Mozilla ‘Webmaking’ Initiative to Teach Kids, Others ‘Web Literacy’

Mark Surman is the executive director of Mozilla, the nonprofit which created the free and open-source Firefox Web browser and is dedicated to “keeping the power of the Web in people’s hands.” And according to him, being computer- and Web-literate doesn’t mean knowing how to use Facebook or Microsoft Office; it means knowing the computer languages that make up the Web, and being able to change things and make your own projects. That’s because, as he quoted Douglas Rushkoff saying, literacy means knowing “not just how to read but to write.”

From “World of Warcraft” to “School of Webcraft”

That’s the name of one of Mozilla’s earlier initiatives, a “Peer Powered” set of online classes where anyone can teach and anyone can sign up for free. It features courses like “Webmaking 101,” where you can learn to “build your first webpage from scratch.” Other courses show how to use information from Twitter in creative ways, sort of like how an arts-and-crafts course might show how to use newspaper clippings.

The Webmakers initiative draws inspiration from these early experiments, and has as its goal the creation of “the next generation of web makers”, or people who build the pages and sites that the Web is made up of. The people behind this initiative are of the idea is that programming is not an elite occupation, but a basic skill that’s fun to practice, and that anybody can learn. To that end, they’ve been working on things like Hackasaurus, a school and home activity where kids and adults learn how to use “X-Ray Goggles” to see the programming code of a webpage, and then change it in funny ways.

X-ray vision, meet Kryptonite shielding?

One reason Mozilla is concentrating its efforts on the Web is because the programming code for webpages is not just easy to learn, but is public knowledge: Your browser may have a “View Source” feature that lets you see the raw code it turns into webpages. More than that, most of the code that powers the Web behind the scenes is “open-source,” meaning that anyone can take it and change it to use in their own projects. One example is WordPress, the free “publishing platform” that anyone can download and set up online with its “famous 5-minute installation.”

Once you get off the Web, though, the situation is murkier. Even in the scientific community, not all academic journals require programming code to be submitted alongside the results it produced, according to Kyle Niemeyer of Ars Technica, making it impossible to reproduce some scientists’ research. And the vast majority of “apps” and boxed software packages are “closed source”, meaning there’s no way for kids and students to learn from them or build on top of them. (The video game modding community has gotten around some of these limitations, but they’ve also faced lawsuits at times, and are legally forbidden from charging money for their labors of love.)

Because of this, the Web is potentially the best place for a new generation of “makers” to learn from. The tools and resources are already there, and organizations like Mozilla are working to put them in front of more people.

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