ichard Wanderman is an internationally-known educational technology
consultant and teacher who specializes in the area of learning disabilities.
His interest in this area comes from the fact that he himself has dyslexia,
a learning disability which makes reading difficult. He says that he is
a successful dyslexic adult and part of the reason for his success is that
he uses computers and and tools such as HyperCard to organize his life
and express his ideas.
Richard received a Master of Fine Arts in 1980 from the University
of Oregon. He has taught high school and college courses on using computers.
He has been a consultant for schools, non-profit organizations, and companies
in the areas of curriculum design and implementation, teacher training,
and helping bring more awareness of the role technology can play in the
lives of students with learning disabilities. He has written for the trade
press on the computer in special education, and has made numerous lectures,
presentations, and keynote addresses.
Richard has led the HyperCard in Education panel at numerous Macworld
Expos, and has led hundreds of workshops concerning technology and learning
disabilities, including many on HyperCard development.
His web site, LD Resources
(formerly called Poor Richard's Publishing) contains numerous resources
for the learning disabilities community and a nice collection of HyperCard
shareware stacks he has made.
Richard's wife Anne teaches at a private high school for students with
learning disabilities. They live in rural northwest Connecticut.
When did you start using computers?
Just after graduating from college I also started coming to terms with the fact that I have a learning disability (dyslexia) and that my problems with reading and writing had directed much of my life. I spent two years working hard on my literacy skills (while holding a faculty position at the University of Oregon!) and at the end of those two years I discovered how useful computers might be as writing tools.
What was your first computer?
It was an early IBM PC running MS DOS, Wordstar, and various other little writing programs. I loved what that machine did for my writing.
How did it help your writing?
It's very much like what working with clay does for sculpture as opposed to working with stone -- you can make mistakes and fix them easily. The sculpting and writing process is much more fluid when you can compose and edit at will without having to think about the limitations of the media.
Were other people with similar problems using computers?
No; after making calls and writing letters I found that very few people with learning problems were using computers as writing tools. Since it was so meaningful for me, I thought I'd better go to some national conference to tell people about it. I started to make a name for myself as the "self-made LD (learning disabilities) technology guy."
When did you get a Mac?
When Apple came out with the Lisa I was right there at the local computer
store checking it out. I thought that if they ever came out with a computer
like that which I could afford (the Lisa originally cost $10,000), I'd
buy it. I had an easy time with DOS and WordStar (ugh!) but the Lisa was
appealing.
I was down at the West Coast Computer Faire a year later (1984) and
at the Apple booth the original Macintosh team was demoing their new machine.
They had a big mock-up of a 128K Mac with a rear projection system built
in. A person stood at a little podium with a real Mac built in and did
work and it showed on the "big Mac" screen. The Apple store in
Eugene, Oregon didn't even have one yet so I hadn't seen it.
After sitting through a demo, talking with Bill Atkinson (I had no
idea who he was at that time), and various other Apple folks, I went up
to Mike Murray (the first marketing manager for the Mac division) and asked
him if he'd loan me a Mac to take to Alaska for a presentation I was doing
up there for the University of Alaska at Anchorage. He did better than
that; he gave me one! He had it Fed Exed to my house in Eugene and it was
there when I returned home from the Faire. I had no second disk drive but
I was in heaven!
After returning from my presentation in Alaska (where the Mac was very
popular) I started the Eugene Macintosh Users Group and kept it going until
moving to Connecticut in 1986.
I moved to Connecticut to build the first Macintosh lab in the country
in a school for dyslexic high school kids. During my time at that school
I was contacted by our local Apple K-12 (kindergarten through grade 12)
sales rep who helped me contact various folks in Cupertino for support.
I then started doing talks for Apple corporate on how the Macintosh might
be used to help people with learning problems.
How did dyslexic students benefit from the Mac lab?
Our lab was not unlike labs in other schools. We stressed writing and
the writing process and used lots of different software to enable this
process. We also stressed telecommunications and had kids sending and receiving
e-mail to/from all over the world (we were an early K-12 AppleLink user).
The Mac's ease of use meant that kids who had very low self-esteem
and didn't think of themselves as learners could actually get some writing
done and begin to see the difference between their learning disabilities
and their intelligence. The Macintosh allowed the computer and "computer
literacy" to fall into the background and the content to be the focus.
In time, the more writing the kids did the better they got. I have
a number of articles documenting this process at my web site.
When did you begin using HyperCard?
I was in the audience at the 1987 Boston Macworld Expo when Bill Atkinson
demoed HC for the very first time to a public audience. It was an amazing
event; like a religious experience in many ways.
I had been working with the beta version of HyperCard (which they had
called WildCard) for about a month before that demo. I got it from some
developer friends and was pretty clueless about it but knew it was going
to be a very interesting program.
After the Atkinson demo and after I got a copy of Danny Goodman's first
book, I went to work developing stacks. A couple of teacher friends of
mine and I started doing stories for kids and we did about five of them
over the rest of that first summer. I did a series of stacks to help organize
the school I was then teaching in.
Did you attend the Boston Macworld Expo the following year?
Yes; in fact I found myself demoing HyperCard in the Apple booth. I was demoing my first attempt at a big database: a collection of lots of information about learning disabilities. There was great interest in that stack at the Expo including from Bill Atkinson himself.
You had a chance to talk with Bill Atkinson?
Yes, he spent a lot of time at my little kiosk talking with me about
what I was doing with HyperCard and how he could improve it in its next
release. I told him less about what he needed to do to improve HyperCard;
more about what he needed to do to attempt to preserve all the energy and
enthusiasm that was out there for his product.
To this day, I believe that one of the underlying reasons HC is such
a great piece of software is because of the vision and softness of Bill
Atkinson. He is truly a great guy, not just a phenomenal developer. After
my talk with him I was floating on a cloud for days.
Was there any recognition of HyperCard's first birthday?
Apple had a one-year birthday party for HC in the ballroom of a big hotel. It was one of the best Apple parties I've ever been to: great food, music, dancing, and a lot of fun. I still have the t-shirt and a few other goodies from that party.
So obviously you continued working with HyperCard.
Yes, I kept making stacks and learning over the next few years. I started building stacks for my wife who is a language arts teacher in the same school I started the Macintosh lab in. I also started spending a lot of time on AOL downloading shareware stacks and seeing what other people had been doing with HC.