Tag: web literacies

Towards a learning standard for Web Literacy: (1) Introduction.

Posted on January 31, 2013 by Doug Belshaw

Update: For the latest information on the Web Literacy standard work, head to http://mzl.la/weblitstd

TL;DR version: Mozilla wants to work with the community to create a new learning standard around Web Literacy. There’s an online gathering to kick-off work in this area at 11am EST on Thursday 7th February 2013 to which everyone’s invited.

Posts in this series:

Introduction
What? Why?
Who?
How?

I’m delighted to announce that Mozilla intends to work with the community on defining a learning standard for web literacy.* This builds on the work that Michelle Levesque started, and I have continued, since joining the Mozilla Foundation in July 2012. It’s part of our wider mission to create a generation of Webmakers.

Anyone interested in helping define and maintain the standard is invited to a kick-off online gathering on Thursday 7th February 2013 at 11am EST (what time is that for me?). There’s no need to book, but signing up via either Eventbrite (below) means you’ll get reminders and be able to add it to your calendar. It’s also listed on Lanyrd.

Sign up here

From the overview wiki page:

The Mozilla Foundation has a vision of a web literate planet. We’ve built some tools to help with this and now we’re asking the question: What are the skills, competencies and literacies necessary to read, write and participate in the Web – now and in the future? We’ve already started the thinking but we want to go further and develop a web literacy standard that we can all align with and teach to. And we need your help.

We want to reach people at web scale, and that means lots of different individuals and organizations teaching various skills and competencies – many of you are doing this already – but we need a way for it to roll up to something bigger.

We need a way to ensure we’re teaching the right things, to connect various options and help learners discover pathways, and of course, to find ways for us all to track our impact. That’s where the standard comes in – we can build consensus around the overall learning map and then each chart our course against it. So, let’s develop the standard and do this together.

We’re convening an online gathering to kick-start work towards a learning standard for web literacy and build upon the work we’ve done so far in this area (and with badges). Be sure to to discuss where we want to go and find out ways for you or your organization to get involved. Make a point to get involved; we’re counting on you!

There’s a new Google Group for discussion/debate which you should introduce yourself to ASAP and the hashtag to use on social networks is #weblitstd. Note that http://mzl.la/weblitstd takes you to an overview page on the Mozilla wiki which should always have the latest information from Mozilla and the community in this new area.

Please do join us for the kick-off meeting, we’re excited!

*You’ll notice that I’m using ‘literacy’ in the singular form here. This is for mainly for communication purposes as we’ve found that talking about ‘literacies’ straight off the bat tends to confuse people. The substance of what I’ve been working on remains the same!

Image CC BY-NC-SA Daniel*1977

Some (brief) thoughts about online peer assessment.

Posted on January 27, 2013 by Doug Belshaw

When I was a classroom teacher, peer assessment was something I loved to do. Once you’ve shown learners the basics it’s as easy as asking them to swap books with the person next to them. Not only do they get to focus in on writing for a particular purpose, but it’s a decentralised system meaning there’s no single point of failure (or authority).

Online, however, things are a little more problematic. When we go web scale, issues (e.g. around identity, privacy and trust) become foregrounded in ways that they often aren’t in offline settings. This is something I need to think carefully about in terms of the Web Literacies framework I’m working on, as I’m envisaging the following structure:

Skills level – granular badges awarded for completing various tasks (most badges will be awarded automatically – as is currently the case with Mozilla Thimble)
Competencies level – peer assessment based on a portfolio comprising of the work completed towards the skills badges
Literacies level – self- and peer-assessment based on work completed at the competencies level

I’ll figure out (hopefully with the help of many others) what the self-assessment looks like once we’ve sorted out the peer-assessment. The reason we need both is explained in this post.

Some of the xMOOCs such as Coursera have ‘peer-grading’ but I don’t particularly like what they’ve done for the reasons pointed out by Audrey Watters. I do, however, very much like the model that P2PU have been iterating (see this article, co-written by one of the founders of P2PU for example). The (very back-of-an-envelope) way that I see this working for the Web Literacies framework is something like:

A learner complete various activities and earns ‘skills’ badges.
These skills badges are represented on some kind of matrix.
Once the learner has enough badges to ‘level-up’ to a competencies-level badge they are required to complete a public portfolio featuring their skills badges along with some context.
This portfolio is submitted to a number (3? 5? 7? more?) of people who already have the competencies-level badge.
If a certain percentage (75%? 90%?) agree that the portfolio fulfils the criteria for the badge, the learner successfully levels-up.

There’s a lot of work to be done thinking through potential extra mechanisms such as rating-the-raters as well as making the whole UX piece seamless, but I think that could be a fairly solid way to get started.

What do you think? Any suggestions? 🙂

Weeknote 04/2013

Posted on January 26, 2013 by Doug Belshaw

Here’s what I’ve been up to this week:

Finishing a short article on Zen and the Art of Digital Literacies for the inaugural issue of the ILTA journal.
Preparing the invitation text for an upcoming webinar asking for those interested in collaborating around a new Web Literacy standard.
Packing for California. Then travelling to Los Angeles via Paris.
Meeting my colleagues at UC Irvine and talking to them about badges (as well as life, the world, and everything!)
Participating in a ‘Future of Badges’ conversation at UC Irvine with extremely smart people like Cathy Davidson, David Theo Goldberg and John Seely Brown.
Lurking in the two-day workshop for winners of the DML competition last year. There’s some great projects producing some awesome stuff (Credly, for instance).
Sleeping whenever I get the chance.
Editing the Learner Bill of Rights doc.
Playing Draw Something with my now six year-old son across timezones. Also, Super Hexagon whenever I get a spare minute! 😀
Learning about the awesome work that’s going on around badges by interested parties – like Credly, for instance.
Arranging when I’m leading a session on digital literacies for #etmooc (18 February – and Twitter chat on 20th February)

Next week I’ll be back home and marking bids for the Nesta/Nominet Trust/Mozilla Digital Makers fund. I also want to plan out (if not start) changes and updates to the P2PU/Mozilla School of Webcraft. The work around this will probably happen post-DML Conference (March).