It has been a fairly interesting day today with a lot going on. Most of it was good, but some was not.
One of the good things that happened was that I got to meet someone on the east coast via video phone call who had some really good ideas on how to get more exposure for this story. She had quite a few excellent suggestions, and I have already acted on one of these, which was to look at a website called DeafRead and see if I could get this blog posted on there for more exposure. I submitted this blog, and they tell me it will take 24 hours to post. There were some other suggestions that I am going to be acting on fairly soon. More on those as they develop.
I don't remember who thought of it, but the idea came up that I should send the CART transcript to the instructor of the course which CART is the accommodation for. I figured that she would be in the best position to judge its completeness. I did that this afternoon and I was surprised at the response the professor gave it. She told me that a lot of the transcript was missing, wrong, or out of context. She said that it would take her an entire hour to reconstruct it, and that I would have a tough time passing the course if that was the only accommodation that I could rely on. She cc'd this response to the new coordinator. That was pretty strong criticism of CART, and probably impossible to remedy unless it is replaced with ... TypeWell. Imagine that! I wonder how the new coordinator is liking his new job now.
So for tomorrow's class with the above professor, I am going to record the lecture and we are going to create a TypeWell transcript from it. Then I will email the TypeWell transcript along with the CART transcript to the professor. I am hoping that this will be a defining comparison and will be the "last straw" as far as this CART service goes.
One of our interpreter/transcribers who was pushed out of CWU by the policies received a rather nasty letter from Charlotte Tullos. Charlotte didn't like the fact that this person was trying to contact a new student to express concerns about the situation. The letter was subtly threatening, if not directly so. It quoted certain statutes regarding privacy, which is truly ironic because it was Charlotte's office that gave out confidential information to the media last winter quarter! Some of us think that Charlotte is worrying about the wrong things and instead should be focusing on providing services to students. Who knows what goes on with Charlotte? I have long since given up trying to figure out the logic behind a lot of what has been going on for the past year. I'm thinking about writing my own letter to Charlotte. But I don't know if it would do a damn bit of good, considering that she and some of the other administrators have done so little for the deaf students at CWU.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
CART Criticized
Glenn wrote:
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4 comments:
It is disappointing and frustrating to see that you are still struggling with this situation at a 'professional' academic facility.
I admire you for your tenacity Glenn.
As a CART provider, I'm appalled and mortified on behalf of my profession. I hate to hear about incompetent CART providers producing substandard transcripts and jeopardizing the academic welfare of the students they're meant to serve. Also, from what you write in your blog, it appears as if the CART provider is only giving you a transcript, not even providing you with realtime output. Is that correct? If so, they're doubly misrepresenting themselves. They're clearly not able to present CART, and are ethically obligated to stop offering their skills to the University. I hope you find an accommodation that works well for you, whether it's replacing the current CART provider with a competent one or finding a competent notetaker (using C-print or Typewell) to at least get down the vital material of the class accurately, if not the verbatim content.
Plover, I did have a reader laptop in that classroom, but is difficult to tell if the reader output was the same as the transcript I received. I guess that I could have taken notes on specific phrases appearing on the reader laptop and looked for them later in the transcript. I just remember seeing lots of garbled phrases appearing on the reader laptop, as well as the CART person completely missing the comment I made in class when I was sitting three feet away from her.
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