Monthly Archives: March 2012

What are we working on? HTML5 power tools. Webmaker branding. Youth teaching youth. StoryThing. Summer Code Party.

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Last week's Mozilla Popcorn learning lab in London

Mozilla Webmaker weekly update for Mar 29, 2012

Audrey Watters: tools for teaching the web to the world

Each week, great guest speakers join our Mozilla Webmaker community calls for your questions, rabble-rousing and debate.

Audrey Watters is a prolific education technology writer, researcher and “recovering academic.” She recently undertook a research project for Mozilla, aimed at answering:

What’s the best way to teach web-building to anyone? For example, should Mozilla develop a tool to help the world learn HTML5?

Designing a “Mozilla Webmaker” brand

Have a look at Chris Appleton‘s early Mozilla “webmaker” branding concepts. These will inform the design our upcoming Webmaker web site, plus get us thinking about the overarching brand promise and story. Chris is looking for feedback around questions like:

  • Does this align with our motivations and what we’re working towards?
  • Are these the pillars that best tell our story? What’s missing? 
  • How do you express these concepts in your own work? Share examples!

Youth teaching youth the web

Meet Zainab, a new Mozilla Youth Ambassador. Zainab is a high school sophomore in New York, where she serves on the school’s MOUSE Squad — a student-led tech support team that’s building digital literacy skills.

Zainab’s understanding of the web began was transformed through a Hackasaurus workshop led by Hive Learning Network in New York. Now, as a Mozilla Youth Ambassador, she’ll be taking what she’s learned to facilitate Hack Jams with her peers at after-school programs.

“StoryThing:” learn HTML by instantly webifying anything


What is StoryThing? It’s a new webmaking prototype designed to take something you care about — like a story or blog post you wrote — and instantly “webify” it. All through a simple ‘learn as you create’ text editing tool and instructional overlay that teaches you how to mark up text in an easy to understand two column interface.

Get ready for Mozilla’s Summer Code Party

We’ve been telling you about our plans for a big summer campaign — and now it has a name: the Mozilla Summer Code Party.

Next week…

Add your agenda items here. On deck so far:

  • Guest Speakers: Design for America
  • Cole Gillespie’s new “Call Me demo:” Twilio + Mozilla Popcorn
  • Popcorn Learning Lab in London Report Back (Brett Gaylor)
  • New Popcorn-powered “collusion browsing session” demo (Atul)
  • Localization: How do we do it better?

Can Mozilla make tools that teach the web to the world?

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Each week, mind-blowing guest speakers join our Mozilla Webmaker Community calls for your questions, rabble-rousing and debate.

Audrey Watters is a prolific education technology writer, researcher and “recovering academic.” She recently kicked off a fascinating research project for Mozilla, aimed at answering:

What’s the best way to teach web-building to anyone? For example, should Mozilla develop a tool to help the world learn HTML5?

Audrey has been asking educators and ed tech developers what they think Mozilla’s role should be, at an educational, philosophical and technological level.

Without exception, everyone I talked to identified a dire need to improve web literacy. Whether it was elementary school teachers, college professors, hobbyists or entrepreneurs, everyone talked about a huge gap in our collective knowledge base around how the web works…. There’s still this sense of the internet as a series of tubes, and the web as a series of documents you can deliver through those tubes. –Audrey Watters

Some key questions and takeaways from the discussion:

  • Learners want to solve real problems and make real stuff. Not feel like beginners/outsiders.
  • There’s a lot of resistance to building a tool that’s de-contextualized or separate from the “real” web.
  • Learners need to make something quickly. With a takeaway that’s personally meaningful to them.

So…

  • What do we really need to build? A community or a curriculum? A product or a process?
  • How can we learn from the successful past examples? Hypercard was arguably one of the most popular, user-oriented entry-level programming tools ever — even though real programmers hated it. Hobbyists and amateurs liked it. The professionals didn’t.

Mozilla’s David Ascher dug into the Hypercard analogy:

What made Hypercard powerful is that normal people were able to use it build really useful things…. The holy grail is something that doesn’t require people to learn the entire stack that “real developers” use, but at the same time, has real utility on a day to day basis. –David Ascher

MIT's "Scratch"

Mark Surman tried to tease out the balance of giving learners access to “real” code — not toys — while still lowering the barriers to entry, providing scaffolding, or useful constraints that help you to make something meaningful quickly:

“The difference between then and today is: we now have a nearly universal platform people can use to consume, create and build: the web. We want to make tools that help people make stuff on the web. They may be scaffolded or supported, but what comes out is still the web.

This is the difference between what we’re trying to build versus Hypercard, Scratch, etc. There may be constraints that make it easier, but what comes out is still “real” code, the real web. –Mark Surman

Stay tuned for some further upcoming fireside chats with Audrey. In the mean time:

What are we working on? Connected Learning. Meet the Webmakers. Etherpop.

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Mozilla Webmaker weekly update for Mar 22, 2012

Guest speaker: Mimi Ito on connected learning and webmaking

Each week in our Webmaker Community calls, we’re inviting guest speakers to blow our minds. This week it was Mimi Ito, researcher, author, and one of the world’s leading thinkers in how youth learn and express themselves through technology. Mimi talked about “connected learning” as a 21st model for education, and how it might inform some of Mozilla’s own work in education and webmaking.

New video series: meet the webmakers

“We are going to get to develop new technology that’s never been seen before.”

