[AAACE-NLA] Adult Literacy education Wiki

[David Rosen]

  AAACE-NLA Colleagues,

  We would like to introduce you to the Adult Literacy Education Wiki.

  "Wiki-wiki," a Hawaiian word meanimg very, very quickly, refers in the 
online world to a web site where you can immediately and easily add to 
or change text.  The best-known application is the Wikipedia, a 
multilingual encyclopedia, created and modified daily by thousands of 
people across the world.

  We think a wiki can be a useful online environment for adult literacy 
practitioners, adult learner leaders, and researchers to have ongoing 
discussions in areas of mutual interest. The idea of having a wiki 
arose from planning the Meeting of the Minds research and practice 
conference held in Sacramento, California in December, 2004.

  The Adult Literacy Education(ALE) Wiki is not a replacement for 
electronic lists.  It is a complement to, and we hope an enhancement of 
them.  Because a wiki is an easily edited document environent, current 
or past electronic list discussions can be selectively copied to the 
wiki, continued at any time, and referenced (and linked) in future 
e-list discussions. For each wiki discussion topic a summary, glossary, 
and list of research and other references can be created.  We hope the 
ALE Wiki will become a handy electronic reference shelf of definitions 
and resources for discussions which take place on adult literacy 
e-lists, and where one could easily find research citations, full-text 
studies, threaded discussions which have taken place on listservs, and 
other materials which are all organized around specific research topic 
areas and questions.  It could also be an environment where researchers 
describe their completed and ongoing work, see how practitioners are 
reacting to or using their research, and see what questions and issues 
practitioners and adult learner leaders think are important to study.

  A wiki, by design, is a participatory environment.  We would like to 
invite you to work on the ALE wiki with us. (Our motto is "workers, not 
lurkers.") We are trying to organize this so that lots of people from 
the field are involved in adding/changing and editing text, but also so 
that in each of the areas there is a leader, a topic manager, to help 
keep things organized.. 

  If you would like to visit the Adult Literacy Education Wiki, and we 
hope join in, you will find it at:

      http://wiki.literacytent.org/index.php/Main_Page

  To set up a log-in account, so you can add to the ALE Wiki, go to:

      http://wiki.literacytent.org/index.php/Special:Userlogin

  Please e-mail David (djrosen1 at comcast.net ) if you have technical 
questions.  We hope you will find the Adult Literacy Education Wiki as 
intriguing as we do, and that you will join other researchers and 
practitioners who have begun to experiment with it.

  David J. Rosen
  Jackie Taylor
  Marie Cora
  Marian Thacher
  Erik Jacobson