The Web to us is not a technology which we had to learn and which we managed to get a grip of. The Web is a process, happening continuously and continuously transforming before our eyes; with us and through us. Technologies appear and then dissolve in the peripheries, websites are built, they bloom and then pass away, but the Web continues, because we are the Web.

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Participating in cultural life is not something out of ordinary to us: global culture is the fundamental building block of our identity, more important for defining ourselves than traditions, historical narratives, social status, ancestry, or even the language that we use.

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What we value the most is freedom: freedom of speech, freedom of access to information and to culture. We feel that it is thanks to freedom that the Web is what it is, and that it is our duty to protect that freedom. We owe that to next generations, just as much as we owe to protect the environment.

All this and much more in the manifesto We, The Web Kids by Piotr Czerski.  (And rapidly translated to english thanks to its CC license. )

I’m a big fan of RSA Animate videos, and this one by Sir Ken Robinson on our education system definitely seemed to strike a chord with me.

“We have to think differently about human capacity.  We have to get over this old conception of academic, non-academic, abstract, theoretical, vocational…and see it for what it is: a myth.”

It’s amazing to see just how much demand there was from kids who want to get their hands dirty and learn more about technology.  But don’t take my word for it.  Check out these awesome photos that Jon Lim captured of the event:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/52869095@N02/sets/72157629401371239/show

50+ kids, 40 parents, 30 volunteers and 10 teachers attended, which is an amazing turn out.

As a former Toronto youth (hey! it wasn’t that long ago!) I have to say that I’m jealous that nothing like this existed when I was that age.

Huge props to Heather Payne who was the creative mastermind behind this event and managed to pull off a great show.

1. Of the web literacy skills, which do Mozilla’s learning offerings currently address?
2. Which do other people / tools / programs currently address?
3. Which need the most love?

These are things that would be stupid for me to try to answer just myself because people who have been teaching this stuff for the last several years probably have a much better sense than I do of the landscape: not only what is available to teach with, but also what works.  This is why things like building an instructor community / site is tied so closely to this work.

If we look for a moment at Popcorn, Open News, and Hackasaurus, we get the following coverage:

It became apparent very quickly that there was an added dimension here: not just whether they taught a skill but how deep they went.  Above I tried to show this via line dottedness: the more solid the line, the deeper they taught the skill.

Another issue that cropped up very quickly was whether the offering taught the skill, relied upon the skill, or provided incentive to learn the skill.

Let’s use Popcorn Maker as the example here.

Popcorn Maker teaches you how to design for the web in the video space: how can you think beyond the borders of the linear video and the box in which it’s playing and take a wider look at how that video can interact with the web?

Some parts of Popcorn Maker rely upon the fact that you already know some browser basics.  When it asks you to enter the URL of an image, it doesn’t hand-hold you about what that means.  (Contrast this with the Open News 101 course, which does.)

And finally, some parts of Popcorn Maker provide incentive for you to learn a skill.  You’re welcome to use their pre-defined templates, but if you want to customize your own templates, you’re going to have to learn a bit of HTML/CSS to do so.  Popcorn Maker does not teach you this skill explicitly, but it does give you a reason to bother playing around and trying to figure it out yourself.

The fact that these offerings all touch skills in different depths and in different ways is going to make creating a map for learners to be a little difficult.  On the other hand, skill maps of the sort “want to learn more?  here’s some options!” are definitely popular.  Which I guess means some thinking is in order.

Lanyrd event information here: A fireside chat with Cathy Davidson.

I’m drinking a large coffee right now in prep for it — so even if I don’t have quite as many insightful things to say on the subject as Cathy, at least I’ll be very wired!

Hope to see some of you soon!

Okay, partly this is because I think we’re just staaaarting to get to the point where it makes sense to shout from the rooftops.  Nobody likes a premature rooftop shouter.

But partly I think that this has also been a traditionally very distributed space with a total lack of cohesion: everyone doing their own thing, and lots of wheels being reinvented.  Which, of course, is one of the roles I think that Mozilla can help with.  (Fixing the lack of cohesion, I mean — not helping to reinvent the wheel.)

So here’s a few questions for you, lazyweb:

Where should we be evangelizing?  Where are the people who are already teaching these things (or interested in teaching these things) already flocking to, where we can reach them?  Where are the people who are considering these issues?

I love that in part people are doing this for us — for example, in canada.com’s recent article “Why Mozilla is teaching kids to hack” — but I think that this goes beyond just pure PR.  Lots of folks have been giving this stuff tons of thought, and as much as possible I think that we’re going to be strongest where we bring them together and move in a common direction.

Perhaps that’s why we’re not shouting from the rooftops: because it’s not about announcing our intentions in any sort of top-down “Here We Are: Rock You Like a Hurricane” kind of way.  It’s about finding all of these islands and helping to draw bridges between them.

We already know about lots of folks out there, but I’m positive there’s so many, many more of them.  Any advice / thoughts you guys have about where or how to find them would be much appreciated.  Cuz this party’s just gettin’ started.

In order to achieve Mozilla’s goal of “building a generation of web makers“, we are reaching out to help those who already teach (or would like to teach) web literacy skills.

One of the ways in which I’d like to do this is to put up a tent (yes, a metaphoric tent) and invite all of the instructors to gather under the tent where we can begin to discuss what already exists out there for teaching web making, what tools are useful in which contexts, and find where there are holes.

Bret Victor – Inventing on Principle from CUSEC on Vimeo.

Thanks to David Ascher for the link.