curiositykilledthecatt: “An eye for an eye” only leads to more blindness...

The ability of blind people to replace one of their senses and do things just by finding another way has always fascinating me. I have been wondering how they can cook, walk around the city, buy something from a store and even read and write…

Many years ago I heard that they are able to discriminate some colors at the magazine images just by touching the paper. I also saw on TV a boy cycling normally and detecting obstacles from the return of the sound that a clicking tool was making (ultrasound hear like bats). These examples of their sharpened senses are admirable and confirm that they can find different ways to do regular things.

For the reasons mentioned above and for many more, I chose this topic for my project.

Working with my group gave me great pleasure because our cooperation was really affective. I don’t regret for not taking notice of the “Contract” we had. I really learned many things and ended up being more open-minded!

My main difficulty was to find material relative to the project. The information about that group is very limited and I had to search hard to find what I needed. Though, processing the material was very interesting because I had to be on alert picking over the useful parts and leaving outside the inrelevant ones. Analyzing information through discussions was the best part! In the end of the day, I was impressed to recall all the topics that popped out during our conversation.

Another difficulty I had was the “space restriction”. In the beginning I was very optimist that we could easily fill the pages… Too good to be true!!! The object of our research was not just to find ten pages of material relevant to blind people… What was asked from us was to come up with ten pages, dense in meaning, sum up the most important things (differences and similarities) and arrive at a conclusion with our thoughts, dilemmas and questioning. So finally, the greatest challenge was to fit in those pages. We had to discuss things again and again to find the essence and the rewrite over and over.

Afterwards, I mention some links for videos that I think could make us learn more about blind people more.

The first one is about inclusion of visually impaired and deaf students: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZ4OeOJ10W4&feature=related

The second one summarizes in four minutes the extravagation of human capabilities speaking about Helen Keller: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdTUSignq7Y&feature=channel

The third and the fourth show how important is for the governments to invest money on research the moment we know that Science makes great “jumps” in discoveries and advance: