MozillianistToward Webmaker Custom Elements, Web Components
I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about how Webmaker can take advantage of the work being done on Web Components and Custom Elements. I tasked Pomax with doing some research and prototyping, and the results have been encouraging. I wanted to say something about my current thinking and what we might do. One of the successes we had with Popcorn.js was that it became really easy to create plugins that could take care of the complexities of working with third-party APIs and showing web...
Planet Webmaker
Web Literacy Standard: a modest proposal (#weblitstd)
Over the last couple of months we at Mozilla have been hosting community calls in an attempt to come to a consensus around a new, open learning standard for Web Literacy. This is a contested area, for many of the reasons I point out in my yet-to-be-published paper on different types of ambiguity. The reasons for us wanting to create a ‘standard’ for Web Literacy are outlined in this meta-post back in February. Since then we’ve had wide-ranging discussions, both on our weekly calls and on the...
OpenNews: Code Sprints in 2013
Back at the Hacks/Hackers Media Party in Buenos Aires, I announced the creation of Code Sprints—funding opportunities to build open-sourced tools for journalism. We used Code Sprints to fund a collaboration between WNYC in New York and KPCC in Southern California to build a parser for election night XML data that ended up used on well over 100 sites—it was a great collaboration to kick off the Code Sprint concept. Originally, Code Sprints were designed to work like the XML parser project:...
Making, Curating and Sharing Resources
Last year I started the /Teach wiki and filled it with a bunch of links out to resources, curriculum, descriptions and other useful tidbits of content designed to support the teaching of digital literacies and spread all over the web. The wiki became my own personal dumping ground to save resources authored by the budding Webmaker community. There were lots of different types of things – presentations, prototypes, blogposts and more – but they all had one thing in common. They were resources...
DML Research Hub | Linking Recognition, Certification & Accreditation to Anytime, Anywhere Learning
Whitney Burke shared a conversation with Erin Knight, Mozilla Senior Director of Learning & Badges: Open Badges 1.0 has been described as a “critical piece of the connected learning ecosystem.” How does badging fit into this model if the ecosystem itself is still evolving? Open Badges enable you to connect different types of learning to each other. The whole point of connected learning by definition — by the name itself –- is to find a way to connect things. To do that, we need something...
TLDR: Let’s teach the web. Webmaker vs. Bowie. Popcorn + the Pope. Localization for humans.
TLDR = your weekly summary of what’s up with Mozilla Webmaker. Notes from Tuesday’s Webmaker community call Join the next one stay in touch | past updates like this one Let’s teach the web Introducing webmaker.org/teach. We’ve got great new kits, teaching guides and projects for teaching digital literacy and webmaking. This 90-second presentation tells the story: Popcorn version You Tube version Get involved: JOIN. Sign up for updates on new teaching resources, events, and our big...
Watching people use Media Clips
I wrote previously about our work to add Media Clips to Popcorn Maker. Since then we’ve watched as people have started to make things with it, from Ron Swanson dancing to any song to the International Space Station orbiting Earth, which has been a lot of fun. One project Brett showed me today was done by BBG as a procedural storytelling experiment using a SoundCloud audio monologue about the election of the new Pope. It’s a really good example of how one can take a bunch of source media...
The 12 coolest things you saw on the web this week
Mozilla Webmaker is all about helping people make amazing things on the web. So what’s the most amazing thing you saw on the web this week? Here’s this week’s hotlist, as contributed by the Webmaker community in our community call. Got more? Let us know… On our “memes” newsgroup. memes [at] mozillafoundation [dot] org At the start of each weekly Mozilla Webmaker call. As comments to this post. So we can include them in next week’s list. Girls in Tech. A nine-year-old girl’s Kickstarter...
What’s Buzzing? DML 2013 Edition
Here’s a recap of some of our favorite moments and must-see links from DML 2013 (in no special order). Ethan Zuckerman Keynote on How to Teach Digital Civics- Ethan Zuckerman is an American media scholar, blogger, and Internet activist. He … Continue reading →
#teachtheweb
This is re-posted from Michelle Thorne’s blog. Please join us in exploring how we might use Twitter as a Webmaker Mentor marketplace. We’d like to help connect those who need certain skills or expertise with those who have it, so … Continue reading →
OpenSource.com | Student conference experiments with Open Badges
Makers and researchers from the University of Michigan School of Information shared these reflections on badges being used around in-person conferences: Online, we know what open education looks like: P2PU, MOOC, Coursera, MITx—pick your favorite acronym. But, what does open education look like in person, and how do we capture its value in transferable artifacts with lasting impact? At the University of Michigan School of Information, a group of students has been experimenting with leading...
