Web Literacy Standard Announced By Mozilla 64
An anonymous reader writes "Doug Belshaw and Carla Casilli, along with a community of stakeholders, have been working on a specification of skills needed for web literacy. Doug report that Brett Gaylor and Chris Lawrence announced version 1.0 of the spec. In a nutshell it's described as 'A map of the territory for the skills and competencies Mozilla and community think are important to get better at to more effectively read, write & participate on the Web.' Usages include writing curricula influenced by it, and issuing Open Badges that align with it (using the 'alignment' metadata field). Doug also calls for help with localization of the spec into other languages."
Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't be the only one confused by this article summary. It's going to take an hour of reading Wikipedia to figure it out...
Pointless (Score:5, Insightful)
This is utterly pointless crap. No one needs web literacy merit badges. My 70-year-old grandmother gets around just fine on the net without some crummy scout badge. Kids surf the net with ease before they learn not to drink bleach. No one needs net training; it's a false demand created by academics who don't understand that there are more pressing first-world problems to solve, like teaching people to distinguish between an oak and a holm oak.
Want people to know what they're doing online? (Score:5, Insightful)
Step 1: ALWAYS SHOW THE FUCKING STATUS BAR! (Firefox, Safari.) And make it the whole width of the window. (Chrome) And it should do exactly ONE thing: show the exact, complete URL of a link you're hovering over.
That is all.
Actually, wait, it isn't. Step 2: ALWAYS SHOW THE ENTIRE URL IN THE URL BAR -- INCLUDING the protocol and all the other ugly bits. In one color text. Again, as much as the width of the window will allow you to see. MAYBE put the main domain in bold so it looks like www.bankofamerica.ihaxxoryou.com/give/me/your/money. But let me turn that off if I know what I'm doing.