Adult Literacy Education Wiki

Originally posted on the NIFl Discussion system - Sept.16/05.
Abridged and Reproduced with permission of the author

http://wiki.literacytent.org

Dear Colleague,

The Adult Literacy Education Wiki now has over 400 registered users, 34 of whom have added their introductions to the Who's Here page. It now has over 500 pages of content on research and professional wisdom in adult literacy education. A wiki* is a web environment in which (after a free registration and log-in) you can easily add content as well as read it. So the ALE Wiki is a community of practice, with practitioners, researchers and learners from all over North America.

The wiki is organized by content areas, or topics. Currently these include:

  • Adult Learners' Self-Study
  • Adult Literacy Accountability
  • Adult Literacy Professional Development
  • Assessment Information
  • Basic Literacy
  • Classroom Practices that Work Professional Wisdom from Practitioners and Research
  • Distance and Persistence
  • Evidence Based Adult Education
  • Family Literacy
  • GED Research
  • Learner Persistence
  • Learning Disabilities
  • Numeracy Research and Practice
  • Participatory and Emancipatory Education
  • Project Based Learning
  • Public Policy
  • Research to Practice, Practice to Research
  • Technology
  • Workforce, Workplace and Worker Education
  • Young Adult Literacy

More topics can be added, and more content can be added within each of the topic areas. The topic areas are usually organized as follows:

  • Questions -- usually actual questions from the field, often those posted by people on NIFL electronic discussion lists
  • Discussions -- usually selected threads from electronic discussion lists which are often added to on the Wiki. Sometimes these are summarized.
  • Glossary
  • Research -- citations and links to pertinent research in the topic area
  • Resources -- links to resources which are pertinent to the topic area

How can one use the ALE Wiki ?

... in ways yet to be discovered. But so far, users have:

  • looked for questions in a specific topic area with which they, as teachers, are facing
  • found references to research which they needed for proposals or to improve program practice
  • looked up puzzling terms in the glossary
  • remembered a discussion held on an electronic list, found the thread archived in the ALE Wiki, and sent the ALE Wiki address to a colleague

I hope you will look at the ALE Wiki -- which is a work in progress -- and register and add to it. Please let me know other uses that you have found for the ALE Wiki, and if you are interested in being a topic area leader for one of the current topics --or a new wiki topic.

David J. Rosen
Wiki Organizer and "Wikiteer"
djrosen1@comcast.net