Future of Adult Ed in the New Digital World

I attended this event at Virginia Commonwealth University a couple of weeks ago, convening a group of adult education practitioners and researchers to consider how technology will affect the field of adult education. The keynotes by Steve Reder of Portland State University, who led the Longitudinal Study of Adult Learning and is now developing the Learner Web, and me, are now posted on the site.

SixthSense Technology

Dennis Porter sent me this amazing video about work happening at MIT to merge computing with the physical world. It's quite mind boggling!

Goodbye Butts in Chairs

Can't resist this one - to the tune of Candle in the Wind. Thank you, Gina Lobacarro, for posting this on the New Digital World Ning site.

More on mLearning

Mlearning seems to be the topic that is getting the focus of ed tech attention these days. Cell phones in the classroom, or no cell phones in the classroom. Adult education doesn't have the same constraints as K12, so issues like cyber-bullying aren't so relevant for adults. But this blogpost by Rob De Lorenzo made me think, again, about how our ways of learning are evolving so fast, and how education is not keeping up.

Why do we call looking up information "cheating?" We look up information all the time. When we want to know something, we go online and look for information. Is that cheating? No, it's a life skill! We should be encouraging, not punishing this behavior. Rob makes the point that education used to be about memorizing a lot of information when information was scarce. That is no longer the case, information is now abundant. Finding it and thinking critically about it are the skills we need to be teaching now.

Recently, Aug. 3, the Sacramento Bee ran an article about using cell phones in the classroom. Articles like this are a big step towards educating parents and the community about the possibilities of mlearning. Along with interviewing some technology-using teachers and tech leaders, the article provides links to more information, such as Liz Kolb's blog on mlearning. (Liz has written a book on the subject, Toys to Tools, published by ISTE.) It was from her blog that I learned about YouMail, free service to listen to your voicemail online. OK, I'm not promoting it as educational, but I'm really liking it for my personal VM.

This is all to say that mobile learning is happening, ready or not. Arguments that sounded radical a year ago now just sound like common sense. Why shouldn't students look up facts, definitions, locations, using their phones? They should!
(Photo credit: silly_a1804)

mLearning in Africa

Information from an mLearning summit in Zambia.

A link from the Teachers Without Borders Diigo group sent me to a number of sites about mlearning and other technology in Africa.

ePortfolios for ABE

California has created an ABE Initiative, supporting adult education programs to look at different ways to support Adult Basic Skills students and to serve them better. We have an online community for the Initiative (not open to the public). I recently received a request from several program administrators to look into the possibility of having some kind of eportfolio system for ABE students.

The things they want to be able to add to an eportfolio are: education plan, personal goals, employment goals, resume, checklist of competencies, work samples, awards, recommendations. The idea is that the student would add to or work with the portfolio maybe weekly, the instructor could check in weekly or monthly, and the student might review their portfolio with the counselor each quarter or semester. The portfolio would go with the student to higher level classes, post-secondary, or employment.

I imagined that there were several free options online, but it hasn't been so easy to find them. I started with EPAC (electronic portfolio action and communication) and their extensive list of resources, which was quite overwhelming, so I emailed Helen Chen at Stanford who was kind enough to talk with me about our goals and the various possibilities. She made several recommendations regarding programs that have implemented eportfolios, including Penn State which has a nice description for students of the steps in creating an eportfolio.

Helen also recommended Helen Barrett, who currently provides information on how to create an eportfolio using Google apps - Google Sites, Google Docs, Google Groups, etc. This might be beyond the comfort level of ABE teachers and students, though.

My current favorite possibility is Mahara - an opensource product from New Zealand that incorporates all the features we're looking for, and is also easy to use, and best of all, free! Students can create a profile, a set of goals, and a resume. They can upload files and media, as well as embedding. They can create different views of their portfolio - one for the instructor, one for prospective employers, another for themselves and their friends. You can create a demo account to try it out.

Research also took me to David Warlick's recent post on ePortfolios as the next killer app. He includes a list of features that he would like to see included. The comments and discussion on this post are interesting, and contain links to other products. I will be presenting Mahara at a meeting this week, and will see what kind of feedback it gets.

Mowing with Goats

This has nothing to do with technology, really, but did you know that Google is now using goats to keep their grass mowed? That's pretty cool! As they say on their blog, "the cost is about the same as mowing, and the goats are cuter to watch."

Twitter at COABE

I want to write about the COABE conference, (national adult education conference) but for now, I'm just going to comment that there was a lot of interest in Twitter. I think Ashton Kutscher and Larry King can be thanked for that! I twittered the conference, and encouraged others. So far I don't think anyone joined me, but I got a number of follows for OTAN.

In my workshop on Web 2.0 Tools for Administrators, the first thing they wanted to hear about was Twitter. Now that's different! I tried to explain how I use Twitter as a professional development tool. I follow links to what my fellow ed tech twitterers are reading, doing, thinking about, arguing about, and I've found lots of interesting material that I never would have seen on my own.

So I will just re-tweet here a post this morning from Ira Socol:

irasocol: Filosophical Friday- If our students could learn as much from a day in school as I do from a day on Twitter we'd be a really educated world.

Social Networking for Professional Development

I'm at the CATESOL conference, and it's been a mixture of wonderful conversations and depressing realizations; wonderful because of the opportunity to see so many colleagues that I don't get to see all the time, and depressing because adult education in California, at least the K12 adult schools, is being cut and curtailed by state budget cuts. The adult level meeting, which is usually full to overflowing, was this time full of empty chairs, and when someone asked how many were from continuing education in the community colleges, more than half the room raised their hands. That means that teachers and coordinators from the K12 adult schools aren't here this year. There was no money for travel. There was also no one from the Adult Education Office of the California Department of Education because they also are not currently allowed to travel.

One of the wonderful parts of being here in Pasadena has been sharing a hotel room with my friend Jan Jarrell from San Diego City College. She used to teach ESL with me at Centre City Adult Education Center in San Diego, and we used to walk at the bay every Thursday and strategize about how to solve the various challenges we perceived in our classes, our program, and the district, not to mention our personal lives. I've missed that since I moved to Sacramento in 2001, and had forgotten how deeply satisfying it is to talk to someone who knows you and your history, and who shares many of your values and beliefs. We don't have to start at the beginning of a conversation, we can start in the middle and still know where we are.

In a year when the opportunities for face-to-face networking are fewer than in previous years, I found myself giving a workshop on Social Networking for Professional Development to a very small audience at the end of a long day. (The slides are posted, and the links on the wiki are just the ones that aren't in the slides.) The audience was small partly because the topic doesn't appear directly related to teaching English to speakers of other languages. But the people who were there, the 3 or 4 intrepid souls who sat up front and really talked with me, were sincerely curious about social networking, and I had the opportunity to share my passion for the subject.

Today I listened to a bunch of episodes from NPR's This I Believe, so let me borrow from their format to articulate here some things I believe:
* I believe we human beings are social animals
* I believe that learning is an innate human drive like sex or the need to find food and shelter - we can't go on for too long without it
* I believe we learn through relationships as much as if not more than through solitary reading and studying
* I believe that we learn through a web of connections between reading, conversations and experiences that interact with each other in some chemical way inside our brains
* I believe that passion is one of the keys to a productive life

In my presentation I talked about Twitter to people who had never seen it, about how many things I've learned from links people have posted there. I talked about Delicious and what an excellent improvement it is to be able to save and tag bookmarks online, and to share them with others and have others share their bookmarks as well. I talked about listservs, and Facebook and LinkedIn, and I realized that I'm still excited and passionate about these things.

I talked about people I've "met" through these networks, like Stephen Downes for instance, someone I will probably never meet in real life, but whose thinking affects my thinking, and my ability to share those thoughts with others. He talks a lot about how ideas are socially generated, and I recently read a biography of Einstein that made me acutely aware of the same thing - ideas are developed socially, feeding off each other, pushing each other, disagreeing with each other. Not to negate the importance of the exceptional brilliance of some minds. I often, in this stage of my life (I'm 61), run smack into the limitations of my own intellect. But Einstein, by putting his ideas out to his field, developed relationships with the other people who were thinking about the same things he was, and through those relationships developed his ideas further. He did that through the social networks that were available to him, but now every one of us has wide social networks available to us. This, to me, is like magic.

Mind-Shifts

I didn't go to TESOL this year, but got a partial experience of it through blog posts, tweets, and photos people posted on FaceBook. Here is an interesting post by Vance Stevens, a person who has been active in the technology interest section and various online developments over many years and always has something interesting to say. I didn't get to hear him speak this year, but here he is recapping a panel presentation he did as part of celebrating 25 years of the CALL (computer-assisted language learning) interest section. He talks about 10 mind-shifts that educators must make to function in the 21st century. I won't repeat them here, but the most Vance-ish one, to my mind, is:
6. Formality – from Trepidation, fear of being exposed as not knowing TO F.U.N. = encourage class to explore despite risk of Frivolous Unanticipated Nonsense

I'm for that, Frivolous Unanticipated Nonsense. We need more F.U.N.!!

Stephen Downes on Personal Learning Networks

I found this video by following Stephen Downes on Facebook. It is a 20 minute talk to educators about how to think about Web 2.0, and how to make it work for our own personal learning, and that of our students. He is a teacher and researcher from Canada who has a job that lets him focus on technology and education issues full time. Pretty cool! You can subscribe to his newsletter, or read his blog, to get an idea of where he's coming from.

