Tag: web literacy

Web Literacy: More than just coding; an enabling education for our times [EdTech Digest]

Posted on September 8, 2014 by Doug Belshaw

Last week, my colleague Lainie Decoursy got in touch wondering if I could write a piece about web literacy. It was a pretty tight turnaround, but given pretty much all I think about during my working hours is web literacy, it wasn’t too much of a big ask!

The result is a piece in EdTech Digest entitled Web Literacy: More than just coding; an enabling education for our times. It’s an overview of Mozilla’s work around Webmaker and, although most of the words are mine, I have to credit my colleagues for some useful edits.

Click here to read the post

I’ve closed comments here to encourage you to add your thoughts on the original post.

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!

Rethinking Literacy for the Web [Educating Modern Learners]

Posted on April 19, 2014 by Doug Belshaw

Educating Modern Learners, a new subscription site from Will Richardson and Bruce Dixon, is now live. Excitingly, the editor of the site is none other than Audrey Watters, whose blog and newsletter I’m sure you already subscribe to.

They commissioned me to write one of the first articles to appear on the site, a process that meant I benefitted from the editorial eye of Audrey. The post is currently available via the free subscription tier for the site, so you’ll need to sign up to access it.

The article is entitled Rethinking Literacy for the Web. In it, I provide an introduction to what the web means for literate practices, the challenge for educators, and ways we can respond.

The time has come to move beyond discussions of whether the web, social networks, and mobile devices are inherently “good” or “bad.” Debates about whether such things can (or should) be used for learning drag on while the next generation cobble together their own understanding of an increasingly blended online/offline world. It’s time we as educators stepped up and taught more than just “e-safety.” It’s time we started facilitating learning experiences around reading, writing, and participation on the web.

Once you’ve had a read I’d be interested in your comments here (I don’t think they’re turned on over there!)

Image CC BY-SA Alberto Garcia