what are the precise differences between children and adults?
Ian Webb wrote:
> The human race is extremely diverse in terms of physical, sensory, and
> cognitive functionalities, as well as possession of skills and abilities,
> education, and cultural mores. There are very clear differences between
> children, adults, and elderly people; there are also gender differences and
> racial groups have similarities and differences. In addition, certain
> people are considered sufficiently far from the “norm” to be classified as
> “disabled”.
>
> Researchers and developers often seem to forget that people actually have a
> wide range of individual characteristics, including disabilities such as
> impaired dexterity, mobility, vision, and hearing. Some users may be unable
> to speak, or have other communication or language dysfunction, or simply be
> functionally illiterate. Although users with these characteristics present
> particularly interesting problems for designers, traditionally they have
> been the remit of rehabilitation engineers, mainstream practitioners often
> seeing an interest in disabled users as a fringe activity of a charitable
> rather than professional nature.
>
> A hard distinction between able bodied and disabled users, however, is a
> mistake similar to the false distinction between “naive” and “expert” users.
> If we represent human beings as points in a multidimensional space, whose
> axes represent physical and mental characteristics, those who are
> categorised as “disabled” simply have functionalities on certain dimensions
> of this space which differ from the average by an often fairly arbitrary
> amount. Every human being has a set of abilities and characteristics, some
> which can be described as “ordinary” and some, which are very obviously
> extra-ordinary. People move about this space whilst growing up and
> eventually growing old. Sickness, accident, lack of sleep or even plain
> drunkenness can substantially change ones position in this space, and people
> also move about this space from hour to hour if not minute to minute. In
> addition high workload, stress and panic can produce profound changes in the
> physical and cognitive abilities, particularly if users are not trained to
> cope with such environments.
>
> If we are to our jobs properly than we must acknowledge the point at which a
> person is on the scale. If this means using a label then as long as it is
> not offensive then lets do that.
> ----------------------
> Ian Webb - Development Officer - DISinHE Centre
> Tel: 01382 345598 Fax: 01382 345509
> [log in to unmask]
> http://www.disinhe.ac.uk
--
Dr Priscilla Alderson
Reader, Social Science Research Unit
Institute of Education
University of London
18 Woburn Square, London WC1H 0NS
tel: 0171 612 6396
fax: 0171 612 6400
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