 Imagine, she won't have to worry about truth online, she'll create it. He'll create great things online and in his classroom. This little princess will read and write on the internet. Why? These kids are growing up in a world where they can be free to be web literate. We've defined web literacy as reading, writing, and participating on the web. In this video, we're going to discuss the work on the web literacy map and let you know how you can get involved and make this happen in your classroom. The World Wide Web has become this generation's defining technology for literacy. This technology facilitates access to an unlimited amount of online information in a participatory learning space. History's first generation of always connected individuals do not have the knowledge and skills to critically explore, build, and connect online. Simply stated, students are often not provided with opportunities in school to practice the literacies necessary to read, write, and participate on the web. The Mozilla Foundation and a community of volunteers have been working to address this paradox by creating a web literacy map. These efforts seek not to simply understand the web, but to empower adolescents to help build a better open web. In this video, we're going to take a look at some of the work that's been undertaken up to this point. We'll look at version 1.1, 1.5, and then leading into the release of version 2.0 coming out soon. I don't believe that the focus should be on specific apps or tools or platforms that will enable students and educators to do these things in the classroom. I think instead we should focus on building up the knowledge, skills, and dispositions associated with these literacies to empower our learners, empower our educators for the future. Many frameworks such as digital literacy, media literacy, information literacy, I was a member of the New Literacies Research Lab and I've also written and conducted work in multi-literacies. All these different frameworks have considered the skills required for the web. However, these frameworks have often attempted to make sense of the web using previous metaphors rather than understanding the explicit affordances of the web as a network medium. So over the past two years, the Mozilla Foundation, the global nonprofit best known for, among other things the Firefox web browser, they've led an initiative to define the skills and competencies required to read, write, and participate on the web. Being as a group of stakeholders from formal and informal educational spaces and industry, the community has been working to develop a web literacy initiative, most evidenced by the web literacy map. The web literacy map, well presented in grid form with three strands. The strands being reading, writing, and participating as a version 1.5 or 2.0, recognizes literacy as a culturally defined social act. In this, we believe that you cannot learn web literacy by separating the competencies contained in these strands from the act of doing. The three strands of the web literacy map are intertwined. You'll notice that there's a lot of different design elements. There's a lot of different visual displays of the web literacy map over time. One of the reasons for this is as we develop up the set of web literacies and the strands and the skills and competencies, it's been challenging to identify the best visual to express a lot of the thinking behind the web literacy map and the way that these all intersect. The best resource that I use in having educators work with the web literacy map and the different skills and competencies is the piece put together by Mozilla on teach.mozilla.org. In this, we see that each strand, such as exploring, contains five competencies. A set of skills is nested under each competency, although presented separately to aid understanding each competency really does or should overlap with another. The thinking is embedded into the general idea of the map metaphor. Individuals basically plot their own learning pathway but use the map as a guide. Once again, this is all based on version 1.5. A lot of the materials are centered on version 1.1 or 1.5. The purpose of the web literacy map is to provide descriptive as opposed to prescriptive guidance for educators. In descriptive, we are basically describing for you, we're getting a group of educators and web litter individuals together to try and identify what is happening online and what we mean by or what could be meant by web literacy, whereas prescriptive is we're trying to identify curriculum or instructional purposes or show you how to build this. The goal is to encourage mentors to align materials, regardless of theory, perspectives, goals or geography and focus on the notion of the internet as a literacy. I wrote my thesis on digital literacies and if there's one thing that I learned, it's that there's as many definitions of digital literacy as there are researchers in the field. So why on earth would we need another term to endlessly redefine and argue about? Well, I'd argue that the good thing about the web is that it's easier to agree what we're actually talking about. Yes, there might be some people who use the term web when they actually mean internet, but by and large, we all know what we're talking about, as well as being something most people know about. It's also ubiquitous. If you have access to the internet, then you almost always have access to the web as well. And that's not true of other digital spaces where walled gardens are the norm. Now I'm sure there's very specific skills, competencies and habits of mind that you need to use lockdown proprietary products. And that's great. But I think a better use of our time is to think about the skills, competencies and habits of mind required to use a public good. To use an imperfect analogy, we don't teach people to drive specific cars, but we give them a license to drive pretty much any car. Right at the beginning of the web literacy work, we hadn't really figured out what are we going to do or how Doug wasn't there to lead it yet. It was it was kind of an exploration of what is the end state that we need to get to. And during that exploration, I actually wrote my thesis on web literacy and adults. And I, you know, in the beginning, I was kind of looking at all of these different literacies that we've defined throughout, you know, time, basically the last 150 years or so. And there's a lot of words out there. There's information literacy, communication, literacy, media, literacy, you know, all of these different literacies. And if you were kind of looking at those different definitions and the semantics around how people were talking, talking about these different literacies in theoretical literature, there wasn't a lot of congruency. And there was nothing that was focused specifically on the web. It was it was all it was wrapping in, you know, media literacy, for example, was also wrapping in hardware. You know, how do I use a camera and how do I upload a photo or whatever? And so when I was writing my thesis there, I found a meta analysis of all of these different terminologies. And I also found Doug Belcha's doctoral thesis on digital literacies. And I started trying to figure out, like, what are the commonalities between these different definitions? And and I started helping the original shepherd of that sort of the web literacy