Abstract:

This work focuses on the difficulty that homebound people (HBs) meet to access information about formal and informal learning initiatives and presents a solution aimed to bridge this gap. An HB is a person who is confined to his/her home (or to specific institutions such as hospitals) usually by illness or disability, since going out requires a considerable effort and the support of specific aids or people.

While HBs hardly access information about targeted educational initiatives, teachers and trainers often lack both technological and methodological skills to design special education experiences. In addition, projects and initiatives targeting HBs are rarely well-promoted and well-focused on actual needs. In this context some important issues need to be tackled: How to foster HBs when searching for educational resources and initiatives? How to foster teachers to get skilled in designing special education initiatives?

A possible solution to these issues can be identified in the design and development of a web-based system acting as a personalized gateway to a variety of information, educational resources and best practices concerning HBs formal and informal learning.

This challenge has been taken up by the WISE Project, a three-year project funded by the Italian Ministry of Education. The project is aimed to design and develop a system which bridges HBs’ educational needs with information, resources, initiatives and tools that fit with them; it also aims to fill teachers’ and trainers’ skills gap, concerning the design and management of technology-enhanced special education initiatives, by providing resources, information and an effective methodological scaffold. One of the main project outcomes will be the development of an ontology-based Knowledge Hub that: (a) will include a knowledge base concerning both instructional design models for special education and information about HBs formal/informal learning initiatives; (b) will interact with Web 2.0 systems and networks to harvest and deliver information. The user-model underpinning the semantic-based system is the actual added value of the project: it personalizes users’ experience with the system by acquiring information about a user (or group of users) so as to adapt the interface and the search results to the profile derived for that user or group. It integrates the main international standards (e.g. IMS-LIP [2001]) with a set of descriptors derived from a mapping against the World Health Organization’s International Classification for Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) [WHO, 2001] and shaping a specific HB profile. This classification puts the notions of ‘health’ and ‘disability’ in a new light, since the health status of a ‘person’ is defined in relation to the “functions’ he/she is able to perform in a specific ‘environment’, thus focusing on the social aspects of disability in terms of actual ‘participation’ in everyday life. Recently, a number of ICF-based tools have been developed mainly for clinical practice purposes, but ICF potential has not been exploited yet to support a personalized access to a knowledge management system targeting people with disability. This contribution will describe the methodological process carried out to mould a user-model on ICF, showing its scalability and portability to other software design context. It also presents the main characteristics of the ICF-based user-model, as well as its main ethical and practical expected impacts.

Keywords:

Homebound people, International Classification for Functioning, user-modelling, formal and informal learning.