Web Literacy Leaders Convening in Chicago: Take-aways
Our eight-person cohort of Mozilla Web Literacy Leaders met up for two full days in Chicago last week. The amount of high-level content shared over the course of 15 or 16 hours was somewhat mind-bending, in that my mind felt like it was literally being bent… but in a good way!
So many excellent conversations, resources, and pieces of advice of were shared that it would be impossible to sum it all up in a digestible format. Therefore I thought I’d harken back to my favorite mode of online communication: the top five list.
Davis’s Top Five Resources from the Mozilla Web Literacy Leaders Convening in Chicago
5. Backward Design
It’s not often that I get to be in a room for hours and hours with people who have job responsibilities similar to mine, and it was perfectly appropriate that a lot of attention was given to designing curriculum for impact.
We were talking about the approaches we each use to plan out a workshop or a longer-term course when the philosophy of backward design caught my attention. This is the concept of identifying the needs of your audience, determining a good outcome for your course, and then charting a path toward getting to those outcomes. Working backward from your ideal outcomes, in other words.
4. Trackerbot Speed Dating
Given that I’m thinking deeply about how to effectively train library staff on privacy and security, it was great to see Sherry’s update on the same topic. After watching this super scary video from Do Not Track, we tested out an activity called Speed Dating.
We each received a persona for a type of tracker, and then we set about meeting one another as personified versions of these often-nefarious bits of technology. I still remember the characteristics of Session Management Tracking (who apparently likes to ghost, is very youthful, and isn’t suited for longterm relationships), which is a way more knowledge than I came in with.
3. Chunk Flip Guide Laugh
Another great resource I picked up in our discussions of curriculum design. The following concepts are the cornerstones of an instruction design framework from Nancy Bacon:
Chunk — break deep subjects into smaller pieces that are easier to learn and remember
Flip — switch up the pace and timing of individual vs. teacher-led learning. Help students learn where they (physically) are
Guide — bring learners to their next step with specific, doable actions that lead them forward
Laugh — focus on the emotional needs of learners; mapping skills to emotional experience helps concretize new subjects
2. Design Thinking
I’ve heard a lot about design thinking (especially as relates to potatoes), but sadly have not had a chance to get thrown into the deep end with it. So I was glad to spend three hours this week thinking deeply about a use case and then helping empathetically design a prototype to help our fictional person realize their dreams.
NB: I might write out all the phases to the process elsewhere so as to move this top five list along. When I do, I’ll link to it from here.
- “Socio-technical infrastructure”
“Socio-technical infrastructure” wins the top spot because it’s a term I’ve already adopted and will sprinkle liberally into relevant conversations from now on. This is a term Nic used to describe the very web itself: while the internet is comprised of routers and serves and wires and all the other stuff that makes it go, there’s a social layer that is an equal partner in creating and sustaining the web as an environment.
This resonates with me because I’m not an especially technical person, so I try to focus in on the human-made-ness of the web when attempting to understand those pesky technical details. For me, identifying the ways in which people conceived and iterated upon technical elements like systems design and coding helps with grasping concepts like TCP/IP. Some person (okay, a dude) came up with that somewhere along the line! What was he thinking? What problem was he attempting to solve?
Further, human interaction sits on top of this technical infrastructure. Understanding social norms on various platforms is a giant part of web literacy. I heard once on “Note to Self” that our various social platforms refract our full selves — business stuff plays great on LinkedIn, Facebook is perfect for feel-good updates, and Twitter definitely captures our snarky soundbite sides. If we make a composite of our interactions across these spaces, do we get to be whole again?
Deep thoughts, courtesy of the Web Literacy Leaders convening.
