We’re in the process of creating Hacktivity Kits for each of our software tools and for a variety of event types. The kits contain information on the Mozilla Webmaker initiative as a whole, specific information on the particular tool and event format that the hacktivity kit is for, and then modular content that allows a facilitator to pick and choose what they want to teach and how.
The HACKtivity kits also contain information on how to hack the kit for your own interests and particular situations. Yesterday, someone told me that the hackability of curriculum is the most important piece to many educators. So we need to make it easy to see how someone might hack the lesson plans contained in the kit.
I’ve been brainstorming the best way to create hackable content that is also usable for people who don’t actually want to hack it. I can imagine that certain facilitators *just* want to teach web literacy as the main theme and need or want a step by step plan in doing that. So we need to have lessons laid out for those educators. But for those people that want to hack it, we need to create a simple framework for creating your own learning materials. I’m sold on the idea that this framework is:
- Create an orientation (introduction) activity
- Create an instructional activity
- Create a practical activity
I’ve talked about these different knowledge levels on this blog before. Accessing all three of these knowledge types is required for *real* learning. The hacktivity kits are a perfect format for this because we can create three separate modules that have x number of different ideas. If the learning objectives are the same throughout each of the example ideas, facilitators will easily see how they can hack the modular content to fit their other learning objectives.
So, I’m thinking that every Hacktivity Kit has at least 6 activities, two for each level of the framework. The complexity of the activities is defined through the event type. At each level of the framework, at least two variations of activities are created to teach a single learning objective. This will help facilitators come up with new ideas because they’ll have two very different examples.
As an example, here’s the framework in use for the XRay Goggles:
- Learning Objective = What it means to “hack” something
Activity = “Hack the Robot Dance” OR “Hack a Boardgame” - Learning Objective = HTML/CSS as the Building Blocks of the Web
Activity = Remixing a site OR “Face” your challenge (contributed by Helen Lee) - Learning Objective = Remixing HTML/CSS
Activity = Superheroes of the Open Web OR Holiday Hack
It would be interesting to try to get each activity to speak to a different age group. I hesitate to assign age ranges to activities though because I know I’m into plenty of things that are definitely not for my age group. It would also be interesting to try and have two examples of online activities for each level and two examples of offline activities so that facilitators have something fun to do regardless of whether or not they can access the Web.