The 4th R: WebcRaft as Lego

I'm thinking about what it would be like to have a world where everyone understood that the World Wide Web isn't a thing, it's more like an "us," with possibilities for remaking and remixing that anyone with a Web connection can join and contribute to.   I'm thinking about what possibilities we could mine if we accepted the challenge and the opportunity.     To do so, requires a paradigm shift (i.e. that's why I call my book "Now You See It").   Before we can contribute and be part of the Web, we have to see it.   That means seeing the Web not as the solution to all problems or the source of all problems but a tool that offers a space of possibility that we can "occupy" (pun intended).   Occupation of the Web is surprisingly easy, but it still requires being able to see its possibilities, not as a consumer but as a participant.  But occupation has rewards.  By occupying that space, we can transform the parts of the Web we want to inhabit.   But that is a conditional, a challenge.   And that's the point.

I'm fresh from my webinar on "The Fourth R" of algoRithmic thinking (or webcRaft, pRogramming, web liteRacy, etc) with Mark Surman and Michelle Levesque of Mozilla, and thinking about all the great things that came out of this conversation, including a set of "resources" composed on the spot, during the conversation, by those who participated in the open chat along side our dialogue.   [You can find that recapp'd here:  http://hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/2012/02/16/recap-awesome-mozilla-webinar-4th-r-webmaking-vital-21st-c-skill]  

On Michelle's blog, I also found this video of her and Mark talking about open distributed learning---peer learning, using the digital to interact, collaborate, inspire, entertain, and educate one another.   Mark used an analogy I like a lot.  He shows a photograph of his son holding Lego blocks.  He talks about how those simple building blocks can create great, exciting things . . . that can then be taken apart to create other exciting things.   Mark notes that, the exciting thing about Legos is you can "see the lines."  You can see how the final thing is constructed.   The Web is like that too.  Like Lego constructions, it is made up of simple blocks that are designed to be pulled apart every day.   When we look at a beautiful Web page, we may not know it, but there's code there, remixable code.   We can do the remixing.   Think about that.  

I wish every school kid leared that lesson in first grade and, along with Lego blocks, was given the Hackasaurus iGoggles and was registered in to Scratch, basic kid-centered tools designed to, in the first case, make the code of any Web page visible and, in the second, to help kids learn the basic principles of Web design and remix.   In five, fun minutes, anyone (I've done this, so can you!) can begin to see how you can remix the Web with Scratch, and can make multimedia stories, games, narratives, and animations.   Cool.  Let's get started! 

You can watch Mark and Michelle's video here:  http://rwxweb.wordpress.com/2012/02/15/open-distributed-learning-mark-su...

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