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Embodiment and multimodality

Published: 02 November 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Students who are blind are typically one to three years behind their seeing counterparts in mathematics and science. We posit that a key reason for this resides in the inability of such students to access multimodal embodied communicative behavior of mathematics instructors. This impedes the ability of blind students and their teachers to maintain situated communication. In this paper, we set forth the relevant phenomenological analyses to support this claim. We show that mathematical communication and instruction are inherent embodied; that the blind are able to conceptualize visuo-spatial information; and argue that uptake of embodied behavior is critical to receiving relevant mathematical information. Based on this analysis, we advance an approach to provide students who are blind with awareness of their teachers' deictic gestural activity via a set of haptic output devices. We lay forth a set of open research question that researcher in multimodal interfaces may address.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ICMI '06: Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Multimodal interfaces
November 2006
404 pages
ISBN:159593541X
DOI:10.1145/1180995
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 02 November 2006

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  1. awareness
  2. embodiment
  3. gestures
  4. multimodal
  5. theory

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