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!

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.