Mobile Screen Technology of the Future

This is a vision of how screen technology will be working by 2014, by a company that does user interface.

ABC's of Investing in Adult Literacy Education

I can't resist posting this alphabet of adult literacy instruction provided by researcher and adult literacy advocate Tom Stitch.

ABC's of Investing in Adult Literacy Education

Tom Sticht
International Consultant in Adult Education

A - An investment in adult literacy education usually produces "double duty dollars," meaning a dollar spent for adult literacy education usually produces many dollars of returns on investment in improved productivity at work, at home, in the schools and in the community.

B - Better educated parents tend to produce better educated children.

C - Childhood education and adulthood education are part of the "multiple life cycles" of education; adults' education produces an intergenerational transfer of language and literacy to their children.

D - Developing integrated basic skills and workplace skills programs is a cost-effective way to increase higher paying job prospects in welfare-to-work programs.

E - Educating adult literacy students has been found to improve self-esteem, motivation to learn, and overall mental health; thus cost- effectively providing health outcomes along with literacy.

F - Federal funding for adult literacy education does not exceed $220 per student while funding for Head Start exceeds $6,000 per student, K-12 exceeds $6500 per student and higher education exceeds $16,000 per student. This is unfair and unjust.

G - Globalization of work means that America's workforce will need to compete with workforces around the world, and adult workplace literacy programs can help workers acquire new levels of skills as new demands arise.

H - Health literacy programs can produce increases in adults' understanding of medical problems before they become critical and contribute to medical cost-savings.

I - Intergenerational transfer from parents to their children of motivation for learning has been found to occur when adults are involved in literacy programs.

J - Just-in-time basic skills education in workplaces has helped adults retain and advance in jobs that would have been lost to foreign competition.

K - Knowledge development is as important as skill development, and faster to achieve, in adult literacy programs that focus on helping adults meet daily demands for reading, writing, and mathematics in functional contexts.

L - Literacy education in adulthood has been found to be an important contributor to the success of pre-school programs of literacy development in early childhood.

M - Military services have valued adult literacy education since General George Washington ordered chaplains at Valley Forge to convert an old hospital into a classroom and use it to teach the ABC's to illiterate soldiers.

N - Navy research near the turn of the 21st century found that each dollar invested in academic (basic) skills training returned $14-$22 dollars in recruitment and training savings.

O - Organizational effectiveness in the areas of recruitment, training, job placement, job promotion, and job productivity has been found in cases where workplace literacy programs have been initiated.

P - Promoting the Adult Education and Literacy System (AELS) of the United States ought to be a major undertaking for communications media, business and industry, and educators at all levels because of the many benefits that this system provides.

Q - Quantitative and qualitative data from research across the last century show that adults can be learn to read, write, compute, and develop functionally relevant knowledge and that this knowledge and skill has contributed to the growth of democracy in our nation.

R - Renewed commitment to adult literacy education by our federal and state policymakers will return itself in greater national achievements in the education of children and the increased global competitiveness of the American workforce.

S - Social inclusion with increased social justice requires that investments in adult literacy education be increased from present poverty levels to levels comparable to the other components of our national education system.

T - Training programs that help under-educated adults move more quickly from poverty or working poor into well paying jobs are possible using cost-effective, functional context designs in which basic skills and job skills education are integrated together into coherent, supportive, developmental programs.

U - Under-educated adults without high school degrees in the United States number in the tens of millions and are presently under-served by a grossly under-funded and marginalized education system. Policymakers need to provide funds to move this educational system from the margins to the mainstream of education.

V - Volunteers have served adults in need of literacy training ever since our nation's beginnings and they continue to serve today. But the services of hundreds of thousands of volunteers need to be reinforced by even greater numbers of full time, paid teachers if the United States is to fully meet the needs for lifelong learning and transfer across life cycles in this more complex age.

W - Women's literacy education is of special importance because research shows that better educated women have fewer children, get better pre-natal and post-natal care, have more full-term babies, send children to school better prepared to learn, and produce greater numbers of secondary school and college graduates.

X - Xenophobia, i.e., fear and hatred of strangers or foreigners, is being fought every day in the Adult Literacy and Education System of the United States by tens of thousands of teachers in programs for both native born and immigrant adults. Better educated adults are less fearful and more accepting of others and this is conducive to better community safety and harmony.

Y - Young adults who are positioned to become parents and who are school dropouts or just poorly educated in the basic skills can receive literacy education and thereby improve not only their own life chances but those of their children when they arrive. Adult literacy education is a form of early childhood education that starts even before children are conceived.

Z - Zest and Zeal for life, greater health, wealth, social inclusion, social justice, family devotion, greater concern for and caring for the diversity of humanity and a greater chance for success in the pursuit of happiness. All these are the realities as well as the intangibles resulting from adult literacy education.

SUPPORT THE ADULT EDUCATION AND LITERACY SYSTEM TODAY!

Thomas G. Sticht
International Consultant in Adult Education
tsticht at aznet dot net

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.