Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

The Beijing School for the Blind dates back to the 19th century, back in the days where the colonial presence was strong. The facilities are impressive, more or less brand new. The principal of the school, proudly showed off plans to expand the campus over the next few years, with high quality architectural site drawings that would have looked perfectly in place in Chicago. Our team toured the school. Like many of the agencies we visited, China is also experiencing a significant increase in kids with multiple disabilities. So, in Hong Kong and in Beijing we saw sensory stimulation rooms for these children. These were quite familiar to folks like Frank Simpson of the Lavelle School in New York and Miki Jordan of the Junior Blind of America in Los Angeles. We visited the English language classroom. We enjoyed getting a chance to chat with a couple of the students who were impressively fluent. We were treated to a funny skit about Chinese tour guides for the Olympics. As we headed ou...

After celebrating the big Hadley birthday, we got down to visiting several nonprofit organizations that assist the blind. Our first stop was the Fuzhou School for the Blind. When we arrived the students were gathered to greet us. We started with musical numbers. We arrived in China just at the end of the Paralympics. So, paralympic athletes were a big deal. Turns out, three students of the school were on the silver-medal winning blind soccer team (the Paralympic site described it as Football 5-a-Side ). So, we were able to visit with them and congratulate them on their achievement. Hearing that Jimmy Young is a soccer player and coach, they invited us out to play! I vounteered to pair up with Jimmy. Soccer has always been my sport, and I even played collegiate soccer (ok, for Caltech, so that's not saying a huge amount)! First, we played sighted, but that's too much of an advantage. Normally, sighted people have blindfolds when they want to play. So, we closed our eye...