
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