This video (which will only be online until March 30, because Google Video is going away, it says) talks about how to collect and organize information for your own personal learning. He talks about using a blog to take notes on a class, or take notes on the things you are learning from everywhere. That struck a chord with me because this blog is really my notes on ed tech sites/developments/information that I want to remember and to share with others. He also mentions his view that content management systems are bound to be dysfunctional because they aren't built for networking, they are built on a broadcast format - one person broadcasts information to many passive recipients. Yes, there are blogs and chats and discussion boards, but they don't really solve the problem. That framed for me the frustration I feel with the CMSs we have now, they are too static.

Then he goes on to talk about the power of networking, the wisdom of crowds, and how important it is to participate, not just be a lurker, to put your ideas out there, and to respond to the ideas of other people, because that is really how we learn and how ideas develop. Information is not a static thing, it's a conversation. Today I read (in Steve Hargadon's slides) this quote, "Information has always been a conversation, it's just that most of us weren't part of it, until the Internet." Now we can all participate in the conversation, and Downes's view is that it's important to participate.

One of the first rules of participating, Downes adds, is to be authentic. Be yourself, put your real self out there. It's true, that's one of the really nice things about all this participatory media online. I feel like I've gotten to know people whose ideas I'm interested in because I listen to their podcasts, watch their videos, read their posts, and it feels like I'm in a conversation with them. I can't say that I participate back with many of them, but they are still part of my personal learning network. But the personal connection is an important part of the learning, I believe. On the other hand, as he points out, it's hard to do. For example, sitting in front of your webcam and giving a presentation when no one is present, it's hard to just be yourself. Hopefully it gets easier with practice. For example, Loic Lemeur is very used to being himself with a camera pointed at him, since his whole business, Seesmic, is based on people making short conversational videos of themselves and posting them. In the interest of authenticity I will say that personally I'm still struggling with this.

It seems like not long ago (it was last April, almost a year ago) that I first came across and blogged about the PLN concept, and now these ideas are getting much more developed. So what constitutes your personal learning network? I recommend watching Stephen's video and seeing where it takes you.

One issue that I have not resolved, though is that all of this only works for the very motivated learner. That's us teachers - we like to learn, we loved school, we enjoyed the pursuit of new fields of knowledge. But what about that learner who isn't so motivated, who has some learning challenges, for whom school was more of a misery than a joy? Those people, and there are many in adult education, may not experience the personal learning network concept the same way. But, people are motivated to learn many different things, and I can't think of a topic for which there isn't a great quantity of information and networking opportunities online. Maybe the task of the teacher is to help that student find information about the thing they are the most passionate about, and go on from there.
Photo Credit: Luc Legay

Web 2.0 Is the Future of Education

You can now see video of Steve Hargadon's presentation at the Symposium, or you can listen to a similar presentation here. This is an earlier version of the talk, but I'm posting it here because it has the audio, and his slides are very visual so you miss a lot without the narration. This version doesn't have the dolphin story, though, so if you want the full effect, watch the video!

Web 2.0 Is the Future of Education

View more presentations from SteveHargadon. (tags: web 2.0 internet)

Brain Rules for Presenters

I happened upon this presentation AFTER giving 4 workshops at the Technology and Distance Learning Symposium. Good information to remember. Steve Hargadon did a nice job of following these rules in his keynote address - lots of photos, lots of stories, a few cogent points with examples. I promise to do better in the future!

My favorite point from this presentation? Spend some analog time preparing the presentation before you sit down to make the slides. Don't think and write at the same time. This totally goes against my habits, but I will try it.

And, yes folks, I discovered this through a link posted on Twitter. Have you noticed that the term Personal Learning Network has become ubiquitous and referred to as PLN? Didn't take that term long to get into our vocabulary.

Brain Rules for Presenters

View more presentations from garr. (tags: reynolds garr)

Online Video Resources

This is a session that I didn't get to attend, but they created a wonderful wiki page with descriptions of a variety of video sites, whether you can upload to them, and what their special features are. Take a look!

Hippocampus

The first day of the Technology and Distance Learning Symposium went well, despite rain and budget cuts of major proportions. Those who showed up were fired up and ready to latch on to new ideas.

Gary Lopez from Monterey Institute of Technology did a presentation on Hippocampus, a website that hosts free online course content for high school diploma courses. Although the audience was small, the teachers seemed very interested in the possibilities. The courses can be customized, deleting the content that is too high for our students, or not relevant, and it appears that each teacher can create their own customized course. He didn't talk about tracking results, though, so not sure there is a management side to it.

Although some of the content is designed for AP courses, and written at too high a level for our learners, there is an Algebra course with a lot of movies and interactive activities. This would be good staff development for teachers who now have to teach Algebra after being away from it for years. It's just in time, any pace, which are both helpful. I look forward to hearing more about what teachers think of it, and seeing if we can get something going with online high school instruction.

Here are the slides from the presentation:

Discover Simple, Private Sharing at Drop.io

21 Ways to Reach 21st Century Learners

This page lists 21 ways to use new technologies in the classroom to engage learners and make learning more interactive and self-directed. Each of the items is a link to examples. For example, the item "Make flash cards for phones and iPods" links to instructions for how to put slides on a iPod, and also to a gallery of educational slides sets that you or your students can download to an iPod. Sets include flashcards to practice identifying the states, or a quiz on US Government. There is also a set of response cards. If all your students have an iPod, and they all download these response cards, then when you ask a question they can hold up their iPod with their response on it, such as the green Yes card, giving you another way to check comprehension or poll students.

Here are the first ten items. Go to the Web site to see the rest.

1 Contribute to a wiki
2 Read and write to a live blog
3 Collaborate using a Google spreadsheet
4 Bring YouTube into the classroom
5 Assign roving reporters
6 Students create podcasts
7 Create interactive maps
8 Create online quizzes
9 Connect to the world through Skype
10 Make flash cards for phones and iPods

The Inauguration and Adult Education

Wow, what a momentous day that was! The photos posted by the Boston Globe are really wonderful, showing how people were engaged all over the earth.

Larry Ferlazzo collected some good sites about the inauguration to use with students.

Christina Nivens created some interesting ESL activities, including a venn diagram about Barack and Michelle.

At the Sacramento County Office of Education, which provides Internet service to the school districts in the county, we had the highest demand on our bandwidth ever, twice as high as normal. I think every school in the county was trying to stream the inauguration!

Learn to Change, Change to Learn

Saw this on Twitter, and it supports a conversation at the CAEAA conference this afternoon about what implications changing technology has for adult education.

We as a field are far from the world of education described in this video, but it's important for us to start thinking in this direction. And then, one step at a time...

How to Show YouTube Videos at School

I just read an article on Larry Ferlazzo's blog about how to get around your district's blocking of YouTube. This is a problem for many teachers. There are good reasons to keep YouTube blocked, but at the same time there is so much good content there. This was obvious during the election when Obama was posting videos on YouTube, and his transition team continues to do so.

Larry's article led me to a blog post by Joyce Valenza on the School Library Journal blog called When YouTube is Blocked (eight ways around). Larry suggests bookmarking this article, and I agree. There will be that time when the perfect video that you or one of your students needs for a presentation, and this article will help you download it and convert it to a format you can play from your laptop or from within a PowerPoint.

Joyce also suggests trying other video sites that may not be blocked. TeacherTube is one that many teachers know about, but Larry suggests EduBlogs TV, which is still in beta, but is hosting educational videos, and Larry says he has used it quite a bit in teaching American History. The list of videos on the home page looks intriguing, however, I can't get any of them to play from work. Maybe they are embedded videos from YouTube? In which case. this doesn't not solve the problem.

Other suggestions?

People of the Screen

Hey, can you tell I'm on vacation? I actually have time to read this article by Kevin Kelly in the NY Times about the ubiquity of video in our culture, and to think about it, and respond to it! (OK, I know, something's wrong with this picture when I only have time to think on vacation!)

The article compares how the printing press made us eventually "people of the book," and how digital media have become so accessible and manipulable that we will soon have a visual language to match our verbal language, and be able to create, manipulate, annotate, and recreate visual images, video, the way we now do words.

There are many ways to do this now. For example, here is an article, with classroom suggestions, about how to add thought bubbles, captions and hyperlinks to video using Bubbleply.

CCAE South

The workshop went well. I spent half the time talking about resources on the OTAN Web site, and there are always plenty of people who haven't explored yet. The other half was about video in the classroom. Useful for the teachers, but I had a mixed audience with a lot of support staff, not sure what they thought of it all. But really, you gotta admit it's amazing how easy it is to show video from anywhere. It took me all of 15 seconds to embed those videos in my blog. How many in my audience had a blog? None.

However, a teacher from Downey Adult School, John Oppenheim, did a workshop on Web 2.0 for the Classroom, and talked about blogs, wikis, and social bookmarking. This is encouraging - it's not just us OTANians talked about Web 2.0 any more! He also posted his slides.

Video as a Writing Prompt

There are lots of funny animal videos online. Here is one with a bunch of cat clips. Any one of these could be a writing prompt for a descriptive paragraph.

