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 pbwiki as the host, because they are putting a lot of effort into responding to the needs of education, and they have been accessible. 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.

Here's the recording of the presentation with the slides:

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.