This study aims to discover the perceptions of the visually disabled students at a
public university in Ankara, Turkey for attending and participating in an online
communication and discussion environment on the Web to access information and
establish social relationships with others. The purpose of this research is six folds:
(1) to investigate the current status of the visually disabled university students at a
public university in Ankara, Turkey for accessing and using computers and the
Internet, (2) to learn the kind of web sites that those students prefer to visit on the
Internet, (3) to discover the topics and subject they prefer to see in the Web forum that
will be designed and developed for them, (4) to identify the topics and subjects in
the Web forum that those visually disabled university students mostly visited for
reading, replying and adding new titles under them, (5) to show the effects of the
Web forum on the participants for accesing information and establishing social
relationships with others, (6) to learn the views and opinions of those visually
v
disabled university students about that Web forum after actively participating and
spending meaningful time in it.
In this study, mixed research method is used. The participants of this study were
the visually disabled students of a public university in Ankara, Turkey and found
by the researcher with the help of an academician colleague working in the Special
Education Department under the Faculty of Education in that university. In that
university, there were totally 39 visually disabled students and 36 of them accepted
to be enrolled in this study on a voluntary basis.
Within the scope of the study, &ldquo / EnabledForum - EngelsizForum&rdquo / was designed and
developed by the researcher as a communication and discussion environment for those
visually disabled university students for enabling them to establish social relationships
with others via submitted posts for the topics and subjects of the forum. Moreover,
this forum helped those visually disabled university students for accessing up-to-date
information from the Web based sources. Finally, the usage logs of the
&ldquo / EnabledForum - EngelsizForum&rdquo / helped the researcher to analyse and report which
topics and subjects were mostly interested by those visually disabled university
students.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:METU/oai:etd.lib.metu.edu.tr:http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12609841/index.pdf |
| Date | 01 August 2008 |
| Creators | Emiroglu, Bulent Gursel |
| Contributors | Ozden, Muhammet Yasar |
| Publisher | METU |
| Source Sets | Middle East Technical Univ. |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Ph.D. Thesis |
| Format | text/pdf |
| Rights | To liberate the content for public access |
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