Using Video to Teach Math

I'm putting together some examples for a workshop on using video in the classroom. Here is a classic Abbott and Costello using math. Maybe not great for instruction, but will certainly lighten the mood once students have a good understanding of multiplication and division.

Wikis in ESL

I attended this event on Saturday purely as a participant, which was a nice change. I had time to listen and observe more than I have in the past. And things have definitely changed. There were two or three presentations on wikis. A year ago, most ESL teachers hadn't heard of wikis, so this was a welcome evolution. One of the most interesting was by Cassie Piotrowski, who teaches academic writing at San Jose State. It was interesting because she was not a high tech person herself, and struggled with some of the technology in her presentation, but nevertheless she was fearless in implementing a variety of Web 2.0 activities for her students.

In her Culture and Current Events class, she has her students divided into teams, and then from each team page she created a student page for each student where they post their slide show, video of their presentation, and other assignments. On her home page, she has all assignments with links to resources and documents.

On her Writing Class wiki, look at the links to the student pages and their assignments, which include Bubbleshare slideshows, Vokis, and Wordle assignments, in which students enter a list of significant words and Wordle creates a graphic of them.

Here is a Wordle of my delicious bookmarks.

Podcasts in Adult Education

My colleague Branka Marceta did a presentation to the staff of the Adult Education Office at the CA Dept of Ed the other day on podcasting in adult ed. We have a wiki page where we collect examples of adult ed podcasts. We have examples from ESL, VESL, EL Civics, and Citizenship. It would be great to have more program areas, but it looks like we aren't there yet.

Questions from the CDE Consultants:
* Are there any administrator podcasts? We haven't heard of any, although we've heard a few administrators who are thinking about it. I think people are a bit intimidated by the idea of doing a radio show kind of thing, unless they have experience in radio or theater. It isn't hard to produce a podcast, but producing an interesting one is a bit more challenging. The interview or conversation format works well, but I've listened to quite a few ed tech podcasts with teachers that have good content but are just boring to listen to because there is too much meandering, inside jokes, off-topic conversation or whatever. Maybe we need to put some resources into this.

* What are the issues of access for our students if these are all online? More and more adult learners every year have Internet access at home, but it is still not 100% and probably never will be. Teachers that are using podcasting extensively either teach in a lab or have access to a lab. But more and more learners, especially younger ones, have mp3 players, and would like to have some learning activities they could listen to outside of school. It's become free and easy to create these, so I predict we will see more and more of them.

Branka ended the presentation by having a couple of people call in to our Gabcast channel on their cell phones and moments later we listened to their podcasts online. This is a fun activity for a presentation because of the instant gratification. We've done it at conference workshops, but still haven't had anyone tell us they're using it in their teaching.

Got more adult ed podcasting ideas? Post a comment!

PollEverywhere

Just saw a reference to this Web site where you can poll your audience and they can text an answer from their phone, or send it online, and the results show up instantly on your slide or web page, like using clickers in the classroom, only free (for now)!

This would not be a classroom tool, but could be great for presentations.

Reflections on Losing a Mentor

Susan Gaer, a long time TIMAC mentor, sent me this article about her first mentor, who helped her get technology in her classroom and then find ways to use it. I post it here as a testament to the mentoring process (this one was spontaneous!) but more especially it's an example of using Internet to find just the right kind of professional development at the right time, and back in 1994!

Susan's Article

Most people think of me as super mentor. They believe that the "technology mentor" is a higher-level species who understands the technology they inevitably don't. That is not how I see the word mentor to mean. By dictionary definition it is "a trusted counselor or guide". To me my mentors and mentees always ended up being my good friends and trusted colleagues teaching me more than I could ever hope to teach them.

I found out on Monday, July 7, that my very first mentor, Leni Donlan died last year. I want to tell you about Leni so you can know her as I did. I met her in 1994 online with AOL's educational community. I was teaching a class of literacy lao/hmong and lahu refugees most with no writing system in their own language. Most of the people in the school at the time told me they had been in this class for a long time and expectations were low. It was a rural community in Central California and information and training was hard to come by. I found AOL's educational community and met Leni Donlan who showed me how to work the system to get what I wanted.

After I got what I wanted ( a modem, phone line and 386 computer) she helped me developed projects and chats with this particular group of students. The activities were great but the real learning took place as I watched students who were considered to be the most marginal in society start to make a difference. We participated in a post card project with a class in Ohio who we sent lemon grass to. They had never had lemon grass before so my students sent instructions to use
the lemongrass. Next we read an essay about how a blind and deaf girl( I think I remember her name as Christie)could hear popcorn pop by putting her hand over the corn to feel the vibration of the popping.

We made cookbooks which bought us a industrial level stove and the book was purchased by "Legal Foods' in Boston.This led to Kathleen Ferenz and I doing a project where ESL students tasted condiments and wrote down their thoughts. Mustard was not a winner. I moved on to the post card project and then took a step on the wild side. I had my ESL Laotian tribal groups take a trip on Westward HO. I never thought it would work. There was so much culture to learn that the other students were brought up with, but when we all started baking Indian bread and learning line dancing, I knew it was one of the most amazing projects I had every participated in.

Leni would come and chat with my class on a regular basis and she said they could always hold their own language wise. She moved on, I moved on and that could have been the end of the story. However, the lessons Leni taught me have been the base of everything I have done since that time in 1994. Leni was one of the most important influences in my instructional life and she was also a great friend. That is what a real mentor is. Leni encapsulated all that and more for me. My students and I will miss her influence in the coming years.

More on Wikis

I'm spending this beautiful Sunday afternoon preparing my CASAS Summer Institute workshops. Thinking about wikis, as I link our wiki on wikis to adult ed wikis, and collections of more wikis. Last year when I did this workshop, the only adult education wiki example I had was the ALE wiki. Now I have several of my own, and many examples from teachers and administrators of how they're using wikis. This serves as a reminder that people take up a new idea when it meets a specific need they have.

Several adult education programs have used a wiki to create their WASC review documents, an extended collaborative process. Almost any time you want to write something together with people who aren't sitting next to you, a wiki is the answer.

Here are examples of wikis I've been involved with in the last few months:
- monthly team report on federal project, where the team is in MI and CA
- attempt to categorize all adult education professional development workshops and courses from all leadership projects
- pages of links that we use as examples in our conference presentations
- wiki site for adult educators in CA to share links and documents they've created
- planning site for the electronic village at CATESOL next April

In all these cases, the purpose is to write a document with input from team members in different cities or states. Seems incredibly obvious today, but a year ago it wasn't so clear to me.

CA Adult Ed Wiki

I believe that adult educators will start using wikis to share information and documents more and more. I already see this happening in the professional organizations and among various groups. If the leadership projects don't support and participate in this, we will become the followership projects.

So I'm starting a wiki for CA adult education. It will take a lot of work to get it off the ground, but I hope it will be a useful tool for our widespread community. The idea came out of a conversation with Martha Rankin from Newport Mesa. When she was setting up her professional learning community at her site, she googled a bunch of topics like "adult education professional learning community" and found pretty much nothing. She had to invent the wheel, since she couldn't find examples from other agencies that had already done some of the things she wanted to do. We made a list of things she would have liked to find online, and those are the first five pages of the CA Adult Ed Wiki.

My model for this project is the Adult Literacy Education wiki, started and managed by David Rosen. He has put a lot of work into keeping the organization of the site up with the added content and developments, as well as recruiting others to manage sections of the wiki. If this is something that the field wants, then it will take off, and there will be people to help manage it.

I chose WikiSpaces as the host, because they allow me to add members without charging for them, and because we have already been using them for our Web 2.0 presentations. I've had some struggles with the formatting, though. And I'm concerned about having this wiki on an outside site, but I think it has to be separate from CDE or OTAN or anything else. It has to have it's own separate, democratic identity and not be controlled by any one entity. There are already plenty of sites for the official word on everything.

Wikiteers

I'm at the COABE conference in St. Louis, and tonight I attended the annual Wikiteer dinner organized by David Rosen, one of the founders of the ALE Wiki. David and Erik Jacobson founded this wiki two and a half years ago, in order to experiment with the concept of a wiki, but also to serve as an archive of research and professional wisdom about adult education.

It has since grown to over 1,000 pages. It currently lists 32 sections on the home page, each representing an interest area within adult education, and most managed by a volunteer, also called a wikiteer. This is becoming the adult ed version of the wikipedia. It relies on a small but dedicated community that sees the value in archiving email list discussions, Q and A's, and links to research. Since no one funds the site, no one has editorial control, but David and many others have done a great job of maintaining the integrity of the site.

At dinner we were reflecting on how just a few years ago the concept of wikis was new to us, but now more and more adult education programs are using wikis for a variety of purposes, such as planning meeting agenda, writing reports, writing chapters required for accredication (WASC) reviews. Teachers are beginning to create wikis in order to post assignments, encourage students to write collaboratively, and for other reasons.

Recently, pbwiki started an adult education page on their collection of educational wikis. OK, they didn't think of it themselves, they were prompted by one of our teachers. But they did it, and they recognized that they already have adult education sites using pbwiki. I think in the space of about a week, there are now screen shots of 8 wikis, and hopefully the page will continue to grow.

Add to it if you can!

