About/FAAQ (Frequently Asked and Anticipated Questions)

What is LiteracyTent?
What services does LiteracyTent provide?
Is LiteracyTent non-profit?
Why host a literacy website at LiteracyTent?
You didn't answer/anticipcate my question!

What is LiteracyTent?

LiteracyTent is a collection of mostly internet-related services for adult literacy programs, learners, and teachers. It was founded in 2000 by computer programmer and former Adult Basic Education teacher Steve Linberg, who dearly wished something like it existed when he was teaching in the mid 1990s.

LiteracyTent was designed to offer technical services and support directly to teachers, learners, and programs. As former adult educators, we wish to continue to support the people doing the hard work of teaching and learning in a field that is desperately underfunded and unacknowleged. We hope that we did OK in our years of teaching adult literacy, but we are pretty darn good with technology, and enjoy sharing our expertise with whoever needs it in whatever way we can manage.

LiteracyTent is a place where we can gather and share all of our expertise and resources. The name came from the vision of the "big tent" to gather under. There's plenty of room under the "tent" for anything related to literacy that we can come up with. This is where it all lives.

What services does LiteracyTent provide?

As of 2004, LiteracyTent provides the following services:

For full details, see the Services page.

Is LiteracyTent non-profit? Why are some services free and others not?

It would be more accurate to describe LiteracyTent as a not-for-profit project of Silicon Goblin Technologies. Fees for some services are needed to help offset the costs of providing them. We have spent thousands of dollars on servers and equipment, and have significant monthly costs for power, physical security, and network usage (bandwidth). We donate all of our own labor.

We insist on remaining independent and as such accept no funding from any source, and the only offset to the costs of providing the services are the fees we ask for some of them.

Why host a literacy website at LiteracyTent?

Hosting a literacy website at LiteracyTent is a good thing in both directions. It helps you because you join a growing community of literacy-oriented sites and services all collected in one place. You get more exposure to other people in the literacy community, and are much more visible to your peers. It helps us because the hosting revenue helps us offset our costs and continue to provide top-notch service.

We know there are cheaper places to host your website - there always are. We price as aggressively as we can and are always exploring ways to improve our services. We say with confidence that you will not find better technical support anywhere on the planet than here with us. And remember, we were adult literacy teachers too. We know what it's like doing the hard work of teaching (and learning!), and that you just want the technology to be a useful tool, and not a headache. We can help you with that.

You didn't answer/anticipcate my question!

Egad! Well, send it on to us and we'll do our best to answer it!