Making Teaching and Learning the Web More Inviting
How we’re designing a web literacy space at MozFest 2016
For many people, teaching Web literacy, or teaching anything at all, can be an intimidating or scary experience. We’ve all been there before: losing authority, standing in front of an unfamiliar group, doubting our own expertise, wanting to be led, not to lead.
Yes, teaching is an act of leadership, but learning can be an act of leadership too. Our vision for teaching and learning isn’t rooted in authority or expertise. We believe in learning that is interactive and fun, in diverse, inclusive spaces; we believe in learning that is hands-on, driven by learners’ interests and passions, supported by their peers, friends and family.
This is the teaching and learning we want to make visible at the Mozilla Festival, where anyone can be a teacher and a learner at the same time.
Things that Go Bump In the Night
There are things we should all be afraid of; things hiding under our beds and in our closets; things that go bump in the night. The challenges facing the Internet today are truly scary! Governments track us and store our data; corporations obstruct us from developing new ways to use the Web; prejudice and violence keep the Web from being a safe place for us all.
At Mozilla, we have identified 5 challenge areas that we believe need our attention and require the dedicated leadership of teachers and learners to preserve the open Internet for generations to come. The Internet we shape will be even better than the one we have today in the following ways:
- Digital Inclusion — The Internet reflects the diversity of the people who use it; people everywhere can access and participate in building the Internet to shape our digital world.
- Web Literacy — People have the skills to read, write and participate in the digital world and move beyond consuming content, to creating, shaping and defending the Web.
- Online Privacy & Security — People should understand and meaningfully control how their data is collected and used online, and trust that it’s safe.
- Open Innovation — Open is the default: entrepreneurs and everyday Internet users can create, innovate and compete online without asking permission.
- Decentralization — The technologies and platforms people use every day allow seamless flow and transfer of information and content.
Our Learning Space at the 2016 Mozilla Festival
For this year’s Mozilla Festival, the learning team began to design a space for teaching and learning based on our learning philosophy and the 5 challenge areas listed above by asking ourselves several questions about how to make teaching and learning about the Web more inviting.
- How can we create a space that challenges people to embrace their fears and overcome them?
- How can our space provide an experience that excites and invites people to join us?
- How does understanding something new help move us from fear to delight in our new knowledge?
- What are the kinds of places that feel scary to enter at first, but leave people feeling thrilled?
As Brazilian Mozillian Andre Garzia put it, despite their fears, we wanted people to be “laughing in awe when they are around our activities.”
We drew inspiration for our learning space concept from theme parks, roller coasters, fun houses, carnivals, and haunted houses – places where people line up to confront their fears!
“Demystify the Web!” is our call to action. We invite you to join our fun house of Web literacy and to submit a session proposal that will help us explore the answers to our key questions above about how we can, together, make the Web more inviting. We hope that the space we’ve conceived of below is a start.
Demystify the Web! A Brief Tour of Our Space
Entrance Gate: Approaching our learning space at MozFest should feel like the start of a mysterious adventure! Imagine walking up to the entrance of a theme park or carnival ride. My personal favorite example are the gates to Jurassic Park from the famous Steven Spielberg movie of the same name. Imagine that intriguing title replaced with ours, Demystify the Web!
Hall of Mirrors: We imagine the first experience inside our gates to be a hall-of-mirrors-style interaction that invites visitors to reflect on themselves on the Web, through the lens of our 5 challenge areas. This is an exhibit-style interaction that allows people explore on their own terms and pass through freely.
We’re looking for interactive demonstrations, self-directed activities, and mini-labs or experiments that guide participants to a better understanding of their own presence on the web. We think of Mozilla’s Lightbeam add-on for Firefox as the perfect example.
We’re also looking for creative designers and fabricators to help us bring these mirrors to life! Can you help us put an LCD display behind a partially silvered mirror?
Open Learning Circle: Beyond the hall of mirrors, our visitors enter into an open learning circle; a space for creative collisions! An informal, accessible, inviting place where learning is exchanged from personal experience, other Mozilla Festival spaces or in between our sessions.
Session Breakout Rooms: From the open learning circle, visitors can access our session breakout rooms, where our formally scheduled sessions will take place.
We believe that teaching and learning cannot be neatly separated from the spaces and places where they happen. We imagine session breakout rooms that integrate and represent the learning being shared in them. Think maker spaces, cultural spaces like museums, community centers, or arcades, or even a re-imagined classroom of tomorrow!
To learn about how your session proposal can fit into our breakout rooms, or to help us co-create our space, check out this awesome post from Kim Wilkens for more details.
Make the Invitation Station: As visitors exit from our carnival of learning, they will be prompted to share what they’ve learned with people back at home. We’ll ask them to document something new they’ve learned, translate a teaching resource into their native language, or tweet out a motivational commitment to learning in 2017. They emerge from our learning space having extended their invitation to new knowledge to their friends at home.
Where Do You Fit In? Join Us to Co-Create Our Space
To get some visual sense for the space layout, you can consult our very modest, hand-drawn, draft map of the space concept below. It’s appropriate to the status of our plan today: a little skewed and rough around the edges.
It’s up to you to realize the true potential for Demystifying the Web! and to make teaching and learning the Web at the Mozilla Festival more inviting.
We’re looking for proposals that share fun, interactive ways to teach and learn the web in diverse, inclusive spaces; proposals designed for creative collisions; proposals that inspire people to engage in an openly networked world.
Submit a session proposal to do one of the following:
- Share your experience as an educator or as a learner in one of our Session Breakout Rooms. Consider and clearly explain the context (space or place) for your learning to help curate the breakout rooms to match!
- Present a hands-on, self-directed demonstration, visualization, digital interactive, or learning lab in either the Hall of Mirrors, Open Learning Circle, or Make the Invitation Station.
We can’t wait to see you at MozFest this year!
