Distance Learning Algebra Microsoft

RantWoman is storing this item about use of Microsoft Lync to enable a teacher from the Seattle area to work with students from the WA School for the Blind studying algebra.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2011/dec11/12-08Lync.mspx

RantWoman thinks, isn't that neat. Plus it's better PR than an item which came through a blindness list recently about Microsoft forgetting some accessibility points in a front-end for a product aimed at the academic market. RantWoman would predict that paying attention to accessibility for that product would be valuable for blind users in training, both in terms of academic work, in terms of supporting MS position in that plart of the market and in terms of the blind person being able to move smoothly to the job market.

But perhaps RantWoman should stick with algebra. For consumers of education-related issues, RantWoman's school experiences included:

--RantMom marching into school a couple times when the alphabet did not get RantWoman into the front row anyway to make sure that RantWoman could see the blackboard. RantWoman gets to be very grateful to have learned math that way, without worse issues. RantWoman is not particularly commenting on how this affected her social life. RantWoman was kind of a nerd anyway.

--Calculus class with a totally blind student who, RantWoman thinks, did his homework in Braille.

--Over RantWoman's wnderings through academia and professional life, she has met a fair number of very bright women with severe vision impairments who take a lot of math specifically because it requires less vision-intensive reading than other fields; these woman also excel in or become very interested in the topic. RantWoman herself still sometimes enjoys things like babbling about countable and uncountable infinity or other such esoterica that probably registers almost infinitesimally in the worlds of electronic profiling.