Personal Learning Network

David Warlick posted a picture of his personal learning network on his blog, and then twittered about it and got a bunch of questions and responses, and responded to some of those on his blog. It's an interesting idea. I'm thinking of printing the picture, or making my own diagram, and using it as an activity at our next staff meeting. If you have a picture in your head of your personal learning network, does that help you consciously take more advantage of it? I would think so. It would definitely help you see how your learning process has changed over the last 10 years.

My personal learning network certainly involves Twitter, del.icio.us, friends, conferences, colleagues at work, books, articles. He filters all his online input through aggregators. I haven't gotten to that point yet. I still check out links that are sent to me in emails or posted on Twitter. I've received some excellent information that way, and I guess this is an example!

50 Ways to Tell a Story

OK, this is amazing. CogDogBlog as I know him (real name Alan Levine)lists 50 Web 2.0 tools you can use to tell a story, sites like BubbleShare, VoiceThread, and Google Presenter. Of course, you don't need 50, you only need one or two, but he created a story about his dog in all 50 tools. There should be some kind of award for that!

His wiki page for his presentations has a lot of good Web 2.0 info, and nicely organized.

Video of Adult Ed Teachers at CUE

Adult Educators at CUE

Computer Using Educators (CUE) was founded in 1978 to support teachers in using technology effectively in the classroom. It has grown significantly over the years, and now has thousands of members, making it one of the largest organizations of its type in the country. Although membership is open to all educational professionals, the focus has been on K12.

CUE holds its annual conference every year in Palm Springs. Several years ago, there were only a small handful of adult educators attending the conference, even though it provides an excellent opportunity for educational technology people to network and to learn what’s new in the world of technology, but over the last few years this handful has grown to about 20. This year at CUE, Suzanne Ludlum of Oakland Adult School offered a 3-hour workshop on digital storytelling using Windows MovieMaker. Barry Bakin of LAUSD Division of Adult and Community Education presented on Internet Projects Students and Teachers Love. Elliot Jordan, formerly of Burbank Adult School, demonstrated to teachers the many possibilities of open source software. Susan Gaer, a Google-certified Educator and ESL Instructor at Santa Ana College Adult Education, partnered with Barry Bakin to show teachers how to adapt any lesson to include technology and the Internet. She also demonstrated her collaborative online student projects, and volunteered in the Second Life Sandbox, showing people how to use Second Life, a virtual environment. Branka Marceta and Penny Pearson interviewed some of the participating adult educators about their experiences at CUE.

Other hot topics at the conference included Open Source software, Moodle for hosting class Web sites, blogging (educators have their own category, “edublogger”), Google tools such as Google Earth, social networking. The conference also offers skill building classes on programs such as Flash, PhotoShop, and Excel. On Saturday, many student groups demonstrate their projects at the Student Technology Showcase. This would be an excellent opportunity for adult education students to showcase their work and get some recognition.

Adult education in California would never be able to host such a large and diverse technology conference, with over 200 vendors in the exhibit area, so it’s encouraging to see more adult educators participating in this conference and contributing their enthusiasm, experience and knowledge.

Moving and Saving Files Online

Just heard about drop.io (pronounced drop-ee-oo), and then started seeing more references to it. It's a Web site where you can create a drop box for yourself with nothing more than a user ID and password. So, if you need to share files with a dispersed workgroup, or if you want to share photos, word docs, or other files between two classes that are collaborating on a project, this would be a really good service. You get 100MB for free, or can upgrade to 1 Gig for a nominal fee. It gives you a URL, and you can upload files in a number of ways, including voice, fax, and email. This would be a great service for a workgroup that needed to share some docs. It can be password protected or not, and it can expire in a month or whatever timeframe you set, if there is an end date to the project.

I actually just had a programmer create something like this for a statewide group that needs to do some work together and share some spreadsheets. Kinda a like a V-8. Darn, I coulda used Dropio!

CUE 2008

There were a number of things at the CUE conference that I wanted to blog, but between attending sessions, checking out vendors, and trying to keep up with my work email, I was fried by the end of each day. So much for my blogging ambition! I did check out a session on edublogging by Mark Wagner where I got a few good ideas about making connections through blogging. He posted his slides and all his links, if you want to see what he talked about.

A nice feature of the conference was having a Ning community where presenters uploaded their slides or links, and people could comment on presentations and discuss with each other and the presenter. Wave of the future. Ning and the whole issue of social networking had a much higher profile in the conference than it did a year ago, thanks in large part to Steve Hargadon, I'm guessing.

The best aspect to me was that there were 3 times as many adult educators there as there were two years ago. OK, the total was about 12, but that's still progress. There were several adult education workshops and hands-on sessions. It paid off lobbying to get Susan Gaer included in the Google Teacher Academy. I was disappointed to hear that the Google Teacher Academy is being turned over to CUE and will cost $50K for an organization to host. At that price, and in this budget climate, I wouldn't expect too many takers.

One thing I was surprised about - I didn't see much twittering of this conference. I searched Twitter using Terraminds and didn't find many using the tags of cue08 or cue2008.

AlphaPlus Blog

A fellow adult literacy program in Ontario, AlphaPlus, has a very useful blog with links to many resources for teachers and learners. They have recently added links about work, numeracy and writing, mostly specific to Ontario and Canada.

There is also a recent post on blogging in adult literacy that links to some articles about blogging in K12, and poses some research questions for adult educators.

Another interesting link there is to the Canadian Consortium of Technology Support Providers for Adult Basic Education. This fledgling group of organizations is looking at supporting technology for ABE in Canada. It's good to know what our neighbors are doing, and to take advantage of opportunities to share our work. The keynote speaker at their first meeting, I believe on Feb. 28, was David Rosen, providing an overview of technology in adult education, which they provide as a podcast from their home page. David gives a good brief overview of what technology in the classroom can mean beyond computers, including simulations (of which we have so very few in adult literacy), video projects, and interactive whiteboards.

I'm adding AlphaPlus to my blogroll.

Becoming a 21st Century Literate Educator

This post by David Warlick is in answer to the question from a teacher - How do I get started with learning how to use technology? He lists 12 suggestions, including finding the tech support person at your school and making friends with them. Actually, he says bake them some cookies! Other ideas include finding other teachers who are interested in the same thing and working together, reading blogs and sharing information, and creating a wiki to share notes. Seeds of a learning community.

Another interesting post I read today was from Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach at 21st Century Collaborative on reflection as an agent of change. Having that time for reflection is so important, and teachers are "on" so much of the day, it's hard to find that time to think about how things are going, what direction to go from here, what went wrong and how to make it better. Sheryl's point is that collaboration really helps nurture that process. When we are in our own separate classrooms by ourselves, there is no one to reflect with. When we are engaged in collaborative projects, f2f or virtual, we have a posse to talk with, think with, reflect with. That makes life so much richer because we are learning as we go.

And Sheryl linked to a post by Jennifer Jones at Injenuity on Viral Professional Development. I think this is the direction we are going in adult education in California, away from the big workshop and towards supporting teachers at a site to work with each other to learn what they need to learn. Can you make this happen? If you have even one or two excited and enthusiastic early adopters, you can. If not? Maybe you have to wait until those people show up, and they will. Jennifer gives a really nice description of viral PD, and a list of steps to get it going.

Time and Attention

I listened to Merlin Mann's presentation at Mac World about how we manage the constant flow of information and interruptions, how overwhelming it is, and how to take steps to manage it so that we don't stay at work until 10 at night, or work for 8 hours on the weekend in order to catch up on email. This really resonated with me. I don't want work to take over my life, and his message was that if you keep doing the next thing that's in front of you instead of stepping back and making some decisions about what to focus on, you will never be caught up. I want to bring this to the next staff meeting and talk about maybe having a designated time when none of checks email or interrupts others, and we just focus on our highest priority tasks. It's hard to do, but if you don't keep trying to do it, you get buried by things that aren't the most important things, and then your life becomes about those things, because time is finite. We have to make conscious decisions about how we spend it.

Aviary!!

Aviary is a whole suite of media editing tools - online and free. I have a new computer at home with Vista on it, and I was thinking I would need to buy PhotoShop Elements or something like that to edit my photos, but I got a free invite to the beta of a.viary.com and it's great! It's not PhotoShop, but I don't need anywhere near that level of complexity. I just want to resize, rotate, crop, adjust brightness, etc., and a.viary did everything pretty easily. Go there and sign up for an invite. They will send you three so you can spread them around. Be sure to look at some of their examples.

Flickriver

Saw this on Twitter also, a site that searches Flickr and serves up the photos in a seemingly endless stream. I searched for the tag "eggplant," probably because I had some really delicious Thai eggplant the other night, and got a stream of photos that included the color eggplant and many plates of eggplant cooked various ways along with the vegetable itself, but what I nice way to find images. Here is my eggplant stream. I also tried egret, ballons, and henna. What would you look for, or what would your students want to see?

You can save your search results as a link, which could be handy. Let's say you're teaching about Presidents Day. You could get a stream of Lincoln photos and show them while you are introducing some information or an activity.

And just for fun, check out FlickrVision. Like TwitterVision, it shows you on a map of the world where photos are being uploaded, with a thumbnail of the photo that you can click on the make it larger. This is I guess a lesson in how small the world really is.

