Over the next few weeks, I have a list of, geeze, dozens of people who I want to talk with who have been thinking about teaching web literacy way longer than I have. There’s enough knowledge worth sponging there that I’m even going to get over my phone aversion. Some of these will probably be worth face-to-face followups as well.
I want to make sure I have a clear agenda to make good use of this time, so here are the set of questions I’m currently thinking of having on hand. (Obviously some customized questions for certain folks.)
- Intro: web literacy, what I’m doing, where I’m at.
- What are you doing? Where are the intersections?
- Blog, etc. link for me to learn more
- What web skills do you think everyone should know?
- Who else should I talk to?
- How would you measure “success”? (Not “knowledge successfully obtained” but rather “goal of web literacy achieved”)
I’m sure after one or two of these, this list will be twice as long. What am I missing?
* “If there was one page you could get everyone in ed-tech to read, what would it be?”
* “If there was one empirically-grounded fact you could get everyone in ed-tech to learn, what would it be?”
(Basically, what’s in the “Physics for Presidents” version of educational technology / teaching people the web?)
Good questions to start w/. I’d modify / add:
* What web skills do you think everyone should know? **WHY? TO WHAT END?*
* Some variation on:
-> What skills do you teach?
-> How do you teach the ‘essential skills’ listed above?
-> What are some good routes to the ‘essential skills’ listed above?
-> Do you know of sneaky and effective ways to embed learning these skills into other experiences (e.g. learning HTML by setting up a blog for your course on pop stars)?
I flag this second part because alot of people are *teaching* code and web stuff at a grassroots level with out any abstract analysis of what skills they want people to know. In my experience, it’s hard for these people to answer your ‘what web skills’ question concisely.
So, in this case it’s important to ask about the teaching and then infer about skills. Likely involves a huge bunch of raw data collecting from people, then a pattern analysis against what they say and do.
Flip side, I think some of the computational literacy and academic people will be good at your ‘what web skills’ question but may not have experience on teaching / mentoring at grassroots level. So, good to see which of them have concrete (and tested) ideas about grassroots pedagogy (ie. not in formal computer science classroom) that map onto their abstract analysis.
Note to self:
Add some questions (to certain applicable folks) about how they think about teaching CSers versus “normal” (non warped — haha) people.
I have a growing list of things that are leading me toward an understanding of what that essential knowledge might be. My list is really a set of symptoms though, not the knowledge itself, I think. For instance: we have a drupal website. People keep asking me what folder certain pages on the site are in. Or about finding orphaned pages. Or, when we were working with a theme designer to change our CSS, people stopped working on content thinking that we had outsourced the creation of the website. I had someone who was convinced that if he uploaded a column from a excel file, the system would get confused because two people have the same last name, and surely it would reverse them and give them each other’s grade. As if the system just copied and pasted a column like he would do by hand. So I sense that there is a massive disconnect on the subject of databases. I think we have a metaphor problem on this one. They are pinning other, physical experiences on this very non-physical thing, and it’s resulting in either a) confusion, b) paralysis, or c) distrust. It’s actually an obstacle to getting anything done. The ways in which they are able to innovate are entirely restricted by this lack of understanding, I have objective proof of that.
Okay, that’s kind of an aside I guess, but these experiences are what is leading me toward understanding that web literacy is a thing I need to address/needs to be addressed in my context. None of the people I was talking about above are students, they are all librarians or faculty.
Oh I think another thing, that is a symptom again and not an actual skill: people are scared to try things. They’re always afraid of breaking something by clicking the wrong thing. I think it’s part embarrassment and part shame. That lack of playfulness hurts people too.
I think “lack of playfulness hurts people” is right on!!
I think if we can get people to PLAY on the web, we’re more than halfway there.
I bet part of Rochelle’s problem is that people _have_ broken things by doing things that looked innocent at the time. The systems have to be forgiving enough that experimentation isn’t permanently painful, but way too often we only give people access to the production system, and we don’t give them an undo button.
+1 — experimentation all too often leads to “it doesn’t work, I don’t know why not, and I don’t even know where to start to figure out”, which discourages play. I think learning environments ought to be checkpointable like games…
Agree with the ability to undo–this is part of why the Hackasaurus X-Ray Goggles support infinite undo, so that any mistakes you made can easily be undone.
Undo/revert is also one of the first things I tell people when teaching them how to use a wiki or etherpad, to make them feel more secure about playing around and tinkering with things.