I did a presentation on web resources for Aspergers last week at ASCON (ASpergers CONnections), a support group for parents and partners. I attached it here: ASDPresentation_2.
If you need more information about ASCON please contact Avril Meaker at ameaker@telkomsa.net or Jana Forrester at janafor@telkomsa.net.
I spoke at Autism Action’s event today, at St Cyprians School. Herewith a couple of important links:
For everyone that supported me today: THANK YOU. I am available at adi@aspie.co.za if you would like to make contact.
The usual disclaimer: The speech was done in my private capacity and what I said did not necessarily reflect all members of the Wallpapering Society’s views.
http://www.mousetrial.com/autism_software_database.php
A collection of links to publishers, developers and distributors of software that you might find useful for kids with Autism.
http://www.raisinghorizons.com/
A disability training division is devoted to developing, and offering, training materials to assist people with learning disabilities.
http://edu.kde.org
Educational Software based on the KDE technologies, open source & free, for students, parents, children, teachers, adults
http://www.softpedia.com/
An encyclopaedia of free software downloads. Lots of educational stuff.
http://www.inkululeko.co.za
The guys that are going to help us setup the Linux lab and assist with training, support etc. The team consists mostly of people previously associated or working at Shuttleworth’s tuxLabs project
http://www.theingots.org
The INGOT certificates provide a motivating progression route from complete beginner to professional level expertise for users of ICT in a wide range of contexts including commonly used productivity tools found in the modern workplace such as word processing, presenting and searching for information.
Change history :
- Originall published: 23 March 2008 -
I’m currently researching what one would deploy on computers in a Linux lab at a school for kids with autism/asperger’s (all ages). I am finding the most amazing things. I need to log it somewhere as time goes by, to refer back to. So, this is very much a post-in-progress. Please feel free to comment more links (I’ll include them in the main post).
- Updated: 31 March 2008: added a couple of very useful links that came up in Autism Western Cape’s March edition of the Spectrum News.
I’m adding these as I find them. Please feel free to put more in the comments section!
“It is important to keep in mind that any educational intervention should be aimed at the acquisition of skills, not trying to enforce an arbitrary standard of normalcy. Efforts should not be aimed at the undesirable and impossible goal of trying to make autistic individuals non-autistic. Instead, education should be aimed at addressing the significant disabilities many of us face with the goal of improving quality of life. ” Ari Ne’emam
“The primary goal of intervention is to enable children to form a sense of their own personhood.” Stanley I. Greenspan
“Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.” Socrates
“Don’t pity me or try to cure or change me. If you could live in my head for just one day, you might weep at how much beauty I perceive in the world with my exquisite senses. I would not trade one small bit of that beauty, as overwhelming and powerful as it can be, for “normalcy.” Anonymous
“A person who is broken becomes whole partially because the people around her decide that she is.” Joss Whedon
“If love is deep, much can be accomplished.” - Shinichi Suzuki
“Who the heck cares about hand-flapping when we should all care about having our kids included in our communities?” - Estee Klar
“It seems that for success in science and art a dash of autism is essential.”– Hans Asperger
~
If a man knows more than others, he becomes lonely.
Loneliness does not come from having no people about one,
but from being unable to communicate to others the things that seem important to oneself,
or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible. - Carl Jung
~
“Instead of attributing all difficulties in communication to the autistic person’s inability to speak your language,
why not embark on the adventure of working with the autistic person
to learn to understand each other’s languages? - Jim Sinclair
~
“Autistic empathy is different from what the typical person experiences. It is no less real, no less deep or emotional.
And I would argue that it’s no less useful to society. Some people give hugs; others get the tissue.
Otherwise you end up with people blowing their noses on their sleeves, which is unbecoming and very untidy.”
- Asperger Square 8
~
“Think of an absentminded professor who can find a cure for cancer but not his glasses in the mess on his desk.
These are the inventors, creators, poets - the people who think creative thoughts
because they don’t think like everyone else.” - Martha Denckla
~
“How many of the emotional and social problems autistic
people have are actually related to being autistic?” – Amanda Baggs
~
“It was always very hard for me to judge whether a person was sad or happy - just as hard as it would be to judge whether this glass is smiling or sulking. If you can’t perceive that, you end up living in a world in which you hardly realize that other people exist. I lived for myself in a world full of glasses of water. Today I live in a world of water glasses where I can recognize whether those glasses are smiling or sulking.” –Axel Brauns
~
“From my clinical experience I consider that children and adults with Aspergers Syndrome
have a different, not defective, way of thinking. ” – Tony Attwood
~
“The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.“
- Albert Einstein
~
“While they take money to create a world without us in it,
we don’t get funding to assist us to live in the world as it is.” – Amanda Baggs
~
“It may be that the social deficits which are the cornerstone of an autism spectrum diagnosis tell us far more about the person who made them markers for such a diagnosis than about the child whom he observes.
- Lucy Blackman
~
When I do an equipment simulation in my imagination or work on an engineering problem, it is like seeing it on a videotape in my mind. I can view it from any angle, placing myself above or below the equipment and rotating it at the same time. I don’t need a fancy graphics program that can produce three-dimensional design simulations. I can do it better and faster in my head..”
– Temple Grandin – Thinking in Pictures
~
“Eagerness to be like others didn’t make Pinocchio real — it turned him into a donkey! And eagerness by parents to cure autism or retardation or compulsiveness will not drive great distances toward the final solution to the actual problem.
Because the person who believes “I will be real when I am normal,” will always be almost a person, but will never make it all the way.
- Eugene Marcus
~
“In terms of work I’ve always had a Bad Attitude in that I won’t work anywhere which requires me to work strict hours or follow a dress code. I don’t know if that’s an Asperger’s thing or not,
I think it’s just being reasonable.” - Bram Cohen
~
“If I did not have my work, I would not have any life.” – Temple Grandin
~
“Nothing about us without us” – Human rights slogan
~
When autistic adults - all of us, not just some of us - get to live good lives,
it benefits autistic children, who will have one more possibility of conceptualizing themselves as having a future.
When autistic children - all of them, not just some of them - have hope for their future
beyond just a ‘cure’, it benefits future autistic adults.” - Amanda Baggs
Tools on the web:
Examples of excellent blogs related to Asperger’s:
Examples of articles related to Asperger’s and ASD on Wikipedia:
Asperger Communities & Discussion Forums:
Examples of videos related to Asperger’s & other ASD:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKzY3u_cUhkTony Attwood’s site: http://www.tonyattwood.com.au
Books on Asperger’s: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:amazon.com+aspergers (Click on “Look Inside”)
Tips on searching effectively on Google:
The Autistic Rights Movement:
Temple Grandin:
The Autism Speaks controversy:
Online questionnaires:
South African websites (to be amended):