Un site web par David Bruant

Open web educators in schools

The page is the detailed project proposal page for the Mozilla and Shuttleworth joint fellowship project proposal regarding open web education. It was written in May 2010.

The world as it is and as it will be if we succeed

Beliefs and stories of non-technical people

Most people don’t have a technical background. They often think that when there is a bug, the computer is to be blamed. We know bugs are issued from a developer’s difficulty to write bugless software, because developers are human.

These people often think that the web can disappear. We know that since the specifications of the Ethernet, IP, TCP and HTTP protocols are open, “the web” can be “recreated” anytime.

True stories :
Someone I know knew she was about to change her job. She was consulting her private Yahoo! e-mail account from work through her web browser. Afraid that someone could read her private e-mails after she left, she decided to erase all her e-mails. We know that erasing cookies would have been enough to keep her privacy.
Someone else recently discovered an online browser-based game. This person told me that the game was “sponsored by Mozilla”. There is here a misunderstanding between what a web-browser and a web application are.
Someone else tried to convince me that I was stupid to think that Linux was free (as in “free speech”), because Microsoft controls everything in the IT world. We know this to be not true.

The web as it is

Since the emergence of what is called “Web 2.0″, people can easily create and share on the web. However, very few people are aware of this potential and even less use it.

There are a lot of technologies which exist to improve the web experience. The web community is aware of it, but a lot of people are left behind. For instance, I have decided to write the third article (in French) of my personal blog about RSS feeds. Friends who don’t have a technical background told me that they had learnt something. They “had noticed this thing in Firefox, but never knew what it was for”

I still see a lot of people using a single tab on their web browser. I still see people being afraid to install a different web browser than Internet Explorer or even not knowing that alternatives exist. This seems to be changing slowly in Europe thanks to the ballot screen (wikipedia page), but still!

I still see a lot of people having thousands of e-mails in their “inbox”, struggling to find “the e-mail John sent around March with this very important attachment” and not using sub-directories and filters or a search feature while it would clearly address a lot of their concerns.

I provide extreme examples which are somewhat far from our day-to-day open web community actors life to demonstrate that the web (including but not limited to the open web) offers huge potential, but they are not well known nor used by the general population.

Computers and the web at school

In 2006, in Europe, more than 90% of schools had access to the Internet. There were about 11.3 computers shared by 100 students on average (source). 4 years later, these numbers are very likely to have increased. The paper also summarizes a survey about the computer skills of teachers. Even if the results seem to be pretty good, the regarded skills include word processing, electronic presentation development or use of an e-mail software. More web-related skills such as creating a blog/wiki or any kind of online community are not questioned. I draw the conclusion that first of all, the question wasn’t asked because those who prepared the survey didn’t have a good idea of what web-related skills are.

It seems like schools and education systems are willing to teach through technology. (Official document describing the interest of the French education system in Information and Communication Technologies (French)).

What we can do and how the world may change if we succeed

Non-technical people have misunderstandings and are not fully aware of the potentials of the web. We have this knowledge. I feel it is our responsibility to share our knowledge, on the technical aspects of the web, as well as on the social aspects such as privacy, copyrights or any concern that the web has brought or emphasis in modern societies.

If we succeed, the general population will be better informed about the web and the open web in particular.

The proposal

What I want to be done on the field

Someone with some knowledge on open web education (“open web educator”) comes to a school and manages a project in cooperation with professors and students using or working on open web softwares or technologies.

Why going physically to the schools?

The first reason is that because they (professors and students) won't come to us.

Moreover, during the last years, I have “converted” a few people to Ubuntu. I tend to think that I’ve achieved that, because I have talked to the persons and convinced them that free softwares were a good and reliable alternative. I was physically there to accompany them during the transition from Windows. Being available for questions, doubts or concerns is certainly what have been decisive in the process of changing from Windows to Ubuntu as the mainly used operating system.

My conviction is that no forum, wiki, website or any kind of online platform can replace the physical presence in the ability to reach people and share knowledge especially with the “scary and complicated things” that computers are.

Why a project-based approach?

I have met a lot of people who had been taught computing (word processing, spreadsheets, (un)zipping, manipulating files and directories) just for the sake of it. Each of them were disappointed and frustrated. A project approach necessarily means achieving a goal and here is already a first motivation. This motivation is bigger if the goal is to solve a problem that people had beforehand. This goal is very likely to fit educational goals that professors already have.

Moreover, a project-based approach is a sort of active learning as well as cooperative learning, both proved to be more engaging and motivating for students resulting in a better understanding of what they are doing and in being more receptive to what they are taught.

Examples

9-10 years old (~ end of elementary school). A school-hosted and privately accessible blog where pupils are the authors can be set up. They could talk about their village, the most recent book they have read or anything. It could be integrated as a language teaching. One of the advantages of the blog against hard copies is that pupils can very easily read what other pupils have written and learn from the mistakes of others.

Since each pupil will have an account, a discussion can be engaged about virtual identities. This could be an occasion to discuss about how to choose a good password, too.

14-15 years old (~ middle school). The same experience could be done in the context of a foreign language class. If the purpose of the blog is to do a book review, students could be tempted to copy/paste another review found on the web. It is a perfect occasion to discuss about copyright-related issues, to introduce Creative Commons licenses.

17-18 years old (~ end of high school). High school students are often stressed about high-school diploma. They may want to study exams of previous years. They could be taught basics of HTML (5 !), CSS, command line and FTP to build a website and gather resources (found or created). It would encourage collaborative effort since everyone could bring the result of his/her searches and share it with everyone.

Teaching basics of HTML and CSS could be enough at a first glance. View source magic can then happen. Not so long after that, a discussion could be engaged on the fact that the same functional goal can be achieved in different ways in HTML and CSS. This is a good occasion to give an insight on good practices, the importance of separating content and style.

Higher education, computer science major. Any open web-related project would be fine here. The project doesn’t have to be initiated though. Contribution to existing projects could be encouraged. Mozilla has “student projects” in its Bugzilla. Open web educators could be the link that encourage students to work on these bugs.

It would be a great occasion to encourage computer science major to get interested in getting involved in open source projects. Being physically present would be the occasion to help out with beginners questions on how IRC works, on getting used to tools such as Bugzilla or any other aspect of open source project which is not usually covered in computer science classes.

What has been done at Seneca College with the processing.js project is the kind of project that could perfectly get along with my idea.

Higher education, business/marketing/economics major. A competition can be organized among students to create imaginary companies dealing with the web and free softwares. It would be an excellent opportunity to explore business models of “web-based” companies as well as business models of companies dealing with free and open source softwares.

These are just examples. Other ideas will be highly encouraged and welcome.

For the targeted schools themselves, even if only in the beginning, it seems more reasonable to have partnership with “regular schools”, I would be particularly interested in “alternatives schools” such as “second chance schools (in French)” or in working with students with disabilities.

How to reach millions of people?

If there is only one person going in one school to manage a project during a couple of weeks or months, thousands of people cannot even be reached. My proposal is then the following: creating an institution which would coordinate several “open web educators”.

A very important point is that projects are supposed to take place in any country. For that reason, I have not given any delay or date in my examples. One golden rule will be the ability to adapt projects to education systems. In some places, projects might be during two entire weeks while other projects could require the presence of an open web educator once a week during three months. Some projects could happen during classes while other could be stated as extra-curricular activity. These aspects will have to be prepared and decided on due time in cooperation with schools and professors.

The institution

Legal status

I am constantly reflecting upon the legal status of the institution. This is one aspect for which I am going to rely on the resources that the fellowship provides. In this case, the legal support and administrative services.

Currently, the main ideas are :