Edutagger

Just saw this on Twitter, a social bookmarking site just for educators. It might be a good way to introduce students to social bookmarking. Looks like the content is reviewed before being posted, as not all posters have 100% of their submissions published. It's a new service and needs support, so check it out and see if it would be useful for you.

The biggest drawback - it's K12. Why does everyone think only kids are learning to read and do math? I found an amazing site on Edutagger, ESL-Kids. Unfortunately, yet again it's designed for kids, but it's free and has a worksheet function that lets you pick a topic, generate a random word list or select your own, and then choose from 18 different worksheets. It's very low level, for example some worksheets are for tracing or copying the letters, but this could work for non-literate students and those from other alphabets. Musical instruments has a nice selection of words, and so does weather. Worth checking out for beginning low ESL.

Library of Congress Shares Photos

Just saw this blog post about the Library of Congress doing a project with Flickr. They are posting thousands of photos that have no known copyright. Some are missing info, and they are hoping people will annotate them and add comments. There are some great photos here, that can be used by anyone! If you add their Flickr site as a contact, you will be able to see whenever they add more photos.

International Day for Sharing Life Stories

Digital storytelling seems to me to be one of the most profoundly useful ways to integrate technology in the classroom. I was reminded of this again by an email about the International Day for Sharing Life Stories planned for May 16 by the Center for Digital Storytelling in San Francisco and the Museum of the Person International Network, in Brazil, Portugal, the US, and Canada.

Check out the examples of people telling stories about their lives on the Digital Storytelling site. They are inspirational, and might give students some ideas about how to tell their own stories.

May 16 is also the birthday of Studs Terkel, a man who has been collecting and publishing people's stories for many years, and this event celebrates his life. I remember when his book Working came out in 1974. I was working in a steel mill then, and thinking a lot about what people do for work and what it all means. Since then I have settled into much more acceptance about working, but Studs Terkel was always questioning, reflecting, and championing ordinary people.

Classroom 2.0 Get-Together is SF

Classroom2.0 on the Ning social networking site is a great place to get answers to ed tech questions, see what other teachers are doing, make international connections, and just generally make friends with birds of a feather. Steve Hargadon, the organizer of Classroom2.0, is now organizing some face-to-face meetings of interested teachers. The first one will be in San Francisco on Feb. 1 and 2. Wikispaces is providing some sponsorship, including providing a location, and will be announcing the location once they know how many people will be coming.

Check out the list of workshops, an ever-evolving wiki page, and add yourself to the list of attendees if you want to come.

There is also a link to a page where people are signing up to organize similar events in their own cities, so go there if you aren't close to San Francisco.

Professional Learning Community Blog

Well, I was swept away by the holidays, a trip to New York, and budget matters before that, many budget matters.... so haven't posted for a while. Just catching up on my blog feeds, and I want to post again about the Adult Education Matters blog by Martha Rankin and her staff at Newport Mesa USD Adult School. The blog is a part of their overall professional development plan, and they use it to keep staff updated on work of various teams, to post documents such as their school-wide PD plan, and ESLRs (expected student learning results). They even have a short PowerPoint about their ESLRs that students view and then sign via SmartBoard.

This blog is such a good example of how blogging can be used by an administrator and program to build a sense of community and share information, I wish every adult ed program in California could check it out. The goals of the blog are:

- to provide current research and articles on the matters of adult education

- to give useful and successful ways to put the research into practice in the fields

- to create an online “home” for professional development ideas in the form of videos, music, pictures, documents, and online articles

- to build a learning community among adult educators and provide an e-forum in which they can collaborate

Technology integration is an important part of their school-wide professional development plan, and is reflected in each of its four sections. For example, they support peer tech mentors to offer tech tips during a 20 minute period at the beginning of class when students have independent work to do. Topics include using SmartBoards, blogging, Internet sites, writing projects, etc. There is a big emphasis on collaboration, and on the importance of technology as a part of 21st century literacy. What a great model!

Video about Google

Kids in a flat classroom project collaborated to create this video about Google. Hang in there until you get to the skit about Google and Yahoo!

Twitter, Again

My favorite quote so far describing Twitter:
Kevin Honeycutt: “ Twitter is my Cracker Jacks: caramel corn, caramel corn...then a PEANUT..then when you least expect it..a secret toy surprise! You have to put some ingredients in too or you’re just snacking on everyone else’s cracker jacks.”

Intermittent reinforcement is the best for establishing a behavior. So you keep reading the boring stuff because you know eventually there will be another PEANUT!

A guy on the video on that same page uses the metaphor of bees "pollinating all over the place" to talk about Twitter. I feel a metaphor lesson coming on!

Serious Gaming

You know, games could really teach anything. I'm sure I learned first about capitalism and our economic system from Monopoly. Most games involve strategies, planning, sometimes teamwork, coordination, etc. IBM has created a game called Innov8, "an interactive, 3-D educational game designed to bridge the gap in understanding between IT teams and business leaders in an organization." Now there's a worthy cause. In the field of adult education, and education in general, as elsewhere, we are constantly experiencing the tension between IT and educational goals. That tension is built in to the conflict between the need for information and access, and the need for security. Hmm, just like life!

There have been some interesting forays into simulations and gaming for adult education. I saw one from I think Ireland demonstrated several years ago at the TESOL software developers fair that allowed students to be a waiter interacting with customers. It had what was for that time sophisticated voice recognition and branched responses. The problem is the expense of developing these simulations. But maybe with Second Life and other MUVEs we are moving into an era of many more simulations and games.

So many blogs, so little time

According to statistics posted on the BlogWorld conference site, 12 million Americans maintain a blog - is that possible? I guess we all like to get our thoughts and opinions out there and hear from others. But 1.7 million list making money as one of the main reasons for keeping a blog. Hey, I think I'm missing something here!

Over 120,000 blogs are created every day. This is definitely information overload. But each one is a part of its own community - home schoolers, chihuahua raisers, artisan cheese makers, travel bloggers, fat bloggers, political bloggers, tech bloggers, scifi bloggers, our personal curiosities and our was of connecting with each other are endless. For adult educators, it's important that our learners understand this phenomenon, if they don't already. They can participate in it, become a part of and build national and international communities.

One more statistic, blog readers spend an average of 23 hours per week online. That sounds about right. Here's a chart of the number of unique visitors to the different blog hosts, comparing Q1 2004 to Q1 2005. Old numbers, but Blogger is still by far ahead of the crowd.

There are more blogs in Japanese than in English, but they are close, and far ahead of other languages, although it looks like all languages are participating. Chinese is third, with 8%.

Branka and I are doing a pre-conference session at CATESOL, and several other conferences, on blogging for language teaching and adult basic skills in general. The key is supporting learners to find their community of interest. There's something for everyone out there, and each person has their passions. The ability to connect with others who have the same passions is what got me excited about technology 15 years ago, and the root of it all is still the same.

Questions for Teachers

Cool Cat Teacher posted the Kansas State University students' video on her blog, and then posed the following 20 questions. I would delete #20 because I know you care. And they aren't all relevant to adult education, but still, food for thought. At the very least, a teacher should have some kind of web presence that you could link to, don't you think?

1. Do you spend any time talking about proper methods of e-mail?
2. Do you have a facebook or myspace profile? (I don't?)
3. I someone wrote about you, is your name hyperlinkable? (Do you have something they can link to?)
4. Do you know the names of all of your students?
5. If your students have computers in the classroom, do your students make ongoing eye contact?
6. Are you unafraid of what would happen if youtube, myspace, and facebook were allowed in your classroom?
7. Do your students collaboratively create documents?
8. Do you expect your students to complete their reading assignments?
9. Do you assign papers and grade them after reading EVERY WORD?
10. Have you ever given assignment and allowed students to create content on the public world wide web?
11. Do you allow students to post content WITHOUT premoderation?
12. If you allow students to post online, do you subscribe to 100% of their content in your RSS reader?
13. Do you comment on your student blogs?
14. Is more than 50% of your content relevant "to life?" (Ask your students)
15. Do all of your students open their textbook for your class on a weekly basis?
16. Do you give reading assignments that include web content?
17. Have your students been taught methodologies for assessing the validity of web documents?
18. Do you give students projects where they must manage themselves, multitask, and deliver a comprehensive output that is relevant to your topic?
19. Have you changed anything significant about ALL of the courses you are teaching THIS YEAR?
20. Do you care?

Adult Education Learning Community

Check out this blog, Adult Ed Matters, by an adult education administrator in Southern California, Martha Rankin. I just added her to my blog roll, and I encourage adult educators to see how she is using WordPress to create community, and focus on technology, among teachers in her program. It looks like the focus is on ESL, but it could be related to any program area.

I hope that her blog and her community thrive. I like that Snapshots feature of WordPress too. Does Blogger have that??

There is no shelf!

This is about how we find information vs. how we used to find it. We've had a hard time learning that we don't need to think of information as a thing located on a shelf or in a file. Tagging and RSS feeds changed all that. Video created by Prof. Michael Wesch and his students at Kansas State Univ.

One More View from Second Life

Just had to post one more example from Claudia Linden. This dragon is a sculpture, not an avatar, created by a teenage girl on teen Second Life. It's really complex and beautiful. Click on the image and look at it full size.

