In the News... Online Citizenship Study

Earlier this week a colleague and I were interviewed by Katherine Glover of MinnPost.com for an article about our efforts to create free online self-study resources for immigrants preparing for U.S. citizenship.

You can check out her story here: Minnesota Literacy Council piloting software to help immigrants with citizenship test.

The new self-study resources are under development as part of the Learner Web (LW) project, of which the St. Paul Community Literacy Consortium is a regional partner. While the Learner Web materials will not be available except to LW partners for the duration of the original 3-year demonstration project, once that project is complete, the goal is to have LW released as open-source learning management software, something akin to Moodle, but focused on delivering self-access, self-paced learner-directed resources rather than semester-based, instructor-led online courses.

But Moodle and Learner Web shouldn't really be seen as competitors: the two systems in our case work together in partnership. Using our existing Moodle site we were able to create lessons and practice exercises and host our own content. That content can be seen at: http://online.themlc.org/ -- click on "Study for the U.S. Citizenship Test". Those lessons are then linked into Learner Web, which is a system for organizing existing resources (such as online courses, websites, books, community organizations, etc.) around the steps a learner needs to take to achieve a goal.

Anyone is free to browse through the Moodle course, which is open to guest users. While you're there, you might want to check out our other online training courses for adult educators and volunteers.

How to Recover from YouTube-Block

Thanks to Marian Thatcher and Larry Ferlazzo for re-posting and discussing this great blog post by Joyce Valenza. All three teacher techies offer tips & tricks for teachers and students who want to use YouTube videos at school. They offer alternatives that allow us to use YouTube videos as learning resources while we wait for our schools' policies to catch up to 21st century realities.

Even with these alternatives out there, I personally feel that the ban on YouTube should be lifted from Adult Education programs--we are working with adults after all. It's patronizing to treat adult learners the same way we treat children, as though we are their guardians who need to "protect" them from the dangers of the Internet. Clearly K12 schools have a duty to protect their young charges from inappropriate and potentially disturbing material. But teaching children and teaching adults are two totally different endeavors, and restrictive policies designed for 8-year olds should not be applied to their parents! Furthermore, as adult educators we have a responsibility to provide our learners with the skills and know-how to be effective parents and role models in the digital age. That responsibility includes helping our learners understand sites like YouTube that their children are probably using at home or with friends. Yes, there is a slew of awful garbage on YouTube, but there's also a wealth of truly valuable material. Which is why our adult learners need guided experiences with it: so they can provide those same experiences for their own kids.

And on that note, I'll share two of the truly valuable resources I've recently discovered on YouTube. Both are resources for immigrants applying for U.S. citizenship and could be of great use to ABE educators and learners. Enjoy!