An Interview with Stephen Segrave
(“Inter” refers to the interviewer, “Segrave” refers to Stephen Segrave
Inter:	Stephen I was going to say by the way today is International Guide Dogs Day but it is actually quite central the message of this type of day to what you want to talk about in this case study so what is the relevance or significance of today being International Guide Dogs Day in regard to this project?
Segrave:	Dale I thought it was very funny when I heard the news this morning about it being Guide Dogs Day because in Melbourne specifically the Guide Dogs Association have as a publicity stance you could imagine decided to bubble rap certain parts of the Flinder’s Street or Spencer Street Station that’s currently under development and most people would I think fairly easily recognise the dangers for someone who is not sighted in negotiating their way through the sharp objects, the unusual levels and bends associated with major development like that and things like that but when you stop and think about it there is a lot more to it because it is just not people with vision impairment who benefit from better designed environments it’s everyone. So if I was distracted or startled I could very easily walk into something. If it was dark at night and I was disoriented I could walk into something. If I was a young child and lost or overwhelmed for the moment I could be startled and I could hurt myself as indeed older people could too, so the whole range of people who would benefit from attention being given to good design of environments and I reckon the same idea applies to the designing of web based learning environments and the simulation of environments that we want to talk about today and we might wander back to the old concept of universal design at some stage.
Inter:	Ok. Now let’s ground this in a particular major educational technology development project call HotCopy that was done at Deakin and let’s begin at the start of all of this. How was accessibility become a key issue of interest, particularly in regards to this simulation called HotCopy?
Segrave:	Well it wasn’t there at the beginning, in fact when we began to do the HotCopy project for the journalism staff in Michael Meehan’s School of Communication and Creative Arts, it was such a challenge for everyone conceptually and technically and there was already so much in the scope of the project and there was so much pressure on us to get a lot done in a short time that anyone who opened their mouth and said we need to make this accessible, really was shouted down a bit, I mean not deliberately but the sense was, there wasn’t the energy or the time to really do much and I can remember Rosemary who was with us at the moment and I can remember Rosemary and Alice King and myself and Mandy Oakham sitting down and we had a very specific meeting dealing with accessibility because Mandy Oakham reported having students in her class who were vision impaired and she wanted to pay some attention but keep in mind at that time the legal compliance connotation were strong in Deakin so we made an effort and we decided there was certain things we could do in providing information on a website and certain things on the CD that would help but largely we couldn’t do much given those constraints.
Inter:	So Stephen what could you do to help initially what was the sort of initial tentative goal of dealing with disability access in developing HotCopy in the early stages, what could you do and in a sense and what couldn’t you do?
Segrave:	Well, there wasn’t much at this stage, we flaggede the issue and we said we would provide updates on the website and we provided as much as we could about the interactive storyline if you like, you know the scenario story line in HotCopy, provide as much as we could in text form so at least a student who could not experience it could at least read what was going on but that’s pretty much it.
Inter:	So in a sense you needed another project related to the ongoing development of HotCopy, that project to begin to look more deeply into the whole area of HotCopy accessibility. I mean what was this other project?
Segrave:	Yeah, that’s right we did and as it tends to be the case it was a bit of an accident. We had developed HotCopy through three versions and the final version included six scenarios and that version was published commercially and at that point there was a bit of a lull and I could see that a couple of things could cause the project but not as such the project as the agenda to go off the rails and not, you know not developing more scenarios and not paying attention to the technology solutions that we needed to find, you know could cause the whole thing to stall so I took the opportunity of the lull in the new scenarios to focus specifically on accessibility but it just happened to be timely that at that stage the Disability Centre and the Equity and Accessibility Office of Human Resources Division, I am just trying to think of the right title for that office, but they circulated information in widely in the University about the Federal Governments HEEP Initiative and that the Higher Education Equity Programme that allocates to universities money to do innovative and action oriented projects that target greater participation in higher education and I think there are about four or five different equity groups and you can imagine rural, distant students as an equity group, there are gender based groups, there are racial based groups and I decided to target the students who are vision and auditory impaired as a group and try use some of the inherent technical capabilities that underlie HotCopy and also some the newer authoring capabilities, that is the tools that you use to create a HotCopy, tools brought out by Macromedia for example they were being released with new capabilities for authoring for greater access and equity and so it was such very timely to put in that application for HEEP funding to pursue that particular agenda menu then.
