Mozilla is sponsoring what looks to be a really great workshop on Toronto Youth & the Web next week (sign up here). The goal is to kickstart a network of educators, volunteers and coders who can make Toronto one of the best places in the world for kids to learn to code and create on the web. This is a really important chance, and I hope we all jump on it. Here’s why:
- Hacking is a Citizenship Skill. Already, almost all forms of public expression move through digital media, and that trend’s not going to reverse any time soon. So whatever you want to communicate – artistically, intellectually, politically – you will have to do it through electronic means. Without a basic understanding of how the web works, of how thoughts become data and data moves through networks, the capacity to participate in public discourse of any kind is restricted. So: we need to make sure all our kids have that knowledge and those skills. And right now, schools aren’t doing that job for us, so we’re going to have to find ways to teach this stuff ourselves.
- We need an open web, and we need our kids to build it for us. The Web is a mixed bag sometimes, but overall it has been a tremendous force for individual empowerment and expanded opportunity. By making information more widely available than it ever was before, the Web has become, among other thing, the best public library that ever was. But this version of the Web is facing a set of challenges – walled gardens, paywalls, locked-down platforms – that threaten its emancipatory potential, probably more severely than at any time since its initial expansion in the early 1990′s. I’ve come to believe – like many others – that the way to meet those challenges is through The Joy of Code. We need as many people as possible to love hacking and creating on the web; and we need them to see that openness is a huge part of what makes them love it. And then they will fight for an open web, and build its future for us. And the only people who can do this – the only people – are our kids.
- None of us can do it alone. When I started teaching Scratch and Hackasaurus in classrooms in my spare time, I was almost immediately flooded with requests from other classrooms and schools. I very quickly realized that my own efforts were doomed to be a grain of sand on a giant beach; that to come anywhere close to the vision I have – and the vision we all need – I’d need to be part of something bigger and more cohesive. This is that something. And we need to seize the chance.
- Toronto is the right kind of place to do this. We live in one of the world’s greatest cities, a city of that brings people from all over the world and from a diversity of economic backgrounds into contact with each other on a daily basis. We have vibrant neighbourhoods and community centres, we have a strong network of innovative social organizations, and we have a huge body of smart, talented people looking to make a difference with their skills. I’ve lived in or near Berlin, San Francisco, Boston and New York; those are all great places, but I wouldn’t trade Toronto for any of them. We can make our city the most fertile hacker incubator in the world; and if we pull that off, then the next generation of web makers will prize Toronto’s values – inclusion, equity, tolerance – as much as we do.
Alright then – see you all there!
