Getting Ready for CATESOL

I'm getting ready for the CATESOL state conference in Santa Clara on 4/23-25, and hoping there will be good attendance!

There will be two labs for the Electronic Village, and many great tech presentations. I'm on two panels, and creating a one-page handout and a wiki for both.

The first one is on Distance Learning: The Future of English as a Second Language. This panel was organized by Kara Rosenberg, Principal of Palo Alto Adult School. We are covering a wide range of topics, from data on distance learning to creating a distance learning program, curriculum, and opportunities for professional development. All our materials and references are on the wiki. It's on Friday at 9 in Convention Center 204

The second one is for the Adult Level Workshop, and the loose theme is Transition. The four presenters will talk about strategic planning for adult education in California (Vittoria Abbate-Maghsoudi, Mt. Diablo Adult Education), the role of technology in transition (me), transitioning students from non-credit ESL to credit ESL at the colleges (Greatchen Bitterlin, San Diego Community College District), and the importance of professional development (Karen Dennis, Santa Ana College). Right now just my part is on the wiki. The Adult Level Workshop is on Saturday, 1:30 - 3 in Grand Ballroom A.

Other OTAN workshops are:
- Moodle (Penny Pearson, Friday at 10:45 in the Great American Ballroom)
- OTAN Resources (Branka Marceta, 9 am on Saturday in Convention Center 205)
- USA Learns (Evelyn Fella, 9:45 on Saturday)
- Connecting with Picasa (Penny and Branka, 1:30 on Saturday, Convention Center 204)

Hope to see you there, California!

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.

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!

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.

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.