Hey everyone!
Last week, I posted a blog announcing CrowdED Learning's new, free Digital Skills Library. You may be aware of our Skill Directories (to be updated in the next month or so!), which provide listings of high-quality, free and open resources organized by subject area. The Digital Skills Library is sort of a "one step deeper" effort to get more granular, where we've pulled specific lessons and activities from these resources and organized them by skill within the area of Digital Literacy.
The goal of the library is to provide learners and instructors with a wide range of instructional and learning resource options that are organized around core skills. Right now, the focus is on direct to student instructional resources around "hard skills" and some great practice resources, as well as sets of instructor-led resources teachers can use to teach digital skills.
Over time, we want this to grow into more, but this can't happen in a vacuum. This is where we are looking to explore ways to tap the collective expertise of the community. How do we build out a library of more robust, application-based lessons that incorporate these hard skills? Are these hyperdocs? What's the best way to organize resources so students can easily navigate to skills they want to develop? What type of crowdsourcing activities could we initiate within the community to do things like develop Quizlet vocabulary decks of digital terms? How can we recruit and assign teams of volunteers to take a particular skill and identify 3-5 resources—leveraging different modalities—that align to that skill? What types of questions might we ask students in a Google Form so they can evaluate resources and help us understand what's effective and what's not?
To get this conversation started, we are hosting a webinar next Thursday, January 17 from 4-5 PM Eastern. During the webinar, I'll be sharing the library, how it's been organized, what resources have been included, and more about the direction we'd like to go with the library. I'll also be asking a lot of questions of the audience via polls as we walk through the library to get feedback and direction, and sending out a survey afterward to gather additional feedback as well as gain a sense of people's interest in joining a volunteer group to support both guiding the focus of the library and creating projects that help build out the library.
If you are interested in being a part of that conversation, or if you are simply interested in seeing an overview of the library, please sign up for our webinar.
I'm really hoping this can be a living, breathing resource that evolves over time into something really useful. In the meantime, I hope you can join us next week, and happy exploring! :)
Comments
Thanks to Jeff Goumas for this announcement. I hope many LINCS members will join the webinar that Jeff and CrowdED are hosting [sign up for webinar ].
Our field's professional development webinars have often been one-shot introductions, but the LINCS CoP has been attempting to change that by linking an introductory webinar to a multi-day follow-up discussion held in a CoP discussion group. For example, on Monday, January 14th Michael Matos will offer a 90-minute "Tips for Teaching Adult Learners Basic Technology Skills" webinar, beginning at noon Eastern time, that will be followed by four days of discussions with Michael in the Integrating Technology group.
The webinar that Jeff Goumas and CrowedED will be offering, not a LINCS activity, is also not a one-shot. It appears to be the beginning of an important CrowdED effort to engage members of the adult basic skills education community in developing useful free resources for integrating technology skills, that we all can use. Jeff wrote, "We are looking to explore ways to tap the collective expertise of the community. How do we build out a library of more robust, application-based lessons that incorporate these hard skills? Are these hyperdocs? What's the best way to organize resources so students can easily navigate to skills they want to develop? What type of crowdsourcing activities could we initiate within the community to do things like develop Quizlet vocabulary decks of digital terms? How can we recruit and assign teams of volunteers to take a particular skill and identify 3-5 resources—leveraging different modalities—that align to that skill? What types of questions might we ask students in a Google Form so they can evaluate resources and help us understand what's effective and what's not?" (Bolding mine)
I would be glad to see a collaborative effort like this in the adult basic skills community; it could also align well with the goals of the LINCS CoP. I hope Integrating Technology and other LINCS group members will register for the webinar, reply to Jeff in this discussion thread, post questions here that Jeff might answer -- before or after the webinar -- and engage in developing and sharing lessons that take advantage of the free and OER resources in the CrowdED Digital Skills Library. I welcome LINCS members to use the Integrating Technology group to organize this effort. It might also be possible to create a LINCS micro-group that focuses on this effort. If this is of interest, let me know and we can pursue it further.
David J. Rosen, Moderator
LINCS CoP Integrating Technology group