Michelle Levesque recently wrote a post about the importance of play in learning.

We need to change people’s mindsets to make them comfortable fooling around, making things, breaking things, and playing on the web.

I totally agree. This is one of the design goals of the Hackasaurus tools and events, actually—it’s a combination of stylistic touches and emotional design to help people feel that what they’re doing is fun, along with humane functionality that makes experimentation easier, such as infinite undoability.

This is something I feel that Apple has managed to do with their products, too: I see non-technical people like my father who are typically terrified of using their personal computer take joy in installing apps on their iPad and playing with them in a way that they never would have dared to do on their PC. Partly it’s due to concrete features, like the fact that it’s impossible for an app to impair the behavior of another app—but it’s also partly due to stylistic touches, like all the device’s glee-inspiring animations.

It’s ironic that tech-savvy folks like me berate the iPad for its lack of generativity and hackability, yet it manages to orient its users towards a sense of playfulness and empowerment in a way that other tools rarely have.

I recently made The Parable of The Hackasaurus, which is a game-like attempt to make web-hacking easy to learn through a series of simple puzzles in the context of a story.

The parable is really more of a proof-of-concept that combines a bunch of different ideas than an actual attempt at interactive narrative, though. The puzzles don’t actually have anything to do with the story, for instance. But I wanted an excuse to do something fun with the vibrant art that Jessica Klein has made for the project, while also exploring possibilities for the Hack This Game sprint and giving self-directed learners a path to understanding how the Hackasaurus tools work.

If you know HTML and CSS, you’re welcome to remix this and make your own “web hacking puzzle” where the goggles are the controller. Just fork the repository on GitHub and modify index.html and bugs.js as you see fit. Almost all the puzzles, achievements, and hints are data-driven and explained in documentation, so you don’t actually need to know much JavaScript.

For more information on my motivations in creating the parable, check out the experiment’s README. Jess is also thinking about making an interactive comic that teaches web-hacking, which I’m looking forward to.

The URL is a very powerful concept; it represents a universal way to access any resource anywhere in the world. Here’s one of them, as it appears in Firefox 5′s address bar:

The first few letters before the colon are called the protocol, which tells the computer how to interpret the rest of the URL. The http protocol is the most common and specifies a resource on the World Wide Web, while the tel protocol specifies a telephone number, and https specifies a resource on the Web transferred over a secure channel that can’t be eavesdropped. Those are just a few; there’s lots of other ones.

Many user interface designers for browsers believe that most users don’t understand what a protocol is, which is probably accurate. Google Chrome’s solution is to hide the protocol when it’s http, but to display the protocol in all other cases. Firefox is now adopting the same behavior.

There’s a number of things that trouble me about this approach. I’ve already written about the behavioral impacts, whereby user expectations of copy-paste are broken and a confusing mode is introduced. Furthermore, because protocol information is still displayed for any non-http resource, understanding how to read the address bar is (ironically) made more complex.

Aside from those concerns, however, there’s something else I’m worried about. The main argument I’ve heard against exposing protocol information to end-users is that, if we present it, we might as well present all kinds of other information about the TCP connection, CPU registers, and other obscure technical statistics.

Now, I know I’m biased because I’m on the Hackasaurus team and trying to teach people the basics of HTML and CSS, but browsers have historically been very friendly to learning web-making, in part because they keep protocol information in the address bar. My guess is that removing the http:// neither helps nor hinders someone from using the basics of the web—but it definitely makes it harder to learn what hypertext is.

Understanding technology is relative. Someone can know the basics of writing an anchor tag without knowing what TCP/IP is, and it’s still quite empowering, in much the same way that it’s empowering to know how to grill vegetables without necessarily knowing everything about the chemical reactions taking place underneath.

Doing little things in the interface that promote transparency and help people move from being a web-user to a web-maker is important, so long as we don’t make things difficult for the people that just want to be users. I’ve never found my parents or other non-technical users to be confused by the presence of http://, which is part of why I don’t see much gain in removing it—especially given the behavioral shortcomings of this change. Far more exciting to me is the exact opposite approach: designing experiences to help users understand what the URL in their address bar means, and encouraging them to create things on the Web instead of just browse.

I’ve been reading Eli Pariser’s book The Filter Bubble and was fascinated by his description of how data collection companies operate. Independently of that, David Ascher suggested that I add a feature to the Hackasaurus goggles which helps learners understand how cookies and tracking works.

I actually didn’t know a lot about tracking myself, so I whipped up a Firefox add-on called Collusion to help me visualize it better. The results were a little unsettling.