Discovery Webinar on SecondLife

Just got finished listening to and watching a webinar on SecondLife by Claudia Linden, aka Claudia L'Amoreaux who works with the teen grid in SL. Of course she is totally committed to 3Di as she called it, 3D Internet, as the mode of the future. She thinks we will be meeting, living and working in virtual environments in the future as many are starting to do now. Her motto - Learn from the teens!

One example was that some kids in one teen grid area, Global Kids, were giving a tour for some kids from Singapore who had never been in SL before, and someone said "We need a tour bus." So a kid went off, built a tour bus, and came back in about 5 minutes and everyone hopped on the bus. That's it in the screen capture above.


She mentioned that there are university courses that take place entirely in Second Life, and participants mentioned University of Maine and Harvard Law as places where this is happening. She believes that 3D worlds increase "emotional bandwidth," i.e. instead of emoticons :( or happy faces, now you can see the whole person virtually as you are talking to them, so it's possible to provide some body language. I guess, although of the avatars I've seen they aren't so expressive. Maybe it's a learned skill. People now have mixed reality, meaning you could be sitting in a presentation at a conference, with your laptop open and talking in Second Life with other people who are sitting in the presentation in both Real Life and Second Life. Could get kind of confusing, but sounds interesting.

She also took us on a tour of the new Linden Labs (creators of Second Life) offices, virtual offices of course! They have most of their meetings "in world" now, using the voice chat. So should OTAN be having staff meeting in Second Life? I'm thinking about it! I have to get a little more proficient myself, first.

But meanwhile, I recommend checking out the other Discovery Education Network Webinars.

Who Can Resist a Mythical Greek Beast?

I was just checking out a discussion of widgets for education on Classroom 2.0, and I found this widget that will add a random mythical Greek beast to my blog every day. I know, it doesn't have anything to do with technology, except that technology can do this. We are all connected to the collective unconscious, right? So you now you can get your random Greek beast fix along with the adult education technology news!

You can get this widget from Laura Gibbs at SchoolhouseWidgets.com.

Online Portfolios

On the NIFL Technology list today there was a post about online portfolios. This is something we have been talking about in California, but haven't really looked into or tried. Two sites were recommended, one commercial and one opensource. The commercial site is TaskStream. It has a nice interface, and the person using it (for a graduate program through the Univ of Phoenix) said that it's been easy to use so far. However, it costs $49/yr, less if you subscribe for more years.

She also found an opensource portfolio service, OSP, that looks very interesting. It would be great to have your resume, work samples, course work, articles, all collected in one place and available either publicly or to those you give access to. So which one will be around longest? That's the biggest issue to me. I wouldn't want to create a portfolio and have it disappear in a year. I guess there are no guarantees, but wondering of any of you have a strong opinion - opensource or commercial?

Web 2.0 for Administrators

My workshop for administrators was interesting. It reminded me that most people don't have time to surf around and look for cool new things. That's part of OTAN's role (my favorite part!), to review the possibilities and present a few that might be helpful for busy teachers and administrators. Links are all on my wiki.

So here's what they wanted to hear about:
1. Google Calendar, and how to share a calendar online
2. Wikis - what's a wiki and what to you use it for?
3. RSS Feeds - but I had to talk about blogging first, and the OTAN News, so they would have a concept of what feeds they might want to get.
4. Social bookmarking - I didn't have time to go into detail on this, but I think this might be one of the most useful things for them

Things we didn't get to:
1. Google Docs
2. Video sharing
3. Unitedstreaming
4. Moodle
5. Open source software

This could really be a 3 hr workshop instead of just a show and tell. Maybe I should propose this for COABE.

Desktop vs Online

Argument with a friend - I say pretty soon we won't need to purchase software, we will be able to create and save all documents online. She says no, because of security. Too easy to hack your online stuff. Would you put your journal online? OK, maybe not. But I would create and save a lot of what I do online. And I will be able to access and use my stuff with something a lot smaller than a laptop, like an iPhone. This is good, because my purse and my laptop case are both too heavy - with gadgets and with paper!

Zoho

Does everyone know about Zoho but me? This is every app you might need, all free and online. So why do we need productivity software any more? OK there are some bells and whistles still missing, but you can create, save, upload and download docs, spreadsheets, slideshows, databases, project management software, etc.

How did I learn about it? A Canadian guy, principal of a school in Saskatchewan, posted a reply to a question I asked on Classroom 2.0.

More on Social Networking and Ning

I'm at the ACSA Conference, and working on my Web 2.0 for Administrators workshop that will happen on Friday. I just have to make another plug for Classroom 2.0 on Ning. A few days ago, while I was thinking about and planning this workshop, I posted a forum topic on Classroom 2.0 asking about Web 2.0 tools for educational administrators. I have a couple of replies so far, not a lot, but they are very useful. People have lots of knowledge and are willing to share. Gotta love it!

I also used the same site to check out a discussion of which free wiki host is the best for education, in order to respond to a question on an email list. While I was there, I noticed that a colleague had joined the community and left a message, so I went to her home page and sent her a friend invitation. So that's a lot of use out of a site for one day!

I also wrote an article about Ning for the CATESOL News, which will come out in November, I hope. One thing I realize about Classroom 2.0 is that its founder does a lot of work to keep it organized, keep discussions going, respond to communnity needs, and generally promote the community. In exploring other Ning sites I see there are a lot of junk sites, and sites that never got off the ground. The tools are there, but it takes a person, or people, with enthusiasm, commitment and hard work to make a community happen.

Twitter

Alan Lew has a blog post about Twitter, where he has pulled together a bunch of references and discussions, and suggested various educational uses. Twitter is blocked at my work as we have youth correctional sites on our network, so I can't use it as much as I'd like to, Can't even grab a screen shot for this post. But I'm interested in how learners might use this service. It is writing, after all. Is Twitter part of the new literacy?

SL Video by Kids

I was just starting to get discouraged about the usefulness of Second Life in adult education, but Barry Bakin posted about this video made by kids doing a project on child soldiers made me think again. It's tough subject matter, reflects some real research, and tells a story. I would like to know what the process of making it was like. Can you see your learners doing a project like this?


Barry found this video on a blog by Kevin Jarrett, who has taken a semester leave to investigate Second Life for education, and is blogging about his experiences.

Doonesbury on Second Life

Did you catch Doonesbury on Sunday? Funny contrast of the generation that is into Second Life, and online life in general, and the generation that doesn't really get it. It also reflects how unapparent it is to the naked eye how much life takes place online. I think about this when I have spent a whole day sitting at my computer. I stand up at the end of the day and stagger out of the office, feeling the intensity of having communicated with many people, research topics, written documents, edited photos and maybe even videos, organized events, attended events, learned about new technologies, participated in national discussions, on and on. But to the observor it looks like I didn't do anything but sit there. How odd is our productive life these days??

Classroom 2.0, Social Networking, and Diigo

I'm really enjoying being a member of Classroom 2.0, a community set up by Steve Hargadon, an ed tech person, using Ning. This is a community of teachers interested in using technology, and they are from all over the world. When I first signed up, my first friend request came from a teacher in Germany. There are lots of interesting topics being discussed there. I drop in when I have a chance, and read a few posts.

For example, tonight I went to the homepage and looked at the new discussions. Steve started several to get people to talk about what kinds of sites they use and like for various things. I checked in to the social bookmarking discussion, and read a really interesting post by Dave Ehrhart. I thought everyone would be talking about Delicious, but no. Dave is using a site called Diigo with his students. Not only can they bookmark sites, but they can highlight pages that they read and write notes on them. Dave, their high school history teacher, can look at their highlighting and notes and add comments of his own to help direct their inquiry or sharpen their insights.

Dave posted a screencast that explains exactly how he uses this tool with his students. After I watched it I understood Diigo and started thinking about how it could be used with adult education students. So I clicked on Dave's icon and went to his home page, left a comment there, and sent a request to add him as a friend. I want to see what else he has discovered!

That's social networking. Steve Hargadon has also created another community on Ning to help teachers set up and use communities. Today I proposed a workshop for CATESOL on Social Networking for Professional Development. I swore I wasn't going to do more than one workshop next year, but this topic I couldn't resist. I have the privilege of having time to surf around and see what's new, and I see part of my job as sharing what I learn, so there you go. Leave me a comment if you like or use Diigo, of if you have other social bookmarking sites to share.

Will Google Be Replaced by a Different Kind of Search

I watched with interest Robert Scoble's video presentation about why Google and similar search engines will eventually be replaced by a "social networking" kind of search, like Mahalo, where real people locate and aggregate information, not algorithms. His idea is that there is so much gaming of Google by Search Engine Optimization (SEO), i.e. companies and bloggers trying to get links to their sites in order to make money from ads on their sites, that Google won't be able to stay ahead of the SEO people. But social networking is becoming so much more developed now that people will be able to use a network of people they trust to find the information they want. He uses Mahalo, Techmeme and Facebook as examples. It's interesting, the idea of a trusted network.

Twitter kind of works like that, too. I follow certain people on Twitter, not because I know them but because I've read their blog posts, or articles, or seen them on Twitter because other people that I'm following follow them. So if one of these people posts a link to something, I'm likely to follow it and see what they are talking about. That's how I saw Scoble's video, which isn't linked to anything, he says, except social networking ways of getting the word out, so you can't find them on Google.