University College London | Using Open Badges to reward achievements in a university context
Ele Cooper from UCL shared these reflections on badges being designed to be useful in university contexts: Last week I attended an event organised by E-Learning Environments (ELE) to learn about Mozilla’s Open Badges scheme. From the diversity of the event’s participants, who ranged from Students’ Union and UCL Volunteering representatives to academics, it was clear that there’s a widespread awareness of the need for UCL to recognise the types of student achievements that don’t fall into...
Webmaker TLDR Update 03.25.13
Re-posted from OpenMatt.org. TLDR = quick summary of what’s up with Mozilla Webmaker this week. Notes from Tuesday’s Webmaker community call Join the next one stay in touch | past updates Open Badges 1.0: coverage, reaction and new demos The Mozilla blog post tells the story. Plus … Continue reading →
Badge pathways: part 1, the paraquel
A few weeks ago I posted this image and stated that I would be following up with several posts about badge pathways. In particular, how they fit into our work at Mozilla along several different lines: the web literacy standard, webmaker, and open badges. Straightforward, yes? Badge system design, white papers & badge pathways Sort of. This is the paraquel (!) post coming before the quel itself. I have an inkling that there’s a prequel yet to be created because quite some time ago I started...
Diving deeper into custom elements
Let's talk about web components some more, shall we? [...]
Webmaker TLDR: moar Badges 1.0. Popcorn for your webcam. Six-word memoirs. #teachtheweb
TLDR = quick summary of what’s up with Mozilla Webmaker this week. Notes from Tuesday’s Webmaker community call Join the next one stay in touch | past updates Open Badges 1.0: coverage, reaction and new demos The Mozilla blog post tells the story. Plus check out: Erin Knight’s demo presentation. In Popcorn and You Tube Press coverage of the 1.0 launch so far List of new features and improvements in 1.0 Re-designed web site. Earn a badge, issue badges, check out who else is issuing badges....
Hacktivity Kits != Event Agenda, but they sure are close…
In an ongoing effort to make Hacktivity Kits as useful as possible, I thought I would explain (quickly) what they are and how to use them. They are designed to be the “meaty” part of any Webmaker event. The kits contain the Big Picture, an overview with learning objectives and stuff about how you might assess someones learning. And they contain “Hacktivities“, which are learning activities designed to get your learners learning the things included in the Big Picture. They also have background...
MentorMob | Digital Media & Learning Gets Weird on St. Pat’s Day
Charles Perry shared the following reflections from the Digital Media & Learning conference: And by getting weird I mean going legit. Mozilla’s Open Badges initiative is at heart about getting educators and technologists to design a trustworthy method of recognizing every kind of learning that’s so compelling kids can’t help developing new skills and policy makers can’t help but take notice. And because badges are a populist, bottom-up method of achieving meaningful education reform (as...
Making is Learning (Chad Sansing)
I recently made this video and wanted to make sure and share the Popcornified version :)
A few words about Web Components, and why I'm totally in love.
For the past week I've been looking at a new, additional take on HTML that is being thought up by a large group of people who think that the web can be further improved. People from Apple, Mozilla, Google, but also general public voices are pitching in to come up with a standard for what they call "web components". Let me come right out and say I think that what they're doing is going to change how we think about web pages, in a good way. I love what they're working on, and with this post (and...
Brooklyn Explorers: Follow-Up Training at Partnership for After School Education (PASE)
This post was written by Julia Vallera, an artist and educator working with Hive NYC on Brooklyn Explorers and other youth-serving projects. This year, Hive NYC is partnering with PASE (Partnership for After School Education) to add a Mozilla Webmaker … Continue reading →
#teachtheweb
#teachtheweb We’d like to try an experiment in a distributed “marketplace” for webmaking. The idea is simple: use the hashtag #teachtheweb to ask for and offer help. Asking for Help It works like this: Say you’d like to organize a webmaking in your city, Athens. You’ve got a venue, you’ve got some learners, but you’re missing someone who can help you teach Javascript. You can use the #teachtheweb hashtag to ask for help: “I’m looking for someone to help teach Javascript at a webmaking...
This week’s Webmaker Hotlist: kung fu clowns! Panic jazzcats! Physics!
Mozilla Webmaker is all about helping people make amazing things on the web. So… What’s the most amazing thing *you* saw on the web last week? Here’s this week’s “Webmaker Hotlist,” as lovingly brainstormed by our community each week in our Webmaker community call. Let us know the most amazing thing *you* see on the web each week: On our new “memes” newsgroup. Send your coolest memes and amazing stuff to memes [at] mozillafoundation [dot] org At the start of each weekly Mozilla Webmaker call....
Introducing Open Badges 1.0
Get recognition for learning that happens anywhere. Share it on the places that matter. Today we’re extremely proud to release Mozilla Open Badges 1.0, an exciting new online standard to recognize and verify learning. Open Badges makes it easy to… earn badges for skills you learn online and offline give recognition for things you teach show your badges in the places that matter. This is a project we’ve been developing for the past two years, in partnership with the MacArthur Foundation. Why is...
