We were lucky enough to get an amazing interview with the inspiring Mark Surman, who has been the Executive Director at Mozilla since 2008.
Read his opinion on education, how Mozilla plan to help children learn better and why he’s so impressed with Ravensbourne!
Question: Where do Mozilla stand with the new phase of a Digital Classroom?
“Mozilla have really started to look at learning as something that’s important for us to play a role in over the last 18 months or so and we started that from the perspective of really wanting to make sure that people could learn digital skills and learn what I call ‘web literacy’ and that’s really at the core of our interest and so projects like Hackasaurus that you saw here today are about us finding easy ways for anybody including kids to just get the basics of how the web works in a way that they’re empowered to make something on the web so that they have the confidence and the skills to really use the web to its fullest potential. We actually made a decision in the last couple of weeks that that should be a big focus for us because we’re really at the level of reaching out and helping millions of people get stronger digital skills and so that’s where we started. In terms of the question you’re asking, using a digital approach to teaching, it’s certainly something we believe in although we really believe that if you want to include technology as a part of how you teach the best way to do it is to do it using the culture of the web. If fall you do is videotape someone giving a lecture that’s not any different, in fact that’s probably a lot worse than a classroom. If what you is say ‘well what’s the web about?’ well the web is about collaboration the web is about tinkering and trying things out, the web is about being able to build something really fast and say’ well what if we build education, even if it’s like science education and made it work like that and for us that’s the role that technology can play. What’s good about it isn’t that it’s cheap or free or everyone can watch a video, what’s good about it is that you can take it apart and make things which is actually a really good way for people to learn. What we’re doing with the HIVE Group for example is we’re helping them embed digital skills and digital technology in learning about science in learning about art, learning about history and in doing that it makes that learning more experimental and hands on because you go collecting data and that’s the role I think digital should play in education and if you use it in that way to make it more fun and more hands on, you also teach digital skills at the same time. We’re starting to work with educators in all fields, helping them use digital in a creative open way because if they do that then everyone is learning digital skills all the time instead of us only teaching kids who want to learn how to code.”
Question: Could you explain to us the term ‘Hacking’?
“There is a kind of tradition in the software developer world, where Mozilla are known for talking about Hacking as meaning just playing around and that’s really the original route meaning of it. I can play with a piece of code, I can try this I can try that, which is actually a really good way to learn things and understand how they work which is the thing we want people to do and in a media context a hacker has come to mean that someone is doing something bad or breaking into a computer and that’s something certainly that we don’t condone and really what we’re trying to say, in the positive sense, hacking is about tinkering, playing around and feeling empowered. In some ways it can be a dangerous thing to talk about it that way because people can misunderstand but also we’re trying to reclaim that language and say ‘it’s actually a good thing to understand how computers work’ in some ways it kind of raises the eyebrows of kids and say “what do you mean Mozilla’s teaching Hacking?’, well, its not the kind of hacking you think but it is about you having control of your digital life.”
Question: Is Mozilla involved in any educational projects?
“Yes. ‘Jetpack For learning’ was the first thing we ever did as an educational program bringing together educators and software developers and we actually got some neat add-ons but we didn’t have educators involved in the design process and we’ve learnt from that and said if were going to make software for education, lets bring educators and developer together and they’re going to come up with things like Hackasaurus or the kind of software that’s coming out of HIVE and we’re doing some stuff with Peer 2 Peer University around teaching web development and in all those cases there is always this marriage between people who know learning and people who know software and that’s when the magic happens. So Jetpack for Learning was a good dip in that pool but it was actually more the thing that taught us ho to make Hackasaurus and all these other kin of things.”
Question: do you think online learning will benefit children in the future?
“My kids are 11 and 9 and they are on the Internet all the time and in many ways the Internet is where they learn. It’s not the only place they learn but for example my son who is 11 if he wants to learn a new guitar chord or a song he goes and looks it up on the Internet, watches the YouTube video of that person playing it then go to a different site and see where the chords are. What’s amazing about that is that he is hungry for information. If he wants to know something he knows how to go and dig it up and that’s a really empowering way to learn, you don’t have to wait for the teacher to teach the class on this guitar chord and I don’t have to wait till its my guitar lesson, I can just learn when I want- in control of my own learning and I think there’s two things that will come out of that is those kids who are confident and have the digital skills, will actually learn faster and more independently which is a good thing and they’ll bring that set of skills into school and for him school goes faster, school goes better. I think as long as teachers are willing to realise that these kids have got jet fuel for learning, then I think the Internet will actually fuel schools in becoming better because student will be better if teachers can work with that, I think the downside is even though we think there are these digital natives, there is still a huge gap between rich and poor and a huge gap between kids who feel comfortable with the internet and kids who don’t and there’s actually some research going on in Harvard University which shows that its not everyone who gets it. Kids who have a lot of computers around them get I and it just seems natural for them and kids who don’t have access even if they just have access to a mobile phone don’t really get the mechanics of computers or the web and that’s why we’re so concerned with teaching digital skills as a really core part of Mozilla’s mission. We want to make sure that everybody understands how the internet works and make sure that they know that they’ve got the skills to be able to play ad make more of an impact like my son does.”
Question: What’s been your favorite part of the Mozilla festival so far?
“I think the digital pop-up youth space by the HIVE which is made up of twelve groups demonstrating this kind of learning where digital takes a back seat and kids are learning design and filmmaking but it takes that kind of ‘maker attitude’ and it builds it into these youth learning projects and you see those twelve very different groups down here teaching twelve different things but they all have that same approach of assuming that kids want to learn and really what we’re trying to use digital for is to give them some tools for them to use to explore or play and invent and move forwards with.”
Question: What do you think about Ravensbourne?
“I love Ravensbourne! I think it’s actually a real example of the kind of ethic that Mozilla would like to see more in education. You guys are actually out here doing something real as a part of your class and not just doing pretend assignments on fake content and to me that kind of learning that is hands on. You’re actually making real stuff not just doing an exercise. This is what absolutely has to happen in all learning and it seems that Ravensbourne to some extent builds that into how they work. I might have stayed in school if they had something like this!”
