Free speech isn’t only about people having the right to speak freely. As important as it is to be able to speak our minds freely, it is equally important that people are able to have free access to information and to be able to explore and delve into topics as they need to and are inspired to.
In last week’s newsletter, we talked about Mozilla’s recent announcement that they would start transitioning the Firefox web browser to require secure connections to web sites. While this does present challenges in terms of raising the barrier to publishing web sites (which we’ll talk about next week), this is a positive step forward. This new requirement will help to protect your privacy while you browse the web and make the web more secure from hackers.
Hackers, governments, and the myriad of other institutions who attempt to restrict freedom of speech aren’t the only threat to the freedom of information. Often, we’re our own worst enemies. As people, we have a tendency to seek out the familiar. We become comfortable and less curious. Even with the endless knowledge available to us on the web, we tend to visit just a couple web sites consistently. Finding new websites to alleviate the Facebook boredom often seems difficult. (hint: try stumbleupon.com).
While writing our Coding with JavaScript For Dummies and JavaScript for Kids books, and, in fact, in everything we do, we work to keep our curiosity alive. We attempt to hone our minds to think like children; with no preconceived notions about what programming is, what work is, and what learning is. This is not all that easy, especially for people who have years or decades of history with the web and with programming. But we feel this is essential in creating a new world of educational content and all the possibilities that invokes.
Maintaining curiosity is key to creativity and also to learning. Seeking out new things and exploring new ideas that are outside of our daily experience not only widens our world view and general perception, but can also provide new insights into the things that we see and deal with daily. Before television and the web became the norm, traveling circuses, curiosity museums, and sideshows provided people with an occasional dose of wonder. Today, we have the universe of knowledge at our fingertips, but we often stick with what’s familiar. We read the new sites that we agree with and scroll the Facebook feeds of people we know.
Understanding how to publish to the world wide web (not just to our ‘friends’) is empowering. Someone with the ability to create web sites and mobile apps is able to compete on equal footing with major publishers. This is revolutionary! The obstacle that people face is that not enough people have these technical skills; and they don’t know how to start gaining them, or even understand why they need them.
People need a carnival barker, or a curator, to guide them through unfamiliar territory. We seek to become that advocate for technical skills and eventually for skills of every kind. Through our work, we want to encourage people to keep exploring and challenging themselves. We seek to expose people to new skills and new ways of thinking about those skills. And to do that, we need to pique your curiosity and ours too!
“My favorite words are possibilities, opportunities and curiosity. I think if you are curious, you create opportunities, and then if you open the doors, you create possibilities.” – Mario Testino