Last week we had a great Mozilla Foundation all-hands that led to far too much bad karaoke, my little pony viewings, and massive deforestation in the form of hundreds of sticky notes.  But we also had the opportunity to finally meet each other, and understand not only what we’re all working on individually, but also how it fits together as a whole.

As Dan Sinker mentioned in our final roundup: “I feel like I have colleagues now!  And that’s awesome!”

So this is my rough-sketch approximation of how it all fits together!

(I’m starting with myself, because that’s the piece I know best. 🙂 )

We develop a theory of what we believe to be important web literacy skills.

These web literacy skills are exposed through a series of badges that people can earn.  The use of badges allows us to certify what people have learned.  We essentially expose what skills Mozilla believes to be important in webmaking via our badges.

But we’re not just building badges for our own use case.  Instead, we’re building a generic federated Open Badge Infrastructure for use by other groups as well.  In this way, we’re challenging the assumption that learning has to be in traditional classroom environments.

So now that we have these skills, now what?  Well, we put them to the test.

We already have projects and partnerships with groups that teach webmaking, like Hive for youth and OpenNews (formerly Mojo) for journalists.

Specifically, these are all groups that teach web literacy using our philosophy: these skills should be learned in a context that’s relevant to the audience, and the learning happens stealthily, almost by accident, in the process of making things.

In these environments, we can try teaching these skills and learn some valuable lessons along the way.  But that’s just our initial playground.

Aside from these pilots, we’re also going to lay the scaffolding and support for others who want to take these skills, apply them to their own contexts, and teach them.

In this way, we’re not just teaching webmaking, we’re helping to build a community for those who want to join our mission of teaching and learning these skills.  By providing low-barrier-to-entry toolkits for people who want to run events, hackjams, etc., we can help new groups get off the ground.  This community can share ideas, best practices and resources, far beyond anything that Mozilla alone would be able to create.

But we’re here to help too.

We’re busy creating tools to help this community with teaching some of these skills.  Learning-by-making resources like hackasaurus, popcorn, paladin and others.  These tools are growing and evolving in direct response to the needs of the community that they serve.

And that’s how we all sort of fit together!

One big, happy, world-domination-scheme family. 🙂  What do you think?

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