Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

6.14.10 | Do you love inventing, experimenting or building things online? Are you passionate about keeping the Internet open and free? A creative soul who cares about the place where learning, the web and creative freedom intersect?

Join Mozilla for the first annual Drumbeat Festival Nov. 4 - 5 in Barcelona, Spain.

The festival will highlight the ideas, people and projects that are shaping the future of learning. Here are a few examples (view more at drumbeat.org/projects):

1. A secure “data backpack” where students control their own learning materials and credentials
2. Libraries transformed into digital garages where kids learn to make, do and create with an agile, hacker attitude
3. Massively scaled apprenticeship, where people learn by diving into the world of open-source master craftspeople
4. Hackerspaces where people teach each other about everything from robots to lasers to knitting
5. Alternative accreditation models based on web and open-source peer review techniques

Your participation is encouraged. Organizers hope to gather people together working on ideas like these in order to be able to eventually replicate them on a large scale. 

Other specific areas of interest include: data portability; open educational resources; secure, decentralized storage in the cloud; open-content licenses; open, user-controlled online identity; and informal learning opportunities.

The festival is organized in partnership with Creative Commons, The MacArthur Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Teachers and learners are invited, as well as web developers, artists, tech companies, and experts in online identity, web standards and the open web.

You can get involved now by working on one of the projects already underway at the Drumbeat site, or start your own. These projects work to strengthen the open web by tapping into the potential of everyday Internet users.

Learn more about the Drumbeat movement and sign up to stay tuned for updates on the festival here.