Map Making 101

Monday March 27th – This morning Dean Johnson, the manager of the Children’s Mobility department came and talked to us about maps. Making maps can be useful in a couple of different ways. The most obvious is to use one in teaching a specific route or area. But maps are very useful in teaching broader special concepts and discovering how a person learns and interprets the world around them. We talked a lot about how O&M is an educational process with a continuum of skills. People can easily miss steps along the way or have “splinter skills” so it’s best not to make assumptions about a person’s skill set. Dean also showed us some of the tools they have available to work on these spatial mapping skills.

We then made up an imaginary client and went into town to look at a route to teach this client. It was an interesting task for me as our “client” was not only a long cane user but was also profoundly deaf (not uncommon in the blind population). So much of what I would normally teach with our clients has to do with relying on hearing, so I had to get creative.

Today in the dorm we were joined by two new clients here for a week of “scanning training” they are working with an O&M instructor and the Occupational therapist to learn strategies to best use their residual vision in daily life. A middle aged postal worker and an elderly person they are both with the Aquired Brain Injury program.

After lunch we went into town and spent 1.5 hours scoping out an area which we later would make a map for. We each were assigned a particular type of vision loss to make our map for. Once we returned to campus we made our maps. We learned about “therma form” which is a process where you use a black marker on special paper to draw your map. It then gets processed through a machine which looks something like a copy machine and any thing black on the page gets raised up, turning it into a tactile map. Pretty cool!

In the evening we forced ourselves to the gym again where I attempted to use the scale to weigh myself. I had to convert kilograms into pounds which made it easy to lie to myself… surely I just miscalculated!
Ron’s Aussie for the Day “Ocka” (Ah-Ker) which is like a redneck.