Road Testing Mozilla’s New Web Literacy Activities
My colleague Molly Schwartz and I kicked off a new series of Web Literacy trainings at METRO this morning. As part of our grant with Mozilla Foundation, we pilot-tested a new round of activities to help learners better understand the ways in which the environment of the web impacts the information we ask for and receive. We also tested a new badging platform as part of this work.
What follows is a short conversation Molly and I had regarding our work together on this first training, including our preparation process and the show itself.
Davis: It was great to work with you, Molly, on this series of web literacy trainings! I wonder if you could share a little bit about the trainings you’ve done in the past. You led these activities like a pro!
Molly: Thanks Davis! It was exciting to get a chance to work with Mozilla’s web literacy training materials.
I’m really interested in developing different ways to understand and communicate the fundamentals of computation. When I was getting my masters in Library Science at the University of Maryland, College Park, I taught Intro to Digital Literacy classes to freshmen students. The idea was to give them an overview of how to find information in the library and how to evaluate whether sources are scholarly and legitimate for the research they would need to do to complete their college degrees (similar to some of the exercise we did today!).
I’ve also just always enjoyed leading trainings. Figuring out ways to communicate concepts to other people always broadens my own understanding in interesting ways. I led a week-long “Intro to IT and Digital Governance” course for undergraduate students a couple years ago at the University of Lapland, up in the Arctic Circle. That was wild because the sun never set, and it felt relevant because there are all these data centers opening up in cold climates.
I particularly like the dynamic of leading trainings for my peers, like we do at METRO. People come in the classroom from such a variety of backgrounds and experiences in the library world — it’s always surprising and interesting.
Davis: Those courses sound like they were a lot of fun!
I was very excited to pilot test these new activities coming out of Mozilla. We’ve been working as one of the six pilot sites in their Web Literacy for Librarians program for about a year and a half now.
What’s great about working with Mozilla is that they are learning alongside the pilot sites. As a result of this partnership, we’ve created useful and fun activities that are easy for facilitators to learn while demonstrating quite a lot of content. It’s been wonderful to join An-Me, Zannah, and Iris from Mozilla, along with my fellow Web Literacy Leaders, in the pursuit of building out these wonderful activities.
When it came time to give a sneak preview while testing badging, I thought I’d see if you were game and I’m so glad you were!
Molly: I’m seriously so glad you invited me to co-facilitate. I think these Mozilla Web Literacy curricula could be really useful for librarians and information professionals. I’m glad we can test the materials and give feedback.
Davis: So today we premiered four activities in our workshop, New Web Literacy Tools for Learners, Part 1: Reading the Web. The name comes from the “read” section of Mozilla’s Web Literacy Map.
Leading up to the workshop, you and I met a few times to discuss which activities we each would facilitate. Since the Mozilla curriculum working group is in the Google docs phase, we each made copies of our activities, and then we marked them up based on what we each felt we would need on the fly.
Molly: Yeah, it was nice to have a sample script to work off of and adapt. It was good to get the ideas flowing, and I think both of us were able to draw upon our own interests and experiences to personalize it. I liked your advice to make a copy of the Google docs and rewrite the script a little so that we could use it during the class.
I was impressed you led it all from memory! Since this was my first time, I found it useful to have a script. It was also nice to be able to divide the four activities up between the two of us and switch off during the workshop. One of the toughest things about teaching, I think, is keeping up my energy because you’re always on. Having little breaks was nice.
Davis: To be fair, the two activities I led are classics. They’ve been tweaked a bit, but I’ve led them both before, in one way or another.
And I definitely reviewed them deeply before today’s workshop! I really went down the rabbit hole, learning in detail how the internet functions. I even learned how to use command line to see what packets my devices were sending and receiving! I considered showing my new command line skills to our participants, but thought better of it. I’m not a pro just yet!
Molly: It was fun hearing how excited you were learning command line in advance of the workshop! You really did go down that rabbit hole. I was inspired to pull out some of the old User Experience scripts we used to use when I was an intern at the U.S. General Services Administration, in their Center for Excellence in Digital Government. They adapted their scripts from Steve Krug’s program, Rocket Surgery Made Easy, and I’ve adapted and reused them at other jobs I’ve had since then. It was fun to dust them off and use them for user experience testing during the “Design on the Web” session today. I cut the scripts down so that our participants could complete short user journey tests in the half-hour time slot. We were really cramming in the material, so we had to move quickly!
It was interesting to see how you customized the badging process to work with the workshops we did.
Davis: I love how easy it is to customize digital badges, but I haven’t found a sweet spot just yet for integrating them into workshops. This time I gave everyone a username in login and even printed out a copy of the assigned user names and passwords to hand out at the start of the workshop. But that backfired in a few cases; several participants had configured their own account information and were confused by my handout, and others were unable to login in spite of my best efforts. I still have work to do to make the badging process more seamless.
Molly: And then we had a room full of librarians ready to learn about the web…
Davis: That’s right! My in-depth research on how the internet works really paid off in “Map the Web / Perform the Web.” I was able to answer quite a few really good questions. I don’t think I would have been able to do that before!
In the activity, I first asked participants to share what they know of how the internet works, and what devices they know they need to have in order to log on. In groups, learners labeled post-it notes with all the components of the internet they could think of. And then I upped the ante by asking them to organize their post-its to reflect a map of the web. We watched “A Packets Tale” — that old classic — and then made a human model of the internet so we could all embody the ways in which information flows through the internet as a system.
I capped my portion with some reflection time during which learners could work on the first task toward earning their badges.
Molly: I pretty much followed Mozilla’s model for the “Search Party!” portion of the workshop. I had fun picking out these sparkly, multi-colored gems for people to sort, although I think some of our participants didn’t appreciate that some gems were really tiny, like rhinestones…
During this session I tried to emphasize that search indexes work really similarly to metadata schema that librarians and archivists create to help people find objects within their collections. Obviously a big difference is that our metadata schema are created by humans, while search indexes are constantly being updated in an automated fashion by algorithms. A big push right now in the library world is to use Linked Open Data to make our digital collections more easily searchable on the web.
Davis: Linked Open Data is fascinating. I hope it gets its big break soon!
Speaking of break, after our intermission, we were back on with “Web Detective.” In small groups, learners discussed the criteria they use when determining whether information they see online is truthful or not. We used this criteria to create a scoresheet we could use for evaluating sources online.
Returning to their small groups, we worked on a research question: is the Kraken, a giant sea creature, real? For each of the four sources provided, learners filled out their scoresheets to determine a final answer to this question.
Molly: And what’d they find out? Is the Kraken real?
Davis: Our learners determined the the Kraken is not real, and is likely just an exaggerated tale based on sightings of a giant sea squid.
Molly: As I mentioned earlier, for the “Design on the Web” session we spent the bulk of the time actually doing user experience testing on websites that the participants chose. It was fun hearing them role-play being UX designers. It seemed like people got really into it.
Davis: Since we needed an even number for this one, I participated in one of the groups. I must say, I got a lot of useful feedback on my website! It was great.
It was lovely to work with you, Molly! I’m looking forward to part 2 in a couple of weeks!
Read our experience teaching part 2 and part 3 of this workshop. Slides for all three workshops are available at the link.
