Educators and students need the latitude to play, ex-periment, fail, and have fun as they learn these Web literacies

So long as enough people are contributing to the project, it does not require any one organization or person to be sustainable.

This requires collaborating as both a mentor and an apprentice while sharing and creating resources in different spaces

everyone is invited to join Mozilla ’ s #teachtheWeb community to help shape, teach, and make current and future versions of the Web Literacy Map

prior work in other areas did not al-ways allow for the multiple perspectives

watches others

accountability, primarily in the form ofhigh-stakes testing, and the drive for national standards

Today’s K–12 students in postindustrialsocieties have never experienced a world without computer-based technologies.They regularly surf the Web, send e-mail, and use instant messaging—acts thathave changed the face of information processing and human communication

thereis a significant relationship between learners’ knowledge and their interests

experiential learning and interest

these motivational factors were not consideredin isolation but were studied in relation to other factors such as students’ knowl-edge, strategic abilities, sociocultural background, and features of the learningcontext.

From the standpoint of human interactions, as well, certain sociocultural re-searchers came to the position that knowledge was not merely shaped or colored

unschooled knowledge

impetus to change was the development of a systematic atti-tude of distrust or devaluing of formal knowledge, and of the traditional mode ofscientific inquiry.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of this research period was its fo-cus on the individual mind.

“natural”

Consequently,learning to read, the written counterpart of acquiring an oral language, came tobe viewed as an inherent ability, rather than a reflective act involving the labori-ous acquisition of a set of skills

identification of the requisite desired behaviors

In this theoretical orientation, learning resulted from the repeated and controlledstimulation from the environment that came to elicit a predictable response fromthe individual.

With this analyticview, there was a growing tendency for problems in the reading act to be looked onas deficiencies in need of remediation, just as physical ailments require medicalremedies.

Such an analysis would presumably result in pedagogical techniquesbased on an understanding of the physiological and environmental underpinningsof human behavior (Glaser, 1978)

This baby boomcontributed to both quantitative and qualitative changes to the school population

In sum, we encourage teachers to providetheir students with linguistically rich environ-ments in which written and spoken language areused to learn, to communicate, to express ideas,to understand the ideas of others andin which

Scavenger Hunt (letters)

We u rg e t e a c h e r s t o b e w a t c h f u l f o r c h i l d r e nwho are not catching on—after multiple expo-sures—to games and activities such as those pre-sented here. These children may need extrasupport in phonemic awareness development.

Bag Game (cues)

“Down by the Bay”

Here we see the additional factor of ensuring that people feel like they belong to and are a valued and accepted part of the social group within which their learning takes place.

In his work, highly educated college-age African-Americans and women do less well on math tests when, and only when, the tester, however subtly, triggers their fear of negative stereotypes (e.g. African-Americans are “less smart” or women are “no good at math”). Otherwise they perform as well as white males. To ignore these wider issues, while stressing such things as phonemic awareness, is to ignore not merely “politics,” but what we know about learning and literacy as well.

the white-black gap has remained roughly constant for the last 16 years...

Given the amount of parallelism and repetition in her text, clearly Leona is not primarily interested in making rapid and linear progress to “the point.” Rather, she is interested in creating a pattern out of language, within and across her stanzas: a pattern

music was now “scary” and the landscape much harsher-looking than the ones he had previously been in.

“person like us”: that is, a member of his family

The story suggests that gender differences (boy versus girl) are associated with different interests (Transformers versus Cabbage Patches) and that these different interests inevitably lead to conflict when male and female try to be “equal” or sort themselves on other grounds than gender (“a fight on who would be which team”: the actual fight at her party had been about mixing genders on the teams).

This is because schools do not start the academic language acquisition process for these children—a process that has already started at home for other children.

does not allow an emotional word

People think of a language like English as one thing—“a language.” Actually, it’s not one thing, it’s many things.

The fourth-grade slump is made up of kids who can “read,” in the sense of decode and assign superficial literal meanings to texts, but can’t “read” in the sense of understanding, in any deep way, informational texts written in fairly complex language.

Most humans are not, in fact, very good at learning via overt instruction.

proper tools are made available

Literacy (written language) is too new a process historically to have had the evolutionary time required to have become “wired” into our human genetic structure. Written language is, at the very best, 6000 to 10,000 years old—too short a time to have gained biological support. Furthermore, written language was invented by only a few cultures and only a few times, unlike oral language, which has existed for all human cultures for long enough to have become part of our human biological inheritance.

Henry Ford would have been proud.