work, Michelle LaVesse, and she was out there talking to smart people about what they thought web literacy was. And so at the at the beginning, it was really messy. And we didn't know what it was. And then Doug came on board and Doug took a look at all of this stuff. And he started saying, OK, you know, what we need to do is we need to define web literacy. Like, what does that mean? And he started gathering a community of people to say, OK, well, web literacy is how we read, write and participate on the web, the skills and competencies around being able to do that. And together he and this community of people started to define the web literacy map as as you know it today. The web is different from digital stuff because you can draw a circle around the kinds of stuff which is constitutes the web. And you can't really draw a circle around the stuff that's digital. So you can actually define the skills that you need to read, write and participate on the web. So that was the starting point. We might get on to why we've ended up dropping the name standard web literacy standard and going with map instead. But yeah, that's that was the starting point. I think deciding that, you know, Mozilla cares about the web and cares about people being able to be successful on the web. And Mitchell Baker's got a whole spiel about about that, about people, you know, leveling up their skills, being part fully participants in society through the web, all this kind of stuff. But if you don't know what those skills are that you need to be able to get better, then you've just got four proper companies who are telling you that you need to use their app or you need to be able to press buttons in this order. And I think it's a lot more than that. There's mindsets, the skill sets, there's all the stuff which are in the web literacy map. The web literacy map operationalized reading as exploring, and this is defined as navigating the web. Recasting the reader as a navigator has important implications. It means much more than just traditional comprehension. To differentiate between reading and reading the web, we focus on specific competencies for meaning making online. Is this the child that will grow up to be a good online reader? Well, of course, if this child's teachers help build the competencies under reading and exploring and reading the web. This child needs to know how to use web tools for navigation. This child needs to know how to use and understand web mechanics. Good online readers can also search for or locate people, resources and information. They then know how to judge the credibility of these sources. Finally, good online readers know that exploring in the web requires an understanding of security to keep content, identity and systems safe. The web literacy map operationalized writing as building because on the web you create content to make meaning. New genres that blend text and tools have emerged on the open web. And as part of this, new modalities have risen in prominence and the code that powers the web has emerged as a new genre for writing and communication. Will this young woman grow up to write the web? Well, of course, and especially if her teachers help focus on writing and building and making in the classroom using digital tools. The competencies of this writing strand reflect the emphasis on making and building. Learning, especially building the web involves constructing new content. We refer to this as making and the products as makes. This philosophy is reflected in the competencies because in the end we're all makers. We pick up tools while composing text through creating and curating content. Furthermore, remixing and modifying content drives the open web. Seasoned web makers learn to design accessible online spaces, code websites, script programs and support the open web infrastructure. In the web literacy map, participating on the open web was operationalized as connecting. Participating on the open web includes connecting with the communities that build and sustain meaningful content on the web. It takes a community of shared interests to publish and link to this content. The technology that facilitates the worldwide web gives us access to an unlimited amount of online information in a participatory learning space. Will this young man grow up to be a participator in the open web? Well, of course, and especially if his teachers build in opportunities for him to connect and participate and collaborate online and in class. In this, you build up the competencies included under the participating strand and also the values as we connect and participate and protect the open web in these activities. Sharing is essential to creating the many small pieces of the web. Individuals that are good participators on the open web collaborate both as a mentor and a learner while sharing and creating resources in different spaces by participating and connecting in these spaces and in the specific practices within those spaces. We connect as an online learning community. We've defined web literacy as the core skills and competencies required to read, write and participate effectively on the web. Combined with 21st century skills, these are the digital age skills needed to successfully live and work now and in the future. Whether you're a first time smartphone, phone user, an educator and experienced programmer, an internet activist, the degree to which you can read, write and participate on the web while producing, synthesizing, evaluating and communicating information shapes what you can imagine and what you can do in this work and in the presentation in this video. We need to keep in mind that any of these children and even more that we haven't even talked about can grow up to be web litter individuals. We also need to understand that there is a need for educators and individuals and adults to build up and scale up their own web literacies. We shouldn't have to rely on specific apps, services or silos to support learning. We also need to acknowledge that there are always access challenges when we talk about technology. There are also great opportunities for learners to support themselves online and in out of school contexts. The purpose of the video is to highlight the developing web literacy initiative and invite global learners and educators to join us and help define what it means to be web literate now and in the future. We encourage you to test out these web literacies, the associated skills and competencies in your classroom. As you do so, please blog openly about your experience so the community can learn from you and connect with you to learn more about the past and current web literacy work and to review extended interviews about this work. Please review the links included with the video. You can also find all of the credits for video I used in this film, as well as other links and resources and connections to future work at wioburn.com slash web literacy. Imagine, at the beginning of this video, we started by talking about ways to empower adolescents, youth and ourselves to be web litter individuals. The focus really shouldn't be on individual apps or platforms, but on readers and writers and focusing on opportunities to empower ourselves, enable ourselves to participate and connect with others online. In a way, we get to build the web that we want and we can only do so if we focus on web literacies.