Inter:	Are you suggesting Stephen that this other HEEP project which was initiated through some intrinsic interest in the issue became a project really that we at Deakin had to do, you know the motivation for doing it and completing it changed over that period of time from a nice-to-do being interested in the issue to something which was essential and core for doing this type of a e-assimilation work?
Segrave:	I thought this was the case, I really did because the international and national and local Deakin policy environments, all hammered home the importance of equity of access and participation in, by students and so while you had the legal compliance of the Discrimination Act and so on, in Deakin they were spelled out in capital letters the three core commitments that Deakin had and the third of those were equity and access, so I wasn’t surprised to see at that stage for Learning Services a vision statement being cascaded down through an operational plan where equity and accessibility were spelled out as core goals and so I just felt that and this was an hunch, you know I just felt that a number of things were coming together. We have a technology that would go nowhere if it wasn’t sustainable, one of the core drivers I think of sustainable learning environment is one that has a greater participation potential, you know is accessible and clearly the policy environment to each of the levels and also the attention that was being given to the technology authoring tools and even our local technical design development group and the way they were approaching their own developments, all of these things led to pursing the agenda more deliberately.
Inter:	Now one of the chief sources of external validation of anything being done with educational technology can be awards and HotCopy through that big first phase of development to commercial release was put up and one external educational technology excellent awards. Stephen is accessibility really seemed to be a relevant criterion in making judgement about HotCopy winning some of the awards?
Segrave:	Initially it wasn’t and I think a number of times throughout the two or three years wasn’t, but I make a real effort to make it so and it all began with the first award which I guess anyone who has been involved in awards knows it’s a bit of a game, it’s hit and miss and if you crack it, you try to keep the ball rolling so what was significant in the case of HotCopy was that the first award was for Innovation in Learning and it was from the National Professional Association called the Australian Institute of Training and Development and they specified in their award criteria that the applicant had to demonstrate that the project was aligned with the organisation’s goals and strategies and policies and I made a real effort to show that HotCopy was a direct response to at that stage to the University’s Teaching and Learning Management Plan which happened to focus on the experience of a learner and a range of things including accessibility and so on and it was that award that had me try and locate the whole agenda that was underpinning HotCopy within policy and strategy at the University and higher levels. So it was there from the beginning as a result of that particular award but after that we won an award for Excellence in Teaching which was the Vice-Chancellor’s Award and we made some effort there to document views from client groups and so on including the Disability Resources Centre and so on and it did appear in arguments throughout unfortunately the most recent award that we went for in 2004 was the Australian University Teaching Committee’s Category Four Award on the impact of a project across the University and that had the strongest argument for the importance of accessibility as a component in a new technology development for curriculum and resources for teaching and learning, so while we did not win, well the nomination left the University but we were not successful in that case we still hopeful that we can revisit that and still drive home the importance of universal design as a core component of sustainable projects for broadly applicable curriculum resources for teaching and learning in higher education.
Inter:	Now Stephen, I know it is difficult to paint a picture of this in words and people looking at this case can actually see what’s been done in regard to may be some of the key outcomes of the HEEP Project, the Higher Education Equity Project you’ve been talking about but to sum up as part of this interview, what were the outcomes in regard to enhancing accessibility issues relating to HotCopy?