It sounds possible to me. But his presentation has prompted a firestorm of controversy, with posts such as the one on Wired, trashing Scoble's ideas. Such are the ways of the blogosphere, I guess. I would prefer to have heated discussion without a lot of disrespect and namecalling, but it doesn't seem to work that way.

Wiki Scanner

There's been lots of press recently about this young German guy, Virgil Griffith, who created a program to figure out where anonymous wikipedia edits come from, Wiki Scanner. The results reveal many corporate and individual attempts to slant articles one way or another. For example, someone at Wal-Mart changed the line "Wages at Wal-Mart are about 20 percent less than at other retail stores" to "The average wage at Wal-Mart is almost double the federal minimum wage."

Examples are listed from a Wired article linked off the Wiki Scanner page. There is also a link to a Stephen Colbert segment talking about Wiki Scanner, in which he calles Wikipedia "Second Life for corporations," i.e. corporations can create their fantasy of reality there.

Wouldn't this make a great lesson in critical thinking about wikipedia articles?!

WSJ Article about Google Docs for Homework

The Wall Street Journal is talking about parents helping kids with homework compositions even when they are in different states using Google Docs.

How did I hear about this? On Twitter!

Vokis from ESL Students

Kristi Reyes, who teaches VESL at MiraCosta College in Oceanside, CA, is also a technology mentor, and does so many creative projects with her students. I discovered Vokis a few months ago and posted my Voki here. Kristi had her students create their own, and you can view them on her blog.

She has also posted student slideshows and other projects - definitely worth checking out for examples of how to integrate technology in the classroom.

Other great projects by Kristi:

• Using Bubblr to create comic strips using Flickr photos. She links to an example that one of her students created to practice using a number of idioms.



• Using Bookr to create a book for the end of her summer class, also using Flickr photos.



• My favorite - she got tired of her students watching YouTube videos in the lab, so rather than banning YouTube, she created an assignment using Zentation where they had to write a description of the video, that plays as a set of slides coordinated with the video. This one cracked me up!

You can read Kristi's article in the MiraCosta ESL Newsletter. Scroll down to page 11.

The 15 Most Blogged Words

For some reason this struck me as very funny. Bloggers Blog reports about Oxford University Press monitoring 70,000 blogs to keep track of new words that should be added to their dictionaries. They also published this list of the 15 most frequently used words in blogs. You know that blogging is in a way a very personal and self-centered activity if three of the top six words are me, myself and my! What does it mean that the third word is stupid? I guess bloggers like to trash things, in the name of me, myself, and my personal opinion about everything in the universe. And - lovely? Must be a British thing.

15 Most Frequently Blogged Words
- blogger
- blog
- stupid
- me
- myself
- my
- oh
- yeah
- ok
- post
- stuff
- lovely
- update
- nice
- shit

100 (+35) Top Online Tools for Learning

This Web site surveyed 101 "learning professionals" about their favorite tools, and compiled a list of all those mentioned at least twice. The top four are Firefox, del.icio.us, Skype and Google Search. Most of the list is familiar to me, but there are some I need to check out. Compare this list to your list. Are there any you would add or delete?

Social Bookmarking in Plain English

Just came across this video by Lee Lefever explaining social bookmarking in simple terms. It could be a great aid to explaining Delicious and other sites (he mentions Magnolia and furl) to teachers, students and even your relatives who haven't experienced this approach yet.

I'm interested because we are currently working on converting the OTAN My Resources area from the old files and folders model to the new tags and tag clouds model, and should have this up soon. We have about 1,000 people who have saved links in their Resources area, and I anticipate that all will not be thrilled with the change, as all never are. Maybe we can send out a link to this video to help explain what social bookmarking is. What do you think?



He has posted some other videos too, like RSS in Plain English and Social Networking in Plain English. Check him out on YouTube or at the Common Craft Show.

What Makes Teachers Technology Users?

I'm in Ann Arbor this week for the Project IDEAL conference on distance learning in adult education. One advantage of traveling is time on the plane to read the stuff that piles up on your desk because you want to read it but you don't have time. This morning I read an interesting research article from the Journal of Computing in Teacher Education, by Peggy Ertmer of Purdue and two grad students, that surveyed 25 teachers who had won awards for using technology effectively in their learner-centered classrooms.

The goal was to find out what these teachers perceived as the supports to their success, and whether they thought intrinsic or extrinsic factors were more important. Extrinsic factors were things like access to computers, software, administrative support and tech support. Intrinsic factors were things like attitude towards technology, confidence and previous success with technology.

The interesting thing about the results was that teachers rated intrinsic factors as more important to their success than anything else. Even if they had limited computer or Internet access, or a lack of support from their administration, if they felt confident and committed, they found a way to overcome the barriers. So if you believe that using technology will help your students, and you have a strong commitment to helping your students, you will find a way to use technology in your classroom even if it is not well-supported in your program.

To me this indicates support for the mentoring model. Mentoring builds confidence and successful experiences with technology through support from a peer mentor. Workshops, seminars and conferences are great for introducing new ideas, and 76% of the teachers surveyed identified these as their preferred approaches to professional development. But workshops and conferences don't necessarily create positive attitude and commitment. Mentoring has a role to play in cheerleading, building confidence, analyzing challenges and celebrating successes.

The highest rated success factors were inner drive, personal beliefs, commitment and confidence. How do we build and support those qualities? There were differences between genders (good tech support was more important to women, and to teachers who had been teaching longer, perhaps because they were less familiar with the technology.)

I can't find the article online right now, maybe the ISTE server is having a hiccup, but I will keep trying.

Surface Computing

If you haven't watched this video about MicroSoft's surface computing project, you need to watch it. It's pretty amazing. Not available yet, and will start as a kiosk kind of thing for companies, but it will be interesting to see where it goes.

And after you've absorbed that information, watch this parody.

Reading about Second Life

Recently someone asked me in an email about my activities in Second Life. I wish I did have time to hang out in SL and get used to the interface and explore all the educational things that are hatching there. But it's a time sink. I'm interested and curious, but it's hard to find the time to play with it.

I just read several blog posts by Sylvia Martinez about her experiences in Second Life. She was invited to join an educators group in SL, and went into it open but somewhat skeptical. She said she has been through many new interfaces that people think are going to revolutionize the way we think, including BBS's and Tapped In, and although some good things happen, there are still big limitations.

Her first post is considering what SL is in relation to education. Her second one related her first SL visit and the things she learned to do. The third reflects on the whole SL experience and why it isn't that revolutionary and doesn't allow learners to do much that they couldn't do in First Life, and since the interface is kind of clumsy, and fairly hard to learn, as she said it better be a really good learning project to justify spending the amount of time learners would have to spend just to learn to navigate around.

The counter-argument is that yes, SL is clumsy and bandwidth-intensive right now, but this is the direction the Internet is headed and pretty soon we will be doing everything via avatars and virtual environments. Well, she's right, it's going to have to be a much better and more intuitive interface than it is right now. But then, remember DOS?

SlideFlickr

OK, this is cool! On SlideFlickr you can create a slideshow of all your Flickr photos, or a group or set in about 5 seconds. All you need is the URL of the group or set, paste it in and click Generate. This gives you a slide show, and also the code to paste the slideshow into your blog or web page. I did a few photos from camping last summer - Mono Lake and a campsite near Lee Vining.

Priorities for Adult Education Teachers

I recently received a newsletter reporting on a statewide (CA) survey of teachers that asked what their priorities were for professional development related to curriculum and instruction. Here's the result:

1. Effective Lesson Planning
2. Creating a Web Site for Your Class
3. Including Technology in the Classroom

OTAN is actually responding to each of these. We have the Lesson Plan Builder for online support of good lesson planning.

We have been offering workshops and information for several years on free and easy ways to create a class Web site. We have showed SchoolNotes, NiceNet and Yahoo Groups. Now we are offering teachers the opportunity to try out Blackboard or Moodle, very robust course management systems. For our "build Your Own Site" workshop, we used to train people on Geocities Pagebuilder, but we had so many problems with school district firewalls that we abandoned that. Now we are creating a workshop on using Google Page Creator, but it's so easy that we will add more content to fill up the 3 hours! I believe this will be the year that teachers really get into having their own class Web page. The early adopters will finally be able to spread some of their enthusiasm.

We are probably most focused on technology integration in the classroom. Last year we focused on Web 2.0 sites, blogging, podcasting, video editing, using Excel in teaching, audio card readers and electronic whiteboards. We are working on updating the Web home of our videos about technology integration, so that's coming soon.

I'm also working on an interesting project funded by the federal Dept. of Ed. AdultEd Online. Part of that project is to create an online self-assessment for teachers to determine their skills in technology integration, and users can build their own professional development plan based on their results. This tool is in beta right now, and will go live on August 31.

So, are we doing enough? No such animal, I guess. But it's exciting for me to see that adult education teachers are focusing more and more on technology. The possibilities are proliferating so fast, I see it as our task to sort through them and provide manageable chunks of useful information for teachers.

Did you know...

This is an interesting video I got from David Warlick's blog, 2 cents worth. It has a lot of data about how the world is changing, and how fast. For example, if MySpace was a country, it would be the 8th largest country in the world. Could your students relate to this message?

