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218 12 Collaborative Knowledge Building for Accessibility in Academia Antti Raike Learning opportunities for students with hearing impairments1 in higher education have increased in recent decades. For an individual Deaf student, the challenge of entering academia is the equivalent of Bruce Lee’s challenges in the film Enter the Dragon. Indeed, scientific thinking, multiple viewpoints, and diversity of the student body in higher education are arduous tasks to every student’s epistemological assumptions . Consequently, university faculties need more evidence-based information about how Deaf students as a cultural and linguistic subgroup of students with hearing impairment make sense of the curricula and cultural diversity of academia. This chapter discusses the development of a personal epistemology by Deaf students and the issue of valid and legitimate knowledge production in higher education. In philosophy, the term epistemology means a theory of knowledge. In sociology (and other fields), the term refers to the use of scientific methods, which lead to the acquisition of sociological knowledge. Here epistemology refers to the nature and justification of socially shared knowledge (i.e., social constructivism) and is associated with the structure of meaning. The term ontology is interpreted as the expression of ideas in artifacts; nevertheless, the distinction between ontology and epistemology is blurred. I investigate connections between Deaf students’ evolving epistemological beliefs , terming them personal epistemology (PE) and collaborative knowledge building (KB). PE is difficult to evaluate, whereas the KB can be evaluated to some extent by the artifacts produced by students during knowledge-building activities. The knowledge artifacts that students learn to use, modify, or create are laden with social and cultural values; once established, these artifacts (technical tools, signs, language, machines, websites, and script activities) persist as the structures of mediation. The metaphor of a cable illustrates the connection or integration between PE and KB (Lewis-Williams, 2002), where each strand of the cable represents one research-supported explanation to connect the two facets of human knowledge as seen in the form of artifacts. To support this description, I integrate the latest “foundations Collaborative Knowledge Building for Accessibility 219 and outcomes of Deaf cognition” (Marschark & Hauser, 2008) and recent theories of cognitive psychology and development with design research methodologies (Krippendorff , 2006). This integration is grounded in the major concepts of theorists such as Popper, Polanyi, and Vygotsky, as well as in modern activity theory. Furthermore, recent social constructivist theories of knowledge emphasize situational dependence and continuous evolution along active interference with the world and its subjects and objects (Heylighen, 2000). An actor constructs reality socially with peers, and this process is value laden; the objective and value-free actor does not exist. The processes of perception and thinking are individually oriented, but the construction process involves cultural artifacts and therefore becomes social. The social constructions of reality are neither personal nor technical. The patterns of externalization and internalization constitute the social construction of reality as the shared epistemology (Boyer, 1997; Crossman & Devisch, 2002). The view of knowledge as abstract conceptual artifacts created by humans to specify the relationships of other objects, in the form of explanations or theories, originates from Popper (1972, 1973; in Bereiter, 2002, and Champion, 2010, respectively). Our main focus is on world 3 artifacts, the products of the human mind; however, to provide a context, it is important to introduce Popper’s idea of three ontological worlds or domains: • World 1 (W1): the world of physical objects and events, including biological entities • World 2 (W2): the world of mental objects and events • World 3 (W3): the world of the products of the human mind A physical object, such as a published academic paper, belongs to W1 and contains information that belongs to W3. Two documents with identical contents are two separate W1 objects containing identical W3 contents. When read by two people, they give rise to two distinct and private sets of W2 events, based on W1 brain processes. If two people attempt to communicate their understanding of the document (in spoken, signed, or written form), the contents of their speech, signing, or text/print belong to W3. However, the communication involves W2 in the form of thoughts and intentions and W1 in the form of brain processes and the sound waves, visual gestures, or the marks on paper. The contents of the communication may differ from the original contents of the document (e.g., because of imperfect understanding); nevertheless, there will be objective relationships between the original contents and the modified contents (Popper 1972, 1973; in Bereiter, 2002, and...

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