"Learning and the Web. Two powerful forces of change converge in a public square. Their dimensions are unpredictable, and many of the outcomes of their convergence will be unintended, but this experiment is not entirely uncontrolled. This group of scholars, hackers, and activists has calculated the likely conditions, wired in all the right connections. When lightning strikes, they’ll be ready.

You are reading the ebook version of Learning, Freedom and the Web by Anya Kamenetz, published by the Mozilla Foundation. This ebook was designed and built by faculty and students at Emily Carr University's Social + Interactive Media Centre, with the assistance of Steam Clock Software."

"I have covered the Open Badges project several times over the past year:  in an article for MindShift and most recently with an interview in O'Reilly Radar with Project Manager Erin Knight.<br />
In the storify below, I've collected some of the resources about the project, as well as some of the reactions via Twitter to today's announcement -- Mozilla's announcement as well as the Digital Media & Learning's badges competition."<br />
<br />
[See also: http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/09/open-badges-project-learning-education.html AND ªªhttp://mindshift.kqed.org/2011/08/mozillas-open-badges-project-a-new-way-to-recognize-learning/ ANDºº ªªhttp://commonspace.wordpress.com/2010/08/12/badges-identity-and-you/ ]ºº

"Building a generation of webmakers… Hackasaurus spreads skills, attitudes and ethics that help youth thrive in a remixable digital world. By making it easy for youth to tinker and mess around with the building blocks that make up the web, Hackasaurus helps tweens move from digital consumers to active producers, seeing the web as something they can actively shape, remix and make better.

Through a set of easy-to-use tools…Hackasaurus tools make it easy for kids to remix, create and share on the web. The X-Ray Goggles allow learners to see what the web is made of, remix and change their favorite web pages, and share their creations with friends. WebPad makes it easy to take the next step, creating your own web pages in a matter of seconds. And the Hackbook provides bits of code for easy copying and pasting, making it easy to play with the web like lego.

…and at "hack jam" events around the world."

"For centuries diplomas have been synonymous w/ the nation’s universities.

That makes MIT’s decision to name a 44-year old Japanese venture capitalist who attended, but did not graduate, from 2 American colleges as director of one of the world’s top computing science laboratories an unusual choice…

Mr. Ito first attended Tufts where he briefly studied computer science but wrote that he found it drudge work. Later he attended the U of Chicago where he studied physics, but once again found it stultifying…later wrote of his experience: “I once asked a professor to explain the solution to a problem so I could understand it more intuitively. He said, ‘You can’t understand it intuitively. Just learn the formula so you’ll get the right answer.’ That was it for me.”

Mr. Ito’s colleagues minimize the fact that he is w/out academic credentials. “He has credibility in an academic context,” said Lawrence Lessig…"

"The problem: Creative Commons licensed content is awesome, but attributing it properly can be difficult and confusing. The first rule for re-using openly licensed content is that you have to properly attribute the creator. There are specific requirements for what needs to go into that attribution, but those requirements can be confusing and hard to find.<br />
The solution: A simple tool everyone can use to do the right thing with the click of a button. That’s why we’re building Open Attribute, a suite of tools that makes it ridiculously simple for anyone to copy and paste the correct attribution for any CC licensed work. These tools will query the metadata around a CC-licensed object and produce a properly formatted attribution that users can copy and paste wherever they need to.<br />
<br />
Open Attribute is a Mozilla Drumbeat project born at the “Learning, Freedom and the Web” Festival in Barcelona."

"Send us your ideas for Firefox add-ons, preferably ones created with Jetpack, that can turn the web-browser into a platform for rich personal learning. You are not restricted to work on any particular type of application. Here are a few examples to get you started:

"To watch YouTube videos without the comments and crap, just drag the button below to your browser toolbar. On any YouTube page, click the bookmark button to watch in peace.

"This is Part 1 of Aurora, a concept video created by Adaptive Path in partnership with Mozilla Labs. With Aurora, we set out to define a plausible vision of how technology, the browser, and the Web might evolve in the future by depicting that experience in a variety of real-world contexts."

"Often in ARGs messages are written in codes such as binary, hex, or even Morse code. Leetkey is an addon for firefox that lets you translate such a message with a few simple clicks."

"Web 2.0 is special. And so are the places that make it happen. Here's how the offices of web 2.0 companies look like. I've also added descriptions to each site in case you've been living in a bubble and don't know what they do."