New technologies that are changing our concept of the learner

The same digital technologies that allow us to examine the biology of learning and to discover and apply the power of new media also allow us to recognize the profound and differentiated (rather than general) ways in which individual learners differ from each other. Continuing the pioneering work of Gardner, Sternberg, and others, this avenue of research continues to show that there is not one "typical" learner with a limited number of variants but instead a great variety of learners - as many as the interactions among modules and architectures in our brains.

In addition, the more differentiated use of media for instruction reveals that individuals who are defined as "learning disabled" within print-based learning environments are not the same individuals who are defined as "learning disabled" within video- or audio-based learning environments. Such revelations splinter the old categorical divisions between "disability" and "ability" and create new descriptors that explicitly recognize the interaction between student and environment in the definition of strengths.

As a result, educators take more notice of the "unusual" strengths of individuals with disabilities - e.g. the prodigious feats of visual memory in the autistic child, or the extraordinary capacity to recognize facial expression in aphasics. In the same context, myriad differences emerge between learners formerly classified in the category of "normal" learners. Against this backdrop, individuals with disabilities fall along a spectrum of difference and the convention of the "regular" student disappears as a normative model.