Syllabus

Web Literacy in Instruction:

Digital Text & Tools for Lifelong Learning

Literacy is a social practice affecting every aspect of our lives. Our use of emerging digital texts and tools define civic and public engagement in our participatory culture. The purpose of this open, online classroom is to highlight the shifting nature of literacy and social practices as new digital texts and tools emerge everyday. 

This resource focuses on the nature of information on the Internet and its implications for how educators think about reading comprehension, critical thinking, and learning in a digital information age. In short, this work tries to embrace all literacies in classroom instruction. In this course will explore how the Internet poses new challenges for global learners that extend beyond traditional reading comprehension skills in order to encompass these new literacies as well as the higher level thinking skills associated with them.

This course is organized around five modules: Multimodal Tutorial, Online Collaborative Inquiry, Online Content Construction, Online Reading Comprehension, and Digital Identity. Three of these modules focus on the three cornerstones of the Mozilla Web Literacy initiative:

• Participate - In online collaborative inquiry, a group of local or global learners arrive at a common outcome via multiple pathways of knowledge. 

• Read - In online reading comprehension, students utilize skills, strategies, practices, and dispositions while locating, evaluating, and synthesizing information during problem based inquiry tasks.

• Write - In online content construction, students construct and redesign knowledge by actively encoding and decoding meaning through the use of ever shifting multimodal tools.

Each module focuses on theory and principles involved in literacy, technology, and related fields. Modules include video lectures, readings, videos, and other online resources. There are multiple opportunities for you to reflect on your thinking about the materials. These reflections and discussion will be posted openly online. 

Assessment & Badges

There are five badges available on badges.mozilla.org under the #orms tag. You can pledge to earn all five of these badges by reading all of the materials within a module. You then need to share a piece of work that you've created after completing this work. Full badge details are available on the "Discussion & Badges" page for each module. 

After you earn all five badges, you automatically earn the Community Mentor Badge. This badge allows you to lead other learners through the MOOC and award badges.