Internet Health Basics | Openness Activity

• Preparation

  Review each step of the lesson and try all of the activities yourself to see how they work.

  Print or otherwise share the storyboarding templates you need for your learners.

  Explore the Open Innovation Toolkit from Mozilla's Open Innovation team. Pay special attention to the following methods adapted for the steps below:

  • Interviewing 101.
  • How might we?
  • Storyboarding.

• Introduction

  5 minutes

  In this lesson learners will practice openness to better understand how a healthy Internet helps everyone create and share new work online. They will each:

  1. Brainstorm ideas for a product or service for your peers.
  2. Pick an idea to work on for the lesson.
  3. Interview a potential user to get feedback on your idea.
  4. Ask yourselves, “How might we…?”, questions about ways to build the product or service.
  5. Create storyboards that show how a user might experience a product or service.

  Welcome your learners and begin explaining the lesson by saying something like this:

  A healthy Internet is open, so that together, we can innovate. People who want to change the world should be able to build products and understand different points of view through open source code and idea sharing. Copyright and patent laws should be reformed so that in this digital age, they foster collaboration and economic opportunity.

  When we work open we share our process and products with people so they can learn from them and improve them. When we practice openness, we try to share new ideas and products that will help people move forward together.

  Working open means we share what we do and how we do it as we go and we keep the things we make able to be changed, improvemed, or remixed by our users.

  A healthy Internet values openness because people from diverse backgrounds can share in the opportunity to change the world through open source code and idea sharing.

  On an unhealthy Internet, laws and locks restrict creativity and innovation - in ways that go far beyond helping individual artists and inventors succeed, and on balance hurt openness for future creators.

  Today we are going to imagine new products or services we might make and share with our peers. Think of apps, games, tools, websites, and anything else you’re passionate about like fashion or food. Our first step will be to brainstorm a bunch of ideas and then to pick one to focus on for the rest of the activity. We're going to practice oppeness by sharing our ideas for innovations with each other.

  Let’s go!

• Offline Activity, Round 1

  50 minutes

  This sequence of activities is adapted from the Open innovation Toolkit made by the Mozilla's Open Innovation team.

  Pass out paper and the storyboarding template to your learners. Explain that you’ll guide them through each step today and give them frequent reminders about how much time is left.

  You can use this example slidedeck or .pdf or one like it to help everyone keep track of their time and tasks.

  Brainstorm (5 minutes)

  Invite learners to brainstorm as many inventions or innovations they can think of in 5 minutes. Make sure students take this opportunity to brainstorm individually. Remind them that they can think of new apps, books, games, movies, or shoes - anything that matters to them and their peers. They should brainstorm on the paper you provided.

  Be sure to adapt this step and all written steps for learners who experience difficulty expressing themselves fully through writing.

  The big idea is to come up with ideas for innovations or inventions that learners and their peers might use.

  A useful frame or stem to share might be something like,

  “I want to make new kind of __________ that does __________.”

  After 5 minutes, ask learners to take a break from the brainstorming and to get ready to pick an idea.

  Pick an idea (5 minutes)

  Next, ask learners to identify their best ideas. Ask them which ideas are likely to attract attention from their peers. Which ideas seem most usable? Most innovative or interesting? Easiest to use in real life?

  Encourage learners to find their top 2-3 ideas and then to pick the one they like the most to work on for the rest of the lesson. Ask learners to circle or otherwise mark their best ideas on their paper.

  Next, learners will interview a peer about their innovative product.

  Interview a peer (10 minutes)

  Explain that interviewing is a form of gathering insights and feedback about a product. By interviewing a potential user, you can see what matters most to them about your idea and then build your product with that in mind.

  Next, pair students in an equitable way. Project or otherwise share these interview prompts in an easily accessible and readable way for your learners. Have each partner interview the other about their product and record their answers for use in the rest of the lesson.

  The prompts are included in the example slidedeck for this activity, as well.

  Interview Prompts

  1. Share your idea. “I want to make a new kind of _________ that does __________.”
  2. Ask, “How might you use something like that in your life?”
  Ask, “What would make it easy or attractive to use a product or service like that in your life?”

  Be sure to adapt this step and help students who experience difficulty with listening or writing to record their peers’ answers.

  Switch partners halfway through this step so everybody gets to interview a peer.

  Ask “How might we?” (10 minutes)

  In this step, ask learners to review the feedback they got during their interviews.

  With that feedback in mind, learners should ask themselves, “How might I make my product better or easier or more attractive for my peers?”

  Learners should use this time to come up with as many answers to that question as possible. They’ll use their answers to imagine and storyboard their user’s experience in the next step.

  Have learners record their answers on paper. Pass out extra paper as needed. Help learners who experience difficulty writing to complete this step successfully.

  Storyboard the user experience (10 minutes)

  After that, pass out the storyboarding template. Learners should create a small comic or series of written descriptions showing how a user might interact with their innovative product or service.

  Stick figures or words are fine. Help all students capture their ideas in other ways if they struggle with either writing or drawing. Pictures and descriptions can show the product or service itself or show someone interacting with it.

  The big idea is to describe or show how someone would interact with and use an innovative product.

  Give learners 10 minutes to sketch or describe their user’s experience with the storyboarding template. Ask them also to complete the prompt for sharing at the bottom.

  Share (10 minutes)

  Invite learners to share a quick summary of their innovation using the completed prompts at the bottom of their storyboarding templates. You or other learners can share ideas for learners who experience difficult speaking in front of large groups. Also, no one should be coerced to shared.

• Offline Activity, Round 2

  10 minutes

  Next, ask learners to imagine your learning space as an "open world." Ask them to imagine a world in which they could build off of all the innovative ideas they heard their peers share. Use prompts like these to facilitate a brief discussion about ewhat that world might be like:

  • How might you combine your idea with another one you just heard to make something even better?
  • After hearing your peers ideas, how might you improve your own?
  • Do you have an ecouraging, "Yes, and...," statement for someone else - a positive statement about how a peer could build on their innovation and improve it? ("Yes, and your machine could make the dessert while it flies to my house to deliver it!")
  • How might you collaborate with your peers to make your innovation real?
  • How did hearing all of your peers' ideas help you with yours? How does openness help us innovate?

• Reflection & Assessment

  5 minutes

  End the lesson with a brief, reflective discussion of how open innovation connects to Internet health. You can record learners’ responses for the purposes of assessment, but be sure to do so in an equitable way that doesn’t disadvantage one learner or another because of your choice of medium. You might use prompts like these or create your own:

  • In your own words, can you describe what open innovation means for the people? How does it benefit us to know about and adapt the innovations that other people make?
  • What products and services did your peers share that you would definitely buy, use, or adapt for yourself?
  • In your own words, can you explain how one of your peer’s open innovations might improve your life?
  • What design methods seemed easiest to use today? Which seemed more difficult? Why?
  • What else do you want to design and build for the web to share your innovations with the world?

  Learn more about open innovation with the Internet Health Report!

  Next activity→Learn more about Internet health with Mozilla!