I’ve put a demonstration up at collusion.toolness.org, which takes you through five popular websites and visualizes the data collection companies that track you across them. From there, you can download the add-on if you want to see the tracking visualization of your own browsing behavior evolve in real-time.

Special thanks to the Mozilla Add-on SDK team for making a great foundation to build on. This experiment also gave me a chance to play around with d3.js, which is a fantastic successor to Protovis. And thanks to PrivacyChoice for their excellent tracker list, which I’m sort of using without their permission. I hope that is okay.

I’m also not really a privacy expert, so I’m not sure if everything I say in the demonstration is completely true. If you find any inaccuracies, please let me know.

Finally, if you need the source code, it’s all at github.com/toolness/collusion. I’m particularly interested in seeing better visualizations than the force-directed graph I’m using, which regrettably requires a lot of user interaction to explore and understand.

I've been working on an experimental iteration in the X-Ray Goggles which addresses some problems we observed kids having with the Compose A Replacement (aka “remix”) dialog at the TEDx Kids Brussels 2011 event and other hack jams.

The current remix dialog looks like this when focused on a Facebook sidebar on the New York Times website:

There's a number of problems with this dialog:

• The HTML Source Code column isn't formatted in a way that helps the reader understand much about the structure of a Web page.
• Despite the syntax highlighting provided by Ace, it's very easy for newcomers to struggle with HTML syntax, missing out on more important concepts (and more fun experimentation).
• The What Your Browser Sees column is frequently overlooked by users; as such, it doesn't effectively communicate the idea of a DOM hierarchy, and it also takes up lots of screen space.
• The What You See column doesn't inherit the CSS styling of the page being remixed, which is very confusing.

The Easy Remix Dialog is an attempt to resolve the above issues, inspired by the interfaces of tools like Scratch and Yahoo Pipes. Here's what the new design looks like:

You can see it in action in the following silent screencast.

The first five Hackasaurus hack jams taught us a lot. Here are a few lessons we learned from them.

1. Know How Much Freedom You Have.

   At our hack jams in the New York Public Library, we discovered that their publicly-accessible Windows XP machines were so locked-down that we were unable to run Firefox or any other programs off a USB stick. Our prototype Web X-Ray Goggles don’t currently work with the built-in Internet Explorer 8, so we weren’t able to use them. Even more distressing was that we couldn’t even show kids the power of View Source, because that feature was actually disabled on the library’s computers.

   This gets to the heart of what Jonathan Zittrain has described as Freedom At The Endpoints, because such a thoroughly locked-down computer—particularly one with an aging browser that doesn’t support many of the Web’s greatest benefits—has relatively little generative potential.

   We still need to figure out how to make it accessible for people to experience the full awesomeness of the Web in public spaces, but in the meantime, we’ve learned to bring our own computers for kids to use when necessary.

2. Digital Natives Know Less Than You Think.

   When I was a kid, computers were all the rage at schools around the country. Throughout elementary and middle school, my classmates and I were taught Logo, BASIC, HyperCard, touch typing, and more.

   These days, however, kids are apparently assumed by the school system to be “Digital Natives” and not in need of any technology education: as a result, many of the kids in our hack jams had never done any programming in their life, and few of them knew how to touch type. Aside from being a distressing discovery, this meant that we had to “calibrate” the jams to the experience level of our students. It varied a lot from one jam to another, since we couldn’t rely on the school system to give them a firm grounding in basic computer use.

3. Engage Your Audience’s Interests.

   One of the broad goals of Hackasaurus is to help kids see themselves as hackers—especially girls and minorities who are traditionally under-represented in technical communities.

   The first four hack jams we did in New York City and Chicago were promoted as Hackasaurus events: the main reason to attend was to learn how to “hack the Web”. Unsurprisingly, we only got kids who self-identified as potential hackers, which meant that nearly everyone who showed up was male.

   In contrast, the fifth hack jam, held in San Francisco at the Bay Area Video Coalition, was actually a Web Made Movies Workshop where Ben Moskowitz decided to deploy the Hackasaurus tools. This was a perfect pairing, as understanding the basics of HTML and how the Web works are closely related to making movies with it.

   Since the event was promoted as a filmmaking workshop, however, we didn’t get kids who self-identified as potential hackers. They picked up hacking just as quickly as the kids from previous jams, and they enjoyed it just as much; but by teaching them about technical concepts that were directly related to things that they were already passionate about, we were able to make them really excited about the Open Web. Aside from attracting a more diverse group of kids, we were also able to engage them more directly.

   So, future Hackasaurus hack jams might not even be promoted as such. Right now we’re thinking about developing many different “genres” of jams that engage kids on non-technical issues that they’re already excited about. If you have any suggestions, we’d love to hear them!