Tag: teachtheweb

Mozilla Webmaker training starts Monday 12th May!

Posted on May 9, 2014May 9, 2014 by Doug Belshaw

Excitingly, Mozilla’s Webmaker training starts on Monday. Join us (free!) to learn creative ways to teach web literacy, digital skills and open practices with fellow educators, technologists and mentors around the world.

Sign up here: http://training.webmakerprototypes.org

Each of the four weeks is a separate topic, but if you decide to do all of them, they build upon one another:

The brains behind the operation is Laura Hilliger, our Training & Curriculum Lead. Several of us from the Webmaker Community team are going to be helping out with running sessions.

Laura’s put together a really nice ‘how to participate’ Thimble resource that’s worth checking out:

Week 1: Exploring

Week beginning 12th May. Learn about the theoretical frameworks and pedagogies (teaching methods) behind Webmaker. This module helps you understand the web as an ecosystem and why an open web is so important.

Week 2: Building

Week beginning 19th May. Develop open educational resources that embed web literacy and making with other topics that you might already be teaching. Using open practices, you’ll make learning materials that are designed for others to use and remix.

Week 3: Facilitating

Week beginning 26th May. Put theory into practice. In this module, you’ll learn how to use open and participatory learning techniques to teach digital and web literacy skills in your classroom, during workshops or at events.

Week 4: Connecting

Week beginning 2nd June. Amplify your work by making connections in your local community as well as within Webmaker’s global community. In this module, you’ll learn how building relationships can help you achieve greater impact.

Getting involved

There’ll be three main places to pay attention to:

The Webmaker Training site: this has links to the content and will have a calendar of all the live events. It’s easiest to think of this as the ‘hub’. Suggestion: bookmark this link.
The discussion area: using great new forum 2.0 software called Discourse we’ll be discussing and debating the theory and practice of teaching web literacy.
Social media: we’ll be using the #TeachTheWeb hashtag on both Twitter (mainly) and Google+.

If you’ve always wanted to improve your web skills so that you can teach the web to others, this is your perfect opportunity – so sign up!

Weeknote 05/2014

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Doug Belshaw

This week I’ve been:

Dealing with a build-up of email after Bett.
Explaining why we’ve merged two community calls into a weekly Mozilla #Teach The Web call.
Helping Laura Hilliger with a proto-glossary for Webmaker.
Creating a community survey to help us with the upcoming workweek.
Moving and redirecting everything referring to the Web Literacy Standard towards the Web Literacy Map on the Mozilla wiki.
Presenting with Tim Riches on Open Badges at Learning Technologies 2014.
Writing a blog post for DMLcentral on ‘disruption’, shiny technology, and education (sneak peek).
Outlining and starting to put together a bibliography for an upcoming Webmaker whitepaper.
Participating in the first #TeachTheWeb community call.
Feeling a bit run down and unproductive. Part of that’s probably to do with the uncertainty surrounding when we’re going to move. It’s out of our hands – which is one of the problems when there’s a chain involved!

Next week I’ll be at a Webmaker workweek in Toronto. I’m looking forward to it, but the weather (-12°C!) doesn’t sound much fun.

Image CC BY-NC Patrick Brosset

How transferable are coding skills to other domains? Why is learning a little code important? (#teachtheweb)

Posted on May 5, 2013 by Doug Belshaw

This is a post for the Mozilla Webmaker MOOC called #teachtheweb. You can get involved here!

There’s a tendency that we all at various times either demonstrate or resist. In ascertaining the value of other people’s thoughts, innovations or opinions we ask for evidence of impact. But when it comes to our own thoughts, innovations or opinions, we believe evidence to be unnecessary because it’s self-evident.

So it is with learning new skills. Those without the skills ask questions about the value of obtaining them (“where’s the evidence?”), while to those with the skills it just seems obvious. And then there’s the perennial question about ‘transferability’. Just what counts as something being a ‘transferable skill’ anyway?*

To me, innovation comes at the overlap of two or more circles of a Venn diagram. It stands to reason, therefore, that the more circles there are on your Venn diagram, the more chances there are for overlap.

Learning a new language is like making your Venn diagram of skills three-dimensional. And by ‘a new language’ I mean things like HTML, JavaScript and Python just as much as French, Spanish and Chinese. These languages are new conceptual tools, new ways of looking at the world. Learning to play a musical instrument and understand mathematical abstraction/notation also falls into this camp, I reckon.

As a Pragmatist, I like the description William James gives of the world as a “bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion”. There is no way that we can have an objective or neutral view of the world, so the more lenses we can use to view it, the better.**

I’m (at best) currently an average wrangler of HTML and CSS, and a beginner with JavaScript. But the computational thinking I’ve developed through learning these from a reasonably young age (and before that messing about with a BBC Micro) have stood me in good stead for seeing the world differently.***

Why do we need to see the world differently? Well, because the problems that we face as a society are increasingly complex. We need people who speak many languages – including those of machines – to be able to solve them. We don’t need a society of pure programmers any more than we need a society of pure linguists or musicians. What we do need are people who know a bit of each.

That’s why I think learning a little code is important.

* I kind of discussed this in this blog post.

** I love the HTML Hunting in the World Around You challenge in P2PU’s School of Webcraft as an example of this.

*** I’m currently re-learning French through Duolingo.