Digital literacy for adults

One of the things that I’m quite interested in is the use of social media for learning. Platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook etc have far more uses than just catching up with friends. They are a way of sharing information with like-minded people – something I’ve talked about in my blog before. In my search for resources on how to uses these medias for learning, I found a lot targeted at secondary school teachers, particularly in the United States – seems they’re a lot more ahead of us in that area. Go figure!

I’m particularly interested in how adults can use things like blogs, Twitter and LinkedIn as learning tools. There is a great book called Social Media for Trainers by Jane Bozarth that provides some very practical ways to facilitate learning through Twitter and other resources (I have not got past the Twitter section in the book yet – I've been so busy taking notes and jotting down ideas that it is taking me a while). I’d also like to add that I have the book on kindle – so I am playing around with being uber-digital myself.

However, I think the first stumbling block for a lot of adults is the fear of the digital media. Until adults have signed up to these tools and have a basic idea of how to use them (and in a way that they feel psychologically safe) they are going to find it difficult to learn from them. I think what is missing is basic digital literacy education. How do I tweet? How do I participate in groups? How do I write a blog? etc. There has to be some easy to digest information that gets adult learners over this first hurdle. Note: Jane Bozarth has some stuff in this area, there is also a bit on YouTube but you kind of have to be in the know to find it all. 

As I said, there is a lot of great information out there for school students. One particularly great site is cyberwise.org (which also has some useful stuff for adults).  There is some material that is generalizable for both groups but the adult audience is different from the student audience. How do you ease someone into the digital technology when they are sacred of it? You can assume that 'scared' adult learners won't be in the know or have the wherewithal to seek out information on how to use digital media for learning. So how do we feed it to them? Or, make is accessible?

Have you found any great information for adult learners? If so, please comment and let me know.