Guiding students as they explore, build, and connect online
Citation
McVerry, J. Gregory; Belshaw, Doug; O’Byrne, W. Ian. (2015) Guiding students as they explore, build, and connect online. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 58(8), 632–635. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.411
Abstract
Educators encounter students like Garth — young people who lead dual lives, fully competent in online spaces yet disenfranchised by traditional school reading and writing assignments. This column introduces Mozilla’s Web Literacy Map as a framework for helping educators support students in the three key practices of web literacy: exploring (navigating the Web), building (creating for the Web), and connecting (participating on the Web). The Web Literacy Map attempts not merely to understand, but to build a better Web — a crowd-sourced, community-developed framework that is open, translatable, and continually revised. The authors argue that web literacy is distinct from other digital literacy frameworks in that it foregrounds the Internet itself as a literacy medium, rather than a tool for accessing literacy.
Notes
The Mozilla collaboration during this period was generative. Doug Belshaw was leading the Web Literacy Map effort, Greg McVerry and I were thinking about how it connected to literacy education, and the conversation kept producing useful friction between the tech/open-web frame and the literacy education frame.
Web literacy is a specific thing, and the framework names it usefully: exploring, building, connecting. Those three strands are not about consuming content — they’re about participating in and contributing to the web as a medium. That’s a fundamentally different orientation than “use this tool for school.”
What I find most useful about this framing years later is the building strand. We talk constantly about digital literacy as a reading skill (evaluate sources, check credibility) but almost never as a writing skill (make things for the web, contribute to the open ecosystem). Garth, the student in the opening vignette, is a builder — he has a YouTube channel, he makes things. School has nothing for him. The Web Literacy Map was our attempt to create a framework that could recognize and support what Garth already knows.