Introducing Open Badges 1.0
This is re-posted from the Mozilla blog. Get recognition for learning that happens anywhere. Share it on the places that matter. Today we’re extremely proud to release Mozilla Open Badges 1.0, an exciting new online standard to recognize and verify … Continue reading →
Introducing Open Badges 1.0
Cross-posted from the Mozilla blog Get recognition for learning that happens anywhere. Share it on the places that matter. Today we’re extremely proud to release Mozilla Open Badges 1.0, an exciting new online standard to recognize and verify learning. Open Badges makes it easy to… earn badges for skills you learn online and offline give recognition for things you teach show your badges in the places that matter. This is a project we’ve been developing for the past two years, in partnership...
Open Badges 1.0 Release: Features & Functionality
The Open Badges team has been hard at work to release version 1.0 of our open source software. Changes you’ll see (drumroll please) starting this week include: A new Backpack user experience. Badge earners who send their badges to their Backpacks are being greeted by a fresh interface and an enhanced user experience. We’ve made creating personally meaningful collections more intuitive and badges more descriptively displayed. This allows earners to easily see key pieces of badge information...
Open Badges reaches v1.0!
TL;DR version: Mozilla’s launching v1.0 of the Open Badges Infrastructure at the DML Conference 2013 today. There’s a newly designed website and badge backpack. I’m at the DML Conference 2013 this week where, I’m delighted to say, Mozilla is launching version 1.0 of the Open Badges Infrastructure (OBI). Given how long I’ve been banging on about badges this may seem surprising, but it just goes to show the extent to which Mozilla works in the open with the community! You should check out the...
Brooklyn Explorers: MOUSE Corps Students as Webmaker Mentors
This is re-posted from the MOUSE Corps blog. This spring, a small team of MOUSE Corps students will act as Hive NYC Webmaking Mentors for middle school students participating in the PASE Brooklyn Explorers program. Omar A., Omar N., Edvinas … Continue reading →
Just an Update
Oh Snap, it's been a month!? My, oh my how the time flies. I won't make excuses for myself, I'll just tell you what's going on in my world. There's a lot of stuff, and there's no way I can cover all of it in my scribble of reflections, so if you are looking for more information, comment or contact me! Train the Trainer Back in January, we tested a couple of train the trainer related things, which I wrote about in my East Coast Tour Reflections. This month we took another large step in the...
Issuer Insignias Arrive
Looking to let your web visitors know that you or your organization issue Open Badges? We’ve got good news for you. New insignias for issuers are available and can be easily displayed to your communities: Download your preferred image; Decide where you want to place it on your website and add it to your site’s front end; Link the image to http://openbadges.org so that interested people can learn about the ecosystem you’re a part of; Ensure that it’s possible for people to easily find...
Freeformers and Mozilla Jam
Recently, I spent a couple of days in the UK with some of the brightest members of Freeformers — Tom, Max, Josh, and Lewie . Our goal was to collaborate on an exploratory prototype tool that encompassed some Webmaker design and ideology, and helped Freeformers achieve higher learning efficacy in their “Tech Jams” — sessions designed for the curious and inexperienced to awaken the instantly-capable web hacker within. From Freeformers’ teaching experience, we identified a sore spot for many...
Thinking through the Web Literacy standard arc.
TL;DR version: Mozilla is working on a new, open learning standard for Web Literacy. We’ve got weekly community calls and a blog to help us come to a consensus on what we need and what such a standard will look like. Our first target is the Mozilla Festival in October where we hope to have organisations that have aligned with the standard, as well as some Mozilla-devised learning activities, assessments, widgets, pathways and badges available. Working in a distributed way at Mozilla is an...
Open Badges launch + Web literacy badges underway
Mozilla Open Badges: the launch approaches Good news, everyone! Mozilla is preparing to launch Open Badges 1.0 at the DML Conference in Chicago next week. We’ve been operating in public beta since April of 2012. During the intervening time our team has spoken at numerous conferences, written a badge validation paper, and grown to include additional brilliant team members who are sprinting to bring it to the first finish line. Because a system is an evolutionary process, we don’t really consider...
Writing a good bug
It’s a bit of a cliche (as google image search show us) but one of the best ways to get contributing to an Open Source (OS) project is to file a bug. It can occasionally seem a pretty silly and frustrating thing but as well as allowing you to tell people that something is broken or a new thing you would like the project to do it also introduces yourself to the existing community, project managers and developers. Filing a bug can seem a little daunting, especially if the developers are people...
Webmaker TLDR Update 03.08.08
Re-posted from OpenMatt.org. TLDR = quick summary of what’s up with Mozilla Webmaker this week, focused on mentors and builders. New explainer video: creating an open “Web Literacy Standard” Learn more. All the web literacy standard links you need are … Continue reading →