Wikipedia:School and university projects/AAC

Masters' students from McGill University will be collaborating to revise and expand the article on Augmentative and alternative communication with the help of the project coordinator User:Poule, to whom questions can be addressed.

Much of the following information was blatantly copied from User:jbmurray's North of the Rio Grande project at UBC.

Students
Insert your username here, as I did above, using the format (see instructions below)



Non-students
We welcome participation and help from other Wikipedia editors. You may wish to add your username below.

AAC Sandbox page
Here is a page that you can use to practice, store information, draft sections etc. Just click this WP:SUP/AAC/Sandbox and edit the page as normal.

Step I

 * By February 1st, please register a username: using your real name is not recommended for privacy reasons. However, giving an email address, though optional in the registration process is a good idea, just in case you forget your password. You won't get any spam etc.  Once you have registered, send me a email with your username and list it above in the  "Members" section.


 * Get familiar with Wikipedia. You might find this tutorial helpful. Make some trial edits, however minor (but helpful!).  Try out the WP:Sandbox where you can fool around to your heart's content.  Demystify the process.  Leave behind any sense of intimidation.  As Wikipedia puts it, learn to be bold.  Learn basic editing skllls and look over some of the material and resources listed below.


 * Start thinking about some of the core policies in encyclopedia writing: most notably, unlike papers and essays, everything we add needs to be sourced to another, reliable source (see verifiability and reliable sources), and we cannot insert our own opinions into the text (see WP:No Original Research and neutral point of view). Since we are going to need to reference everything we add to the article, it is a good idea to add a citation tool to help you.  To do this go to "my preferences" at the top of the page; select the "Gadget" tab, check "Reftools" and save.  You can now easily cite books, journal articles, etc etc using the blue button on the far right of the blue editing menu bar.

Step II
Sign up for responsibility for article sub-sections. Some sections will need to be longer and more detailed than others; so some sections would benefit from multiple editors, while others probably only need one person. You will figure some of this out as you go along, so it is fine for this list to change as things go along.


 * Introduction including definition: Poule
 * Team:
 * Unaided AAC: Diadochokinetic
 * Aided AAC:
 * Low Tech: jesszahav
 * High Tech: liyush


 * Symbols (e.g. objects/photos/bliss/pcs/tangible etc): Jerseylicious
 * Organization of symbols (messaging e.g. core/fringe, activity based):salsa1981
 * Access: capucine2
 * Rate enhancement strategies: Pam_pull_MOOSE
 * Specific groups of AAC users
 * Cerebral Palsy: willow1984
 * Intellectual impairment (including those with behaviour problems): NaLa3
 * Autism:Phlip phlop
 * Developmental coordination disorder: GoodbyeRosie
 * Visual impairment: Bleuette
 * Aphasia: Phlegmily
 * Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis: Karyna
 * Brain Stem stroke including locked in syndrome: peanut butter sandwich
 * Degenerative conditions (Parkinson's disease, Multiple Sclerosis): hummingbird321 (PD), Yamsey (MS)
 * Dementia: Isladepascua
 * Traumatic Brain Injury: hourlate_dollarshort
 * Challenging Behaviours


 * Users involvement/experience:
 * Effect on speech development: astiquebec
 * Early Language Learning using AAC:backrower2, backrower1
 * Literacy: Chocohol
 * History of AAC: gir711
 * Multicultural aspects: Vinnieb101
 * Outcomes: Allasork, slpmom

Things to consider when doing research and writing:


 * This is an encyclopedia article, and it needs to summarize the best current information about AAC for a general audience (not professionals, clients, families), including avoiding too much technical jargon. You can find out more here WP:MOSMED  One thing that can help is to "link" more difficult words to other articles here in WP. For example if I type a word with two square brackets around it (like this Aphasia ), it makes a nice blue word Aphasia that links to the article about the subject.
 * Everything we include needs to come from a reliable source. In our case, this means journal articles (particularly review articles about AAC published in scholarly journals) and books. We could also probably include information from websites of organizations such as ISAAC, CASLPA, ASHA etc) though ideally this should kept to a minimum, and better sources found whenever possible. You can find out more about this here WP:MEDRS and WP:SOURCES. It is preferable that a variety of sources are used for the article.
 * This encyclopedia is a global one: it is going to be important to write it from a global, multicultural perspective, not just from a North American one. We need to think about including material relevant to people in India, Uganda, UK, Australia etc.

Resources

 * The five pillars of Wikipedia
 * Getting started
 * How to edit a page
 * The perfect article
 * Article development
 * Good article criteria

Where to edit
Jesszahav, liyush, phlipphlop, chocohol, jerseylicious have asked me some really good questions on my talkpage and I have decided to answer here for the benefit of all! By the way I am thrilled to see that some of you are getting going with a few edits here and there. Jesszahav in particular started a nice little clean up of the current article. See what she did by comparing the two versions shown here.  What they asked was where they should be doing the editing, on the actual article page here Augmentative and alternative communication or on the project page above. First sorry for the confusion, and thanks for asking the question. My preference is that you edit the article itself. I will be around to help with any picky wiki formatting and other issues, so there is no need to worry about things like that. If you are feeling a bit insecure and/or want to do things over a few days/weeks then use the WP:SUP/AAC/Sandbox (not this page) to store your material (could be rough notes or whatever) and then when you are ready, you can move the material into the article proper.

Following an equally good question from Jesszahav on my talkpage, I am going to add section headers to the article, (and to the Sandbox) so that everybody knows were to put their material. On the article itself (not the sandbox), I have hidden the headings with codes so that they won't be visible to the general public until you are ready to reveal them along with the sections you are contributing.

How do the hiding codes work, you ask? Well, in the screenshot below, you will see the edit screen of the AAC article at the moment I write. Note the at the end .  These are the codes to the rate enhancement strategies heading. Other hidden headings are also visible as well as one that isn't it. In fact, anything typed between those two sequences is hidden.



When you add material for a section, as I did below (with blah blah), you should delete the. The section heading (and your text) will magically appear in the article when you hit the save page button. Here is how the edit screen looks with the hiding codes removed.



But don't worry about this; if you make a mistake, I or somebody will be along to fix it up. --Poule (talk) 14:46, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

Images
Where can I get pictures of some high-tech AAC devices (the most popular ones) and would it be ok to take a picture of a brochure I have and post something from that brochure? Liyush (talk) 02:16, 20 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Great question. Images are complicated because of copyright issues. We can't use pictures that we find on the internet, nor take photos of brochures. We can use pictures from this website http://commons.wikimedia.org/ I had a quick look and think that one of these sign language pictures might be interesting to include  But we can take our own photos of devices/boards etc and then upload them. If you let me know what sort of pictures you would like to include, I could bring some devices, boards, books, etc to class so you could take photos of them. I will also write to ISAAC and see if have some photographs/pictures that they would be willing to release.  --Poule (talk) 13:14, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Combining refs
I have been asked what you do if you are citing the same source several times, and you want the reference to appear only once in the reference list. The answer can be found here WP:REFNAME; you can see that this is what Jesszahav‎ did here to combine the refs. But don't worry about this unless you want to. I am happy to fix up this sort of stuff.--Poule (talk) 20:34, 25 March 2009 (UTC)