RIT Awarded $95,000 Grant for Cyber-Community Summit

National leaders in educational services for deaf and hard-of-hearing students will be part of the three-day conference

E. William Clymer, associate director of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf’s Center on Access Technology at Rochester Institute of Technology, has been awarded a $95,188 grant from the National Science Foundation’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure for a “Summit to Create a Cyber-Community to Advance Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Individuals in STEM” (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics).

Attending the summit will be 50 leaders in the field of support service provision for postsecondary deaf and hard-of-hearing students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) from across the U.S. The primary outcome of this conference will be a report on the current state of online remote interpreting and captioning for deaf and hard-of-hearing students. Additionally, the principals will prepare a recommendation report specifying the characteristics of a multimedia cyberinfrastructure to provide remote communication support for deaf and had-of-hearing students in mainstream STEM classrooms.

The three-day conference, scheduled for June 26-28, is timed to follow the 2008 International Symposium on Educational Technology and Education of the Deaf, scheduled for June 23-25 at RIT (http://www.rit.edu/~techsym).

“Leading the way in innovative technological teaching methods for deaf and hard-of-hearing students is at the core of NTID’s mission,” says Dr. T. Alan Hurwitz, RIT vice president for NTID and CEO/dean of NTID. “It’s very exciting to be working with colleagues throughout the campus and around the country to benefit student learning.”

Jorge Diaz-Herrera, dean of RIT’s Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences, is co-principal investigator on the project. James J. DeCaro, former NTID dean and current director of both the Center on Access Technology and Postsecondary Education Network (PEN)-International, and Richard Ladner, Boeing Professor in Computer Science and Engineering in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and adjunct professor in the departments of Electrical Engineering and Linguistics at the University of Washington, will also be key participants in the Summit.

Rochester Institute of Technology is internationally recognized as a leader in computing, engineering, imaging technology, fine and applied arts, and for providing unparalleled support services for students with hearing loss. RIT is home to the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, where more than 1,100 students with hearing loss from around the world study, live and socialize with 14,700 hearing students on RIT’s Rochester, N.Y., campus. U.S. News and World Report has consistently ranked RIT among the nation’s leading comprehensive universities.

Web address: http://www.rit.edu/NTID.


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