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!