[Pathway] Learning & Leading

Curated by: Chad Sansing (@chadsansing) An-Me Chung ( @anmechung) , Sam Dyson ( @samueledyson)

Learning Objective:

Educators, librarians, and community builders from every level of experience will work towards goals in three interrelated areas: community engagement, technical skills, and teach like Mozilla.

Personas

Persona Names:

Angus Singh (Community Leader/Game Designer, Scotland, strong connections to community, wants to give back)
Christina Ali (Tech-savvy farmer, community leader, rural Lancashire)
Katie Erikkssen (NGO educator, limited technology resources, community affinity for Yoga & football, Brazil)
Alfie (Student, England, slightly introverted, slightly-controlling parents, open to new ideas that open new paths)
Dan (By-the-books school board chair, rural)
Yayan Ruhian (Urban library curator, Jakarta)
Nanjrra (Grad Student, East London, works w/in traditional academic norms, but is looking outside them)
Persona Descriptions:

Angus dives right in to community-building sessions to network with other community leaders and bring back activities he can share with other, local trainers that will get their learners out of the club or classroom and into their neighborhoods to model Web Lit as they map and study their communities w/ digital resources and methods.

Christina moves in an out of this strand; she wants to help her rural community through technology, so she’s looking for community engagement sessions, as well as technologies to use as a farmer. She leaves MozFest networked to peers and mentors who can help her organize a women’s group of technologists and farmers working to share and combine best practices in a kind of open-source coöp.

Katie harvests interest in her community and work and shares a lot about how she could apply ideas in each session to her community and NGO. She leaves with connections and activities she can use to help her students and bring value to her NGO. She has ideas for all her learners, but also plans to establish a women’s community planning group.

Aflie moves through this strand as a rock-star of sorts because of his expertise and young age. He engages with activities that speak to his interest, but also finds ways to help those around him - younger and older. He starts to develop an understanding of how learners are different and how to organize and teach his friends through participatory and lo-fi/no-fi activities. He digs the new Thimble especially much and becomes an ambassador for it, staying in touch with ‘peer’ members of the dev and curriculum teams he meets at MozFest.

At the recommendation of an MLN staffer he met in the coffee line, Dan drops in on sessions on openness, digital learning for diverse learners, and youth empowerment. He begins to see how there are many ‘rule books,’ and that the rule books for openness, diversity, and youth empowerment in learning can help his school engage learners with free and relevant digital curriculum that just might put his school on the proverbial map (perhaps beginning with the Moz Clubs map). He goes home determined to get school heads and teachers invested in MozClubs and introduces several educators back home to the MLN staffers and volunteers who led the sessions he attended at MozFest.

Yayan wants help learning how to shift from being an old-school librarian to one who teaches like Mozilla. Yayan has no experience with maker or participatory pedagogies, just a strong feeling that those are the right kinds of teaching and learning to pursue. With its emphasis on beginners and ‘101’ types of sessions, the Newcomers strand gives Yanyan an introduction to basic skills that can easily be brought home and featured as new classes or as a club in the library. MLN staffers connect Yayan with a Regional Coordinator before the end of the fest to help Yayan teach like Mozilla back home.

Nanjrra arrives unsure of where to begin, but finds her way to the Newcomers strand with help from MozFest organizers. She attends several sessions there while also wandering the floors to check out other learning possibilities. From the newcomer strand, she gets a few new technical skills - specifically in reading, writing, and participating on the Web - and a sense that Web technologies can offer her fun, social ways to engage with her work, as well as serious new methods she plans to research further (with the help of her new Open Science friends) right after MozFest ends.

Persona Experiences

After learning the basics of Thimble, Yayan immediately begins thinking of how to teach Web Literacy in the library. He engages an MLN staffer with his questions and ideas, gets feedback, creates a 1:1 connection with the network, and finds out that attendees can drop in on clubs sessions in the same space to see how others around the world are organizing to teach UWL. Yayan leaves catalyzed as a Web Literacy educator.
Angus attracts a small crowd of mentees interested in using game design to teach the Web. They have an impromptu scrum and then split into two teams in the MLN space. One team decides to jam on delivering a multi-platform (Scratch, Gamestar Mechanic), beginner game-design-on-the-web kit through Thimble, while the other begins sprinting on a Thimble-delivered kit to teach learners how to make a basic snake game in canvas. Angus convenes experienced mentors and they create game-based learning materials for MLN.
In a session on teaching digital skills to diverse learners, Dan asks how educators and policy-makers can align the participatory pieces of TLM practices with the content standards facing most formal educational spaces and classrooms. A number of formal learning-space educators meet up after the session and start working on a Thimble template that crosswalks user-remix standards to key participatory teaching methods called out by this group. Dan communicates a common educational need and helps convene educators to meet this need.
Additional Experiences

In a focus group designed to help frame and inform our upcoming IMLS professional development curriculum, librarians and library patrons from around the world gather and share out their professional needs and the Web Literacy needs of their users. They leave connected with one another and our on-going work to support librarians as leaders in teaching the Web. MLN convenes librarians to listen for their needs. Teachers and MLN staffers might convene a similar focus group for teacher-educators.

In a basic coding session, a group of librarians wonder aloud how UWL connects to the other parts of their emerging makerspace programs. They get interested in both the Internet of Things (IoT) and using Web platforms, like Thimble, to share and remix maker activities for and from libraries. They work to level-up their tech skills to develop beginner IoT activities and library makerspace templates for Thimble. They continue the work together after MozFest and ask for support from clubs in the form of a library-centric RC. Librarians convene themselves to create maker curricula for their libraries.

Longtime localization/l10n heroes find one another in the MLN space and grab a table for 'L10n Central.' Continuing their longstanding tradition of MozFest localization sprints, the group translates and adapts the most recently released clubs modules, awesome community makes from the new Thimble, and (maybe) an upcoming curriculum module we aim to release in 5 languages at launch. Dedicated MLN volunteers helps us communicate better across languages and local contexts.

Youth learners and mentors convene with teachers and librarians around developing opportunities and credentialing for youth leadership development in teaching Web Literacy in their communities. Together, participants think of the curricular hooks and mobile technology tools needed to help youth lead others to read, write, and participate on the Web.

mozilla / mozfest-program