David Warlick and ClustrMaps

Reading David Warlick's blog about Bernie Dodge's presentation in Vermont. He was talking about his formula for learning power, attention x depth x efficiency, which he also talked about last year at CUE. David Warlick's blog is interesting, but his ClustrMap is depressing. He has a million red dots all over the world, and I have about 3!

Tech Support for an Old Technology

This video puts tech support in perspective. Someday we'll be laughing about the days when we needed a lot of tech support for computers (I hope!)

Draggable Driving Directions

Have you ever gotten driving directions on MapQuest or another mapping site, and then you didn't want to go the way it told you to go? Google Maps has added some very useful features to address just this problem. Now you can drag your route, add stops, change the order of the stops by dragging them up or down. Here's a video that shows how it works.

Some Quotes

I'm trying to catch up on email today, and finding some quotes, about technology and about literacy, that I want to keep. Here are 3.

Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination.
--Albert Einstein

I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
--Stephen Jay Gould, 1980

Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the universe.
--Kurt Vonnegut, in Hocus Pocus, 1990

Gabcast

My workshop at the CASAS Summer Institute covered a bunch of things - the OTAN website, the technology integration self-assessment for teachers (only in beta right now - email me if you want to be a beta tester), blogs and podcasts, and 3 pieces of equipment (audio card reader, portable keyboard, and electronic whiteboard). The highpoint (to me) was having participants call in to my channel on Gabcast and record a message that I could then play as a podcast when they got back from break. This is such an easy way for students to post audio - great for speaking activities, and pretty much everyone has a cell phone now. You can go here to listen to the examples we made yesterday.

AND, I did my presentation from a wiki for the first time - no more PowerPoint!! Not as pretty, but if I have more time I can work on that.

Centralized Voicemail

Someone sent me this link to Grand Central, an online service that gives you one lifetime phone number that all your phones can ring to. In other words, my home land line, my work phone, my work cell and my personal cell would all send their voice mails to this number. And, I could have all calls go to the number I choose. So when I'm traveling, all calls could go to my cell. When I'm at work, all calls could go to my work phone. It sounds like a great idea for those of us with too many phone numbers. But it's in beta right now, so I'm wondering if it will grow and how long it will last.

Has anyone else heard of or used this service?

My New Voki

Get a Voki now!

Urban Reading Teacher

Barry's blog led me to another adult education blog by Delondra Williams, called Adventures of an Urban Reading Teacher. Delondra teaches ABE in Los Angeles, and has blogged almost every school night since she started her blog in May, reflecting on her lessons, her students, her CASAS scores, and more. Great example of teacher self-reflection, and she feels like blogging connects her to the larger teaching community, as her fellow teachers leave comments on her posts.

ESL Technology Blog

Just got a message from Barry Bakin that he is reviving his Tech4ESL blog. Barry teaches ESL Level 5 in the LA area. I'm happy to see more adult education teachers blogging about their classroom experiences and use of technology. His latest post is about Bubblr and class projects adding text bubbles to photos. He has some funny examples - check them out.

File Conversion

Zamzar supposedly will convert many different file types, including video. I haven't tried it yet, but I read about it on someone's twitter. They converted two word docs to pdfs on the site and it worked perfectly. How convenient is that?

If Class Were Like a Chat

This video is meant to show how inefficient online chat is. It's pretty funny.

Pay Attention

This slide show is a harangue about technology infusion. The tone is kind of self-righteous and therefore annoying, but there are some good points such as about using cell phones in instruction. My favorite line: "It's not attention deficit, I'm just not listening!"

Music Podcast

Click here to get your own player.



Steve Gwynne, a VESL teacher in San Diego, did a workshop for a few fellow teachers on using Audacity to make sound files. They each answered the question "What kind of music do you like?" and played a short music clip. He made their files into a podcast for his students, and added a quiz.

Bubbl.us

Heard about this site today from the Webheads. It's an online brainstorming site, where you can create diagrams, link them together any way you want, and share the process with other users. I don't have any other users to try it out with on this Sunday afternoon, and anyway I'm supposed to be going to the grocery store right now or there will be no dinner. But email me if you want to try it.

If Class Were Like a Chat

I found this video on the Webheads Convergence. It shows how teaching would be if the classroom were run like a chat room. It's pretty funny.

Webheads Convergence

The Webheads in Action Online Convergence is almost over, happening May 18-20! There were keynotes, blogs, chats, etc. They are using a lot of different tools for communication, including Twitter, Learning Times, Tapped In and Knowplace. So even just going to their site and signing up for the various tools they are using is an education in itself. I hate to say it, but there were some that I already had accounts for but had totally forgotten. Just too many things to cram into the old brain.

This morning I attended part of a presentation on Personal Learning with Web 2.0 that used and audio stream, and Yugma to show the slides. I also tried to attend a session in Second Life, but I think I was too late. I'm not doing too well at converting GMT to PDT! It seems there is so much happening in Second Life and education these days, I would like to get on top of it, but there's a steeper learning curve than for a lot of other things, and I haven't managed to make the time yet. I was happy that I found the Webheads hut where they hang out, even though most people were gone already.

Did anyone else catch part of the convergence? Leave a comment and let me know what you participated in and how it was.

Some Reflections on TIMAC

We just finished up the third year of the OTAN Technology Integration Mentor Academy. It was a great two days, with presentation by cohort 3 on Thursday, and cohort 2, the second year people who are finished now, on Friday. It worked out really well having 7 minute presentations, much easier to sit through 15 in a row, and the information was more succinct too.

So much has come out of this experience. It really feels like we are beginning to have some effect on the field. There are more and more tech presentations at conferences like CCAE, and many of them are by TIMAC participants or mentors. They are also networking with each other more, and even beginning to do workshops at each others' sites.

Leila Rosemberg said one of the outcomes of TIMAC for her was being showered with admiration and appreciation. It made me laugh, but it's so important, too. The teachers who have come to TIMAC have experienced a lot of benefits that come from being seen as a leader. They didn't start out thinking of themselves that way, but through technology mentoring they have affected their programs and their administrators notice.

Another observation someone made is that "there is an alarming acceleration in the number of things I know nothing about." I loved that line too, and I can relate!

Overall, there were some wonderful applications of technology, such as podcasting and creating of student orientation videos and powerpoints. It seemed that there were quite a lot of powerpoint projects, which was a little frustrating. But I always need to be reminded of where our teachers are, overall. They are not tech-friendly, for the most part, and sometimes very resistant. So powerpoint is a good place to start for them.

The other thing is the number of creating teaching strategies you can implement with powerpoint. Using sound and video, one teacher got the script of her video to scroll in ppt in time with the video - pretty good!

And I felt that the participants are being good advocates for both their students and their mentees. Branka should be very proud of her work in putting this together, and I am too!

More on Maps

Larry Ferlazzo pointed out that there are a number of mapping sites, including Google Maps, (Click on My Maps)which has some nice examples of projects, like a historical guide to Route 66. Here is a student project by one of his ESOL high school students.

Other map sites he recommends to his students are Microsoft Virtual Earth, Continento, Wayfaring, QuickMaps, Click2Map,

UseaMap.com

I got an email from a person in Dublin who has created a mapping site, like TinyMap, where you can create your own map, save it online, link to it, and also easily embed it in your blog or anywhere else online. The site is called Useamap. I made a map of where OTAN is. Unfortunately, the satellite photo is old, so there is only a vacant lot where our offices now stand, but hopefully that won't be the case for your school or community! Our building is quite new.

This could be a nice activity for anything that involves mapping, distances, math, community information, etc. You can also add notes, directions, comments and photos (although I couldn't get the photos to work.)

Blogs and Podcasts at CCAE

Branka Marceta gave a wonderful workshop at the California Council on Adult Education conference on blogs and podcasts in adult ed. She asked people to call GabCast on their cell phones before the workshop started, and then played the resulting podcasts at the end. You can click on an example on the blog she set up for the workshop.

She also added a video of the evening activity, which included feeding giraffes at the Fresno zoo!

TIMAC Videoconference

Last week the third annual TIMAC videoconference was held, including about 15 people at 6 sites. None of the schools have access to videoconferencing equipment yet, but several are considering purchases. I'm really hoping that by next year there will be at least two schools that can do a collaborative project with students using videoconferencing.

Again this year we visited Ano Nuevo State Park where they have a webcam on the beach to observe the elephant seals. It's fun for the participants, and one thought about how it might fit into adult education is community awareness. For example, the teacher from Fresno, Susan Guzzetta, said that a lot of their students have never been outside of the central valley, so here would be their chance to see the beach, and some of the state parks - the next best thing to being there.

CCAE Conference in Fresno

The first day of the California Council on Adult Education was today. I was at the TIMAC (Technology Integration Mentor Academy) panel, and all panelists did a great job. We really are creating a community of practice, as Branka said, or at least a corps of ed tech professionals in adult education. Stories from Tulare, San Gabriel and Fresno confirmed that technology integration is a collaborative effort. Having a supportive administrator is crucial, and so is having a good relationship with the tech support guys. I want to make a video about the Pixley project. Tom Elwood told a great story about this tiny farming town south of Tulare, very poor, very low education levels in general, where a grant from AT&T, secured by a community organization, is providing wireless for the whole town, and laptops to the parents of any sixth grader in Pixley, if the complete a computer class. What a great story! The parents are gratuating and receiving their laptops in a couple of weeks.