The meeting was chaired by out-going chairman Glen Ashlock and current chairman John Goldthwaite who also acted as recorder. Personal information forms were distributed for changes of address and collected by David Jaffe. Forty-four people attended the meeting; thirty were SIG-11 members.
We had two well-qualified candidates for SIG vice-chair, Sharon Ferrell of St. Luke's Rehabilitation Institute in Spokane, Washington and Gary Downey of the Capper Foundation in Topeka, Kansas. Sharon Ferrell was elected vice chair and chair elect. Forty-five members voted out of our total membership of 202. This represented an improvement over last year’s participation by twenty-eight members. The members were asked if there were any problems with the electronic mail balloting processing and if everyone was contacted. No problems were noted and it was agreed to continue balloting by electronic mail.
Glen Ashlock expressed special thanks to Patty Benzing for her work in documenting all the SIG chair procedures and saving them on diskette. This was invaluable in keeping up with the tasks that need to be done over the year. Glen has passed the “Diskette” on to John. We thanked David Jaffe for keeping the SIG website, mailing list and listserv going and Sharon Ferrell for organizing this year’s Developers Forum.
The RESNA membership indicated SIG-11 currently has 238 members. Sharon and I reviewed the list after the meeting and found there were a large number of duplicate records and the actual membership was 202.
Sharon Ferrell discussed the Developer’s Forum and asked us to think about West Coast vendors we would like to see at next year’s Forum. John Goldthwaite is going to query the members by email about this and another topics. Sharon is forming a committee to plan the Forum for next year.
We discussed methods of improving vendor representation at RESNA 2001 and increasing attendance by local non-RESNA professionals, consumers and families. Members were also asked to think about vendors who should be approached about exhibiting next year. We will follow up on this topic via email.
Glen reviewed efforts to increase RESNA membership and SIG-11 membership particularly among the 900 people who have passed the ATP exam. We discussed methods of attracting new members. John suggested providing reference materials and training programs on the SIG-11 website and asked if people would submit documents or presentations. Dan Wilcott described the three tiered website proposed by Dennis Anson and it was suggested that the training materials be placed in the member only area of the site with some “teaser” material in the public area.
The group was queried about sponsoring a SIG-11 guest speaker for RESNA 2001. Kevin Caves commented that Dr. Marshall Raskin was the guest speaker last year and his session on technology for Learning Disability had been very successful. John Goldthwaite will query the members by email later in the summer about possible topics and speakers.
Rich Simpson led a discussion on Student and Local RESNA chapters. Several universities with Rehabilitation Engineering programs are interested in forming student chapters. It is hoped that the student chapters could be supported by student activity funds from the universities. The funds would be used for guest speakers or to support student projects. It was suggested that the student chapters could receive free copies of RESNA publications and an award given for most active chapter. Ray Castillo discussed local chapters for areas that have enough local professional to support one. Local chapters could assist the State Tech Act Projects in running regional technology conferences, perform outreach to special educators and work with local chapters of AOTA, ISSAC and other professional organizations.
David Jaffe has been approached to organize the research symposium for RESNA 2001 and asked the members to think about potential topics. He suggested Virtual Reality as a possible topic.
We discussed the possibility of providing the RESNA proceedings on CD or on the Internet like the CSUN conference proceedings. This would be a good item for the members-only section of the web site with the abstracts available publicly.
We closed with a short discussion of the SIG-11 Show and Tell session. Over a hundred people attended this year’s session. However, John felt he had to go outside the definition of Show and Tell sessions to fill all the time. Ray Grott reviewed the topics that would be appropriate. John Goldthwaite asked that more people contribute cases if we are going to have a session next year.
John Goldthwaite