Michelle + I explain web making

Want to know what we mean by web making? Or why you (and Mozilla) should care? Michelle Levesque and I did this 20 minute talk at last month’s Learning Without Frontiers conference to answer these questions:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fq52WAfpfRM]

One thing that’s worth pulling out of our slides is the definition of ‘web maker’:

a web maker is anyone who makes things using the open ethos and building blocks 
of the web

I’ve been using this definition for many months now, but it often seems to fly past people. I want to underline it here as this web maker audience is central for all the learning programs Mozilla is developing this year.

If you want more info — or if wonder what I mean by the ‘open ethos and building blocks of the web’ — there are lots of old posts by Mitchell, myself and others that unpack this general topic. Here are a few:

You see the pattern in these posts: a) open ethos = transparency, decentralization, participation, remix + b) building blocks = HTML, CSS, Javascript, open source tools and libraries. In my books, anyone who uses this ethos and these tools to make things on the web is a web maker.

PS. here is a PDF of the slides from the talk Michelle and I did. Can also send Keynote to anyone who wants to use these.

Comments

  1. Hippynz replied on | Reply

    interesting, i am self taught in photography, filming, video editing, web design (rather basic level). I also help a lot of others to learn. I think the idea here is good. Google web sites have made creating sites easier for beginners, they just need to encourage it more as an extension to G+ (sort of like Facebook pages), this is the step before stand alone sites.
    Facebook = place to put images, links, pictures and to promote anything created
    G+ = blogging similar to facebook
    Picasa = photo hosting
    Google web sites = fully editable (with some limits) web sites without needing to know HTML, but you still have access to editing HTML if you want (unlike Facebook).

    All tools that have a place

  2. Paul replied on | Reply

    I sort of get it. For years though the techies I knew mystified people and truly believed in the old adage knowledge is power. Even the Computer evangelists who really wanted to share web technolgy we used to say spoke in binary.

    I think the kids will be receptive and they will benefit hugely from this initiative but a lot of ‘us oldies’ have been sort of brainwashed into believing that we cant do it. Thats the harder audience to help.

    Years ago I used to play with the software that came with netscape navigator and did build some elementary web pages and learned some good stuff along the way. The WYSIWYG web creation software you can use these days produces good sites quickly but users end up feeling none the wiser or that someone else achieved for them – that make sense?

    perhaps I am just lazy… after all there are lots of books, blogs, articles out there but hang on… I am not alone… so if its that straightforward why isn’t everyone web builder savvy?

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