Biography for Lawrie Phipps

Dear All
at the last EOWG meeting Andrew asked if I could post a short note about my
involvement in the EOWG, I'm happy to answer any questions from the short
piece I've written below.
Lawrie

I manage a JISC (Joint Informations Systems Committee) Service
(www.jisc.ac.uk) called TechDis (www.techdis.ac.uk - but being redeveloped).

The TechDis remit is to support education institutions in providing access
for those with physical, cognitive or learning disabilities to learning and
teaching, research and administration across the post 16 education sector,
through the use of Information and Communication Technology.
At the moment new Government Legislation (Special Educational Needs and
Disability Act
http://www.legislation.hmso.gov.uk/acts/acts2001/20010010.htm) is a major
driver in the UK education sector. The legislation effectively brings
education into line with other disability legislation that has been law
since 1994. 
Our perspective applies to how technology can be used to access education
and students and staff can access technology. A briefing paper on the
legislation can be found at (http://www.techdis.ac.uk/news/smbp15.pdf)
Unfortunately we are a currently a small team 5 staff (2 look after a
product database at http://www.niad.sussex.ac.uk/) and have over 800
academic institutions in our community across England, Northern Ireland,
Wales and Scotland. The service replaced the DISinHE project (although we
still have good contacts from that team who moved on).
An additional problem for us is the perspective of our community. We are the
only disability based service in education, funded by education, that covers
the whole of the UK and all post 16 education. This opens us up to a lot of
enquiries that are not really in our remit to respond to - such as funding
issues.
Our main activity in the past year as been awareness raising, but we have
also commissioned research and primed projects. most of which will be coming
to fruition over the next several months.

Please feel free to contact me with any questions (although I will be on
Holiday from 2nd February until 11th February)

Received on Thursday, 31 January 2002 07:52:52 UTC