ATTECDEDHAM

Advertisement Table of Contents ADVERTISEMENT California Gold Rush Summary & Analysis The Big Picture: Who, What, When, Where & (Especially) Why The Gold Rush and the American Dream The most significant legacy of the California Gold Rush can be found in its utter transformation of the American Dream. In the early nineteenth century, the United States was an overwhelmingly rural society, and the prevailing republican ideology of the time reflected the country's agrarian orientation. Brands has argued, "California presented to people a new model for the American dream—one where the emphasis was on the ability to take risks, the willingness to gamble on the future."8 Ever since, the American Dream has been less about taming the market than about exploiting it, less about achieving a competency than about enjoying a fortune won by seizing the main chance. © 2010-2012 Knowledge by Design, Inc.

Advertisement Table of Contents ADVERTISEMENT California Gold Rush Summary & Analysis The Big Picture: Who, What, When, Where & (Especially) Why The Gold Rush and the American Dream The most significant legacy of the California Gold Rush can be found in its utter transformation of the American Dream. In the early nineteenth century, the United States was an overwhelmingly rural society, and the prevailing republican ideology of the time reflected the country's agrarian orientation. Brands has argued, "California presented to people a new model for the American dream—one where the emphasis was on the ability to take risks, the willingness to gamble on the future."8 Ever since, the American Dream has been less about taming the market than about exploiting it, less about achieving a competency than about enjoying a fortune won by seizing the main chance.

First, even when the features of devices were well-matched to the needs and abilities of users, the devices were not always environmentally useful for the system operator. Perhaps there was a question of portability. Perhaps there was no one in the potential system operator's daily life who was able to support the person adequately in using the system effectively. Perhaps there were mixed attitudes and expectations on the part of people around the person using the system. There were any number of possibilities.

Though the needs and abilities of students and the features of systems of assistive technology tools were well-matched, systems were frequently developed with insufficient up-front attention to the environments in which the system of tools was expected to be used, and to the naturally occurring tasks in which the person was expected to participate by using the tools within the identified environments. As I began to watch more closely what was being done by my colleagues, it became increasingly clear that those who were getting higher rates of success for users and lower rates of device abandonment were those who routinely considered the person within the context provided by the environments and the tasks.