Adult educators include academics teaching in higher education and volunteers working with the homeless to acquire basic literacy skills. They are lecturers and facilitators, counselors and role models. They are a diverse group of educators teaching a diverse group of learners in diverse settings. That has always been the case.
However, the most dominant insight I have gained regarding the different roles of the adult educator is that, first and foremost, the adult educator must also be an adult learner.
While the foundational principles of education may be well defined, the strategies, methods and technologies that are available are evolving at an exponential pace. Educators can no longer settle for being a content expert and decent lecturer. Educators must now also be bloggers and ‘facebook’ers, twitter’ers and YouTube’rs, multimedia developers and savvy Second Life’ers. They must understand the pros and cons of blended learning and flipped classrooms, and they must be able to execute these instructional methods effectively. Just looking through the list of apps I currently have on my iPad alone attest to the revolution of technology in adult learning: iTunes U and Khan Academy, Medscape and Skyscape, GoToMeeting, Weebly, Prezi, Evernote, SimpleMinds, Omnio, and Feedly. To communicate with students in clinical I also have sms, imessage, and WhatsApp. All tools to facilitate teaching and learning in one form or another. And it is not just sorting out all these tools and downloading them, one must learn how to use them competently, and then figure out how to use them (or not, as the case may be) in the learning environment. Oh yes, and not to forget my new Second Life Avatar, through which I will explore the learning resources and opportunities offered by organizations such as the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE and the Discovery Educator Network (DEN). Not only am I needing to learn to be a techy, I need to be constantly staying on top of what is coming next. Click Read More to learn about how to avoid becoming one of Eric Mazur's obsolete dinosaurs, and about Salman Khan and the Flipped Classroom.