Segrave:	Well, there really is a range of outcomes at all levels too and some of them are quite practical; you know deliverable that you can put your hands on, other is a little less easy to pin down. In the first instance HotCopy had six scenarios and as a pilot we took two these scenarios that sit within the HotCopy CD rap so there was a front end and a back end to the scenario. Two of the scenarios in the rap were made accessible. Now by that I mean that the students when they commenced using the CD are confronted with the screen which in many cases they would need some assistance with, so that’s not necessarily accessible but that screen provides them with options for customising the experience and the customisations include text descriptions of what is happening on the screen in the experience, in the scenario, captions of precisely what actors in the scenario are saying, anything that is in text, that is the captions, the descriptions and things that the students might be keying in as they write stories are converted to sound through the text speech, using the inherent computer’s function rather than a separate speak engine at this stage. In addition to that there is tab highlighting that means any portion of the screen that ought be active at any moment is highlighted and the navigation around the screen is prescribed and known to the user so there are set shortcut keys which allowed for that navigation through tabbing and the student can also change the size of the text if they are only slightly vision impaired for example, like I am at 51 and they also can changed the text from a positive to a negative, so white on black and black on white and colour, so there are range of things that can assist quite a range of different users.
Inter:	Without being crass about it Stephen too, in terms of these things being embedded in HotCopy to commercial product, how is the publisher seen this type of outcome in building accessibility features into a product that they are selling to a market?
Segrave:	They initially were very excited about it, they were chaffing at the bit to get the commercial version released twelve months later as an accessible version and they are still keen to do that. We believe at this stage, we have proven the things that are doable for a complex project like HotCopy and those that aren’t and I am jumping ahead a little here but in the light of our subsequent project which will refer to as LiveSim, we really want to take forward from the HotCopy HEEP Project what we have learned and do a better job of developing the accessibility into LiveSim, so we park the commercial release of the accessible features for the moment but the publisher thought it was a real seller, so that is good to hear.
Inter:	Well, obviously HotCopy, the suite of simulations relating to journalism has gone well and you mentioned LiveSim, a new project. Let’s jump to that now, what is LiveSim about, I mean is that HotCopy Mark 2 or is it something different applying to different professions?
Segrave:	That is a tricky question. When we started HotCopy, it was a programme wide initiative that would enable the staff to collaborate, to create simulation experiences that were applicable across the whole programme and to include a high level of reusability of each scenario, a simulated scenario could apply to more than one unit but equally the components in the scenario, characters and events could be reused across scenarios. So at that point we were already pitching for a sustainable project through reusability. LiveSim is really ramping that up to University wide agenda, so what we are trying to do is to distil the best features of HotCopy and carry forward the HEEP accessibility agenda to redesign the underlying architecture of the simulation environment we called HotCopy and we have really done that in a major way. We have altered the technology and we have introduced Flash in addition to the other technologies that I won’t list but I could do that now and the new technology suite and the new architecture enable us to build the accessibility in and to create a more generic simulation environment that can apply to professions well beyond journalism and so at the moment the project which is funded under John Rosenberg’s STALGS Scheme which is the Strategic Teaching and Learning Grant Scheme was initiated to deliver for four professions at least their first scenario and the professions include psychology - practising psychologists, law - in this case company law, information systems engineering and specifically computer systems engineering consultancy and public relations. Now even before we started the project we have interest from nursing, teaching, forensic science, social work and the list goes on. So what we are trying to do…
Inter:	Just there you mentioned interest from all these different professional groups within Deakin around simulation, e-simulation. Everything I read now from the UK to Europe to North America talking about developments in e-learning, blended learning rates very highly the whole potential of e-simulation, gaming, role playing being a really important educational strategy to move e-learning towards the next generation, some people call it the third generation of e-learning, may be cut to the heart of the matter, what is it about simulation electronically which makes it such an attractive e-learning strategy? And generates so much interest that you are talking about.
