Meaning of literacy

I am using the term literacy to encompass a wide range of ideas on learning, education, workplace skills, soft skills, computer skills, and general increase in knowledge and skills. I will focus mainly on adult literacy but will also include some thoughts on children.

What gives me the authority?

I have been involved in adult literacy education for nearly 15 years but I am not a professional educator. I started tutoring adults with Milwaukee Achiever Literacy Services in 1996.  In 2004, I joined their board of directors and then was Board Chairman from 2006-2010.

During that time, I have devoted many personal hours to thinking about not only adult literacy but how our community could most effectively benefit from, pay for, and deliver literacy. Still being on the board but no longer chairman allows me the opportunity to consolidate and communicate my thoughts on the big picture of literacy.

Is literacy important?

Yes! It is extremely important and in a future article I will review a variety of statistics that show just how critical literacy is for the success of every community and ALL of its members.

Community

My understanding of how literacy fits into a community comes from the greater Milwaukee, WI area. I am certain that many of the ideas presented will have a wider applicability but the details will always be based upon and derived from the Milwaukee area.

Series

One reason that it has been difficult for me to write on this topic is that there is so much information and every topic seems interconnected with every other topic. I will attempt to start the series with simple overviews of the various topics. Next, I will try to demonstrated the connections between them.

It is entirely possible that in the course of writing my thoughts, the thoughts themselves will evolve. Hopefully by the end of the series, a coherent picture of how we can improve our community’s literacy will emerge.

I will attempt to do one article post per week but there will certainly be some weeks when that is not possible.

Time to get started!

Google Way

updated 5/7/2009

Use Google Calendar to easily share event and meeting calendars with a group. Once created, friends can view or subscribe to the calendar. There are 3 methods to accomplish this.

One, you can simply link to the calendar with a button. As an example, view the shared calendar for Milwaukee Achiever Literacy Services – Board meeting and event calendar.

Two, invite your friends to subscribe to the calendar using a iCal compliant calendar client. To subscribe to the MA board calendar use this URL. The subscribed calendar will update automatically whenever you add a new item. This is a large advantage over Live.

Three, embed your Google calendar into a web site using iframes. As an example, see the MA Board calendar embedded into this page.

Windows Live Way (hotmail)

Windows Live provides many of the same capabilities as Google. In fact, it allows direct access via a URL to a shared calendar to visitors who are not logged in. This is an advantage over Google.

Allow friends to view your calendar directly using a URL generated from the Windows Live sharing page. For the MA example you may click on this URL.

While it is not possible to subscribe to a calendar, it is certainly possible to import a calendar into an iCal compatible client. For MA try this URL.

Yahoo Way

Yahoo does not provide the ability to create multiple calendars. It does allow you to share calendar items though. I considered this approach not sufficient for my purposes.