Mozilla's White Paper and More

Mozilla's white paper gives a great introduction and overview of the purpose of Mozilla. (Why don't more organizations write white papers? Is that an "old" form of introduction? Or do we call it an "about" page now?) The Mozilla founders want to keep the web "knowable, interoperable, and ours." They are against silos and pages that don't share the source code. Established in 1998. That rang a bell for me. That was the year the department head at my multinational corporation thought the web was the wave of the future for communication and decided he needed someone on his personal staff who could read HTML code. So despite that I was pregnant and exhausted, he sent me during work hours to two courses at NYU: HTML Coding and Designing WWW. The classes were pretty much only geeks and computer nerds (and one pregnant lady who took a corporate limo in from Jersey and power napped at every break.) I had almost forgotten all about that experience until reading Mozilla's page. The design software we used then would be primitive now. I seem to remember Photoshop being cutting edge. Not sure what the point of all that was, but yeah, I can read a little bit of code. And the web and its users and makers were different in 1998.

Exploring, Building, Connecting. Mozilla's idea of web literacy is different from our idea of digital literacy at the college level, and what we've been focusing on in class and at the NJIT library. Digital literacy so far has meant knowing how to use and evaluate sources on the web. Mozilla goes much further than knowing and evaluating. That is captured in the "explore" section of their web literacy initiative. They move on to building, or writing for the web, and then connecting, or participating on the web. This pushes the boundaries of our digital literacy ideas.

Mozilla has tools that might be relevant. I need to check out popcorn (would that be better than Camtasia?), goggles (might be neat to fool around with code again), and the web literacy teaching kit on the teaching activities page (is there anything of value that I could bring to my classroom, or assign for homework?). Looking forward to Laura's discussion lead.