As we gear up for the launch of our new brand and web site, we’re working with the good folks at Thought Bubble — the animators behind “the Mozilla Story” — to produce a series of short videos starring the four major communities we serve:

  • youth
  • journalists
  • film-makers
  • educators

Here’s a sneak preview of some of the video they shot with youth last week in the Mozilla Toronto office.

Girls Learning code: what did we learn? How do we scale up?

Last week we told you about the “Girls Learning Code” camp in the Mozilla Toronto office. Here’s a report-back on what they made and what we learned from the process. There’s huge interest in bringing the camp back this summer — stay tuned for more. In the mean time, here’s some helpful resources:

Each team made their own web site using Mozilla Hackasaurus and others tools:

Team Action Script: Second Chance

 

Team C Sharp: Leave Animals Alone (L.A.A.)

 

Team Java: Sexual Rights Association

 

Team Onyx: MIVIJ International

 

Team Opal: Community Development

 Etherpad + Mozilla Popcorn = Etherpop

What if you could edit and annotate video as easily as editing text in an etherpad? Kate Hudson, creator of the awesome Popcorn Shakespeare demo, is exploring how to do just that with her new “EtherPop” demo. Paste in any video URL and add annotations and notes using Etherpad. Several people can collaborate simultaneously, too. Cool huh?

Kate is coming on board as an intern to work at Mozilla this summer — beginning April 1. So look for more great Popcorn work to come.

Mozilla Hackasaurus learning challenges + new Mozilla Badges

These new challenges and quests are designed to:

They’re all in early stages and seeking feedback. Let Laura know what you think.

Hackasaurus in action: Chicago

This video from Chicago’s Malcolm Williams at a mini hack-jam is a great example of Hackasaurus in action. Malcolm is a gamifcation expert and has an encyclopedic knowledge of superheroes. We especially like how he:

  • Uses a simple metaphor to explain how the Goggles work.
  • Adds drama and a simple superhero flair to the experience.
  • Shows off his own interest-driven hack.

Mozilla Learning Group: this is how we do

We’re constantly trying to get better at publicly roadmapping our work.  Here’s a post and wiki from Mozilla’s Erin Knight on…

What should every techie know about education?

Planet Mozilla needs humans?

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How do we grok the Planet Mozilla firehose? Mozilla community member and open journalism expert Phillip Smith has written three extremely thoughtful posts that are must-reads for anyone interested in the Planet Mozilla firehose challenge:

What’s the problem?

In a word: growth. As Mozilla’s grown, it’s become increasingly difficult to get a birds-eye view of what everyone’s working on. We need to ensure Mozilla’s openness continues to drive meaningful engagement, instead of drowning ourselves in posts and data we can no longer meaningfully keep up with.

I’ll admit: I no longer read Planet Mozilla. It’s simply way too much stuff.  I find keeping up with the aggregated blog from my own team difficult enough.

Growth has also lead to questions around what is and is not appropriate for Planet Mozilla, which generated a large amount of spirited debate recently. But for me, the firehose problem is the most interesting one. As Phillip puts it, some core questions are:

  • 1) What’s the best way to package and amplify great Mozilla stories?
  • 2) How do we reach new audiences with those stories? In ways that drive participation.
  • 3) How do we showcase everything Mozilla is doing “beyond the browser?” As we go big in new spaces like mobile, apps, privacy and identity, education, etc?

Reporters covering Planet Mozilla as a beat

I’m not sure this problem can be solve by simply tweaking the tech. Maybe we need a dedicated human or humans to help us summarize, filter and storify the best of Planet Mozilla. Essentially: professional reporters who cover Planet Mozilla as a beat. As Phillip puts it:

When I think about Mozilla, I think of a city that is growing….

Like any city, I believe that Mozilla-ville needs a smart, scrappy news organization to help its citizens understand what’s going on around them.

In Superman’s city, Metropolis, that was the Daily Planet. In Mozilla-ville, I think that the job should go to Planet Mozilla.

Some of the most interesting technology news stories are happening right here in our city, Mozilla-ville, so why are we waiting for other news organizations to cover them?

We have the scoops. We have the experts. We have the technology. So what are we waiting for?

Digg Nation: weekly episodes from Planet Digg

Other orgs are already doing it

“If Tumblr were a city of 42 million,” [new Editor Jessica] Bennett said, referring to the number of Tumblr blogs that exist, “I’m trying to figure out how we cover the ideas, themes and people who live in it.”

Storytelling matters. For openness, agility, and collaboration.

But wait — wouldn’t hiring reporters violate Mozilla’s whole DIY spirit? I don’t think so. Phillip captures it well:

“Sources going direct” is both empowering, and limited. Some people are great at public speaking, giving interviews, producing rapid prototypes, writing lengthy essays on governance in newsgroups…

But, as a generalization, most people are not mind-blowingly excellent at telling their own stories. Call it humility, call it being busy, or maybe chalk it up to just not having gotten the hang of “talking out loud” — the important point is that we’re currently missing a lot of the most interesting stories and work in Mozilla because they’re not being told well, or not being told at all because we simply don’t know about them.

Reading and summarizing Planet Mozilla — so you don’t have to?

Here at the Mozilla Foundation we’ve been experimenting with our own firehose problem via these new weekly updates. We sprint and document together in our weekly community calls via etherpad, then have dedicated storytellers turn that grist into more polished update posts that real humans can read.

What if we were to do that for all of Mozilla? Feeding the best work from Planet Mozilla into a multimedia package and digest that gets presented and amplified in Mozilla’s weekly all hands meetings?

What do you think? Has Mozilla-ville has grown large enough — and Planet Mozilla so full of great stories — that we could use a reporter covering it like a beat?