Segrave:	In recent years some of the keywords that people have tended to, they have tended to be current you know, high currency-engagement is one of them, authentic learning is another one, immersive environments, participatory learning, experiential learning, it as though the conversion, I will use that word the conversion of learning resources from print and traditional media to the digital/internet format, amounted to the delivery and I used that word “the delivery” of content and that as a framework is just totally incompatible with the design of good experiences for learners. And so simulations and games have been around. Well, I started studying instructual design in 1979 and already simulations and games have been around since the 50’s and 60’s and Elizabeth Lee from the University of Western Sydney I think who recently did her PhD in simulations and games has plotted the development of the use of simulations and gaming for educational purposes going right back to the Greeks and so on. So it isn’t new but we are revisiting the application to simulations and games to educational as a result of the convergence of all the technologies to the digital and the ability we have got now with smart data bases and the like to customise, personalise and individualise the learning experiences of our students. And so if we can create an e-simulation and that tends to denote a simulation that is mostly delivered online, it can be very powerfully done, very flexibly done and so LiveSim is trying to do that. So we are seeing the situation of off-campus students needing to receive a CD where they get their heavy media but where as HotCopy was mostly CD delivery with a little bit of internet functionality for modifying an existing scenario on the CD through the web link, LiveSim would be substantially internet enabled, it will detect whether you have got an internet connection and it would largely run the simulation from the Net connection which does not happen with HotCopy at the moment.
Inter:	What you said Stephen, is I mean for many, and I guess for me, it is something of a revelation because when the issue came up originally and you were doing the HEEP project, it seems to be about disability access and inclusive practices, something that have to be dealt with to get it right through a separate project, not on this side, not tacked on but something there to be done but it seems to me something more fundamental is motivating the approach, I know you use this phrase before but ‘Universal Design’ seems to be a key motivator for actually getting accessibility right. What do you mean by that term, what is the more fundamental motivation now? It certainly much beyond what I or many other people may have thought what you were doing, in doing that HEEP Project.
Segrave:	Well, look I think we are tapping into passion now Dale. We gave a paper recently at the ASCILITE conference last year, the Australasian Society for Computers and Learning and Tertiary Education. At that conference we were a little provocative in challenging educators who approach their teaching with a compliance mentality and it struck me that what se started out doing with HotCopy was a reaction to the legal framework and the compliance kind of mentality and for me I have always been interested in education because I am interested in learners and their experience of learning and what that can be like and so the whole idea of universal design is exactly about that. It’s saying, everyone is important if we do a really good, a really good job at design, it would naturally be inclusive of everyone. We don’t have to focus on small groups and focus in a negative kind of way, you know referring to terms like disability or discrimination or equity and words like diversity and difference and individualising; those sorts of things to me speak of our interest in the relationship with the learner and the learner’s experience, so while if you did a search on the internet for universal design you will find some tentative descriptions of people who are struggling to understand what’s actually possible in universalising design which is a little different to individualising, customising. With universal design you try to design something that will benefit the greatest number of people. When you individualise and customise you are providing an opportunity to make alterations, so it is more applicable to one person, OK. Now, the two go together because a good, a well universally design environment will naturally have some individualising and customising kinds of components to it but in whatever way you look at it, I think it’s more uplifting and it’s more fun actually to get on and do innovative things with the focus on universal design rather than you know the anal retentive, negative approach that’s come to mind with terms like discrimination and compliance.
Inter:	And finally, Stephen, getting back to today, being International Guide Dogs Day and what the Melbourne Guide Dogs Association in highlighting the day, being to bubble wrap the unfinished Spencer St Station to make a point. Need I make the connection between the day, the point, universal design for e-simulation, for e-learning.
Segrave:	I think we sort of covered it because we’re saying that learning environments are very much like physical environments and whether they are virtual learning environments or only physical learning environments or blends of physical and virtual learning environments, they are environments and we seem to pay a fair bit of attention these days to designing accessible physical environments and the Waterfront Campus that we are sitting at the moment is an award winner. You can get anywhere in the building with no trouble at all and I think about the fact that a person in wheel chair can find their way through the building easily, so too can someone who is pushing a trolley with cakes, bikkies and coffee or someone who is carrying some heavy equipment. You could be anyone doing any number of things and benefit from the fact that someone sort they were making the building accessible only to people only in wheelchairs. So if we can carry that same approach through to the design of virtual learning environments even including the more complicated immersive simulation environments rather than what we just started at doing, which was focussing on web based environments then I think everyone will be better off, so rather than thinking about the Guide Dogs, an only vision impairment and rather than thinking bubble wrapping only for people who are blind, let’s think about designing a better environment for everyone.
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