Project Overview 
Project Overview
This summer, fifteen adult educators from seven states in the Northeast were invited to participate in an intensive, week-long training program designed to enable them to create high quality Web-based educational products especially for low-literacy or beginning-to-intermediate level ESL/ESOL adult learners. Each participant began to work on a product during the week, and are now developing final prototypes of their projects at home or work, while we continue to provide on-line technical assistance. Final prototypes should be completed by the Spring of 2001.
The project was a collaboration between the Literacy Assistance Center of New York City (LAC) (with funding from the Northeast Regional Technology in Education Consortium), the New England Literacy Resource Center (NELRC) at World Education, the Adult Literacy Resource Institute (ALRI), Vermont Adult Learning (VAL), and the Graduate Center of Marlboro College.
Because of funding requirements, participation was limited to applicants from the Northeastern and mid-Atlantic states, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. The LAC's Jana Sladkova, NELRC's Jeff Carter, and ALRI's David Rosen read more than 40 project proposals to select the best candidates.
The lead trainer for the week-long training was Steve Linberg, the programmer behind PBS LiteracyLink. Ralph Silva of Vermont Adult Learning handled facilities planning for the physical meeting to take place in August.
The training was held from July 31 to August 4, 2000 at the Graduate Center of Marlboro College in Brattleboro, VT. During those five days we covered a great deal of material, including the mechanics of authoring HTML, multimedia types and how to incorporate them into web projects, and more advanced topics such as CGI scripting and programming. We concluded by looking at project-management strategies to help ensure that projects eventually are completed. Our goal was to give participants the tools to plan, design, and launch their own Web projects and the collegial network to support their work.
Web Camp projects range from a low-literacy oriented site for survivors of violence to a site geared to building sight word vocabulary. Underlying all the projects is the same basic philosophy: sites should be easy to navigate, contain language accessible to low-level readers or ESOL learners, and, most importantly, feature content that is meaningful to marginalized adult learners.
Ongoing technical support this Fall is being handled by Jeff Carter of the NELRC.
The Need
U.S. Adult education programs provide basic literacy, basic and secondary level skills, and English Language instruction for, at best, only 10% of those who need and might benefit from these services. (Estimate by US Department of Education, Division of Adult Education and Literacy.) One promising development to meet this need -- especially for those adults who, because of the complexities of work and family responsibilities, have limited opportunity to attend classes regularly is instruction at home, work, at a community computing center or a public library through CD-ROMs, the Web and E-mail.
Internet-based instruction is relatively new, and few adult learners currently have Internet access at home. However, there is reason to believe this will gradually change, as the cost of computers and Internet access has dropped -- new computers are available now for under $300 -- and with technologies such as WebTV now well under $150. A recent National Telecommunications Information Agency "Digital Divide" report says that "all Americans are becoming increasingly connected -- whether by telephone, computer or the Internet -- over time" and that "the digital divide among households of different races, incomes and education levels may narrow. This pattern is already occurring with regard to home computers." Although the Digital Divide report goes on to say that those with low education levels, low income, and living in inner cities are the most likely NOT to be connected, it is clear that even this population will-- perhaps more slowly -- have access to the Web.
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While it is important not to overestimate the degree to which low-income adult learners have meaningful access to new technologies, it is also important, we feel, in light of the increased access that is occurring, to begin to think about how to serve this population better. Currently one can find very little instruction on the Web for adults with low-level literacy or English language skills. Much of what is available in other digital formats, such as CD-ROM, is dry tutorial, or drill and practice which are neither engaging nor particularly effective. Nearly all of the high quality, creative curriculum materials in our field are found only in hard copy print.
One reason for the lack of useful educational digital multimedia is the nature of the adult literacy field. Many creative adult education curriculum writers work in small adult literacy programs, not for national publishers, as in K-12 education. And few of these practitioner/curriculum developers are familiar with creating materials in an interactive digital medium. Further, there are very few professional development opportunities available to adult education practitioners to learn the technical skills needed to work at an advanced level in this medium.
Our Response: Spiders at Work
Our idea was to begin to meet this need by identifying adult education practitioner/curriculum writers of proven talent, those who have published effective, creative curriculum materials, and by giving them the training and technical support needed to create useful on-line materials for adult learners.
