Category Archives: Mozilla

Introducing blog.webmaker.org: curating the Webmaker story

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TLDR version of this post:

  • We’re getting ready to launch a new curated blog for the Webmaker project at blog.webmaker.org.
  • The goal: tell the high-level Webmaker story in a crisp way, highlighting community and ways to get involved. In a more curated, less firehose-y way.
  • The Webmaker blog will pull from the best of our weekly community calls and your Planet Webmaker posts, distilled into a shorter, more curated form.
  • If you have ideas on how to make the new blog better, please share your feedback as comments here — or file a bug here.

The Webmaker blog

What’s the GOAL?

Tell the Webmaker story in a crisp, curated and engaging way. Through 3 – 5 great posts each week. Don’t make people read too much — help them grok the high level story fast.

Key audiences

Key audiences for the blog over the next 6 months:

  • Mentors. Techies, educators, teachers, parents, youth interested in teaching and helping people make stuff. Especially digital literacy and webmaking.
  • Maker Party participants. People participating in Maker Party 2013. Partners, hosts, the high-level story. Celebrating diverse community around the world.
  • Allies. Organizations and supporters in the same big tent as us.
  • Lurkers. Casual and curious. Interested in what we’re doing — but not necessarily invested enough yet to sign up or dive in.
  • Press — Not so much. blog.mozilla.org is the primary channel for us to reach press.

STRATEGY

  • Highly curated. This is the drinking fountain, not the firehose. Planet Webmaker is where we write and post in a high-volume, wide open way about all things Webmaker. blog.webmaker.org will link to and pull from the those posts in a more synthesized form.
  • Diversity of voices. The posts need to reflect a *community* of diverse people — not just one or two regular authors. Constantly celebrate and give voice to community. Make community the stars.
  • Focused on ways to get involved. Ensure everything comes with great calls to action and easy ways to participate. That’s our secret sauce — an open story shaped by everyone.

blog-i-verse 2.001

CONTEXT

Where else do we blog right now?

  1. blog.mozilla.org. Perrier. High-level press announcements. Just the really, really big stuff, alongside other Mozilla-wide announcements.
  2. blog.webmaker.org (new). Drinking fountain. Best way to grok the Webmaker story.
  3. Planet Webmaker. Firehose. Aggregated blog of the people making Webmaker. Includes everything under the Webmaker sun.

plus also:

  • explorecreateshare.org. Focused on Hive NYC — but much of this content is relevant to Webmaker mentors as well. As a test-bed, source of stories and case studies, seeding webmaking networks around the world, etc. We want to re-purporse this content on blog.webmaker.org for a broad Webmaker audience.

KEY CATEGORIES

What are the key meta-stories we’ll be focusing on from now to October?

  1. Teaching the web — stories and content relevant for mentors and educators. Digital literacy, broadly defined. Learning through making. Building our global network.
  2. Maker Party 2013 – the high level campaign story. News, community, event highlights. Rolling into MozFest.
  3. Case studies — stories from the field, highlights of teaching or people using our tools. Humanizing what we’re doing and showing it in action.
  4. Best makes – pulling round-ups of the best things made from our gallery and highlighting them, with a call to remix.
  5. Webmaker product and tools — announcements around Popcorn, Thimble, webmaker.org, etc. Stressing Webmaker as an open source project. Big leaps forward for our tools and web site and major announcements.
  6. Awesome stuff on the web – The coolest creative stuff on the web. Have your mind blown or expanded regularly. Viral bait. Tasty yet smart. Mashable for webmakers.
  7. the Mozilla mission — stuff that explicitly connects what we’re doing to the larger context and mission of Mozilla. Often linked to join / donate.

pop-up

What type of content will we post on blog.webmaker.org?

  • The best of Planet Webmaker. Snippets and curation from what other teams are already blogging. Curated, filtered and linking back to Planet.
  • Community celebration. For Makers, Mentors and Builders.
  • Maker Party and campaign news. In ways that can be served to partners through an RSS feed, etc.
  • The Webmaker Hotlist. Our weekly list of the coolest things collected by the Webmaker community each week.
  • Ways to get involved each week. Constantly highlight CTAs. End every post with “How to get involved.”
  • Weekly updates. The top handful of stories coming out of our community call each week. Packaged as individual posts published over the week.
  • Our best content from the Mozilla all-hands meeting. Presentations, etc.
  • Product releases and news. Around things like product releases, etc.
  • Project planning and strategy. (e.g., roadmaps, board slides, etc)
  • Guest posts. From community and thought leaders.
  • Best makes. Pulled from our gallery. In round-up form, top 10 lists, or with more supporting context and narrative than our gallery provides.
  • Case studies. Highlighting our tools in the field.
  • Maker Party report-backs. Photos, recaps, etc from Maker Party events. (Probably using a simple template like this.)

SAMPLE PUBLISHING SCHEDULE

Aiming for 2 – 5 short, quality posts per week.

FAQ

What’s the difference between the Webmaker blog and Planet Webmaker? 
Planet Webmaker is an aggregated blog, or “blog of blogs.” It has about 25+  different feeds pulling into it. blog.webmaker.org will be much more curated and intentional — less content, more concentrated, more “front of the mullet.”

How do I get my stuff on the Webmaker blog? The Webmaker blog will be managed by the communications team. We want to help tell your story! If you’ve got a high-level story you’d like to tell, here’s how to get something added to blog.webmaker.org:

  1. Post it to Planet Webmaker. If you’re already on Planet Webmaker, we’ll see it look for ways to include it on the Webmaker blog. (If you’re writing regularly about Webmaker stuff, please make sure you feed gets added to Planet Webmaker. Here’s how.)
  2. Share your story on a Webmaker call. Those calls feed directly into our story meetings each week.
  3. Propose a guest post.  We want your ideas and stories! Pitch us one anytime. Easiest way: just go ahead and write it on your own blog, then let us know about it so we can  cross-post or link.
  4. Got a big announcement or story coming up? File a Webmaker comms bug, to let us know and get the ball rolling.
  5. If all else fails… get in touch with @OpenMatt, your friendly blog editor-at-large

What’s Planet Mozilla? How do I get added? Planet Mozilla is an aggregated blog of absolutely EVERYONE working on every aspect of the Mozilla project. It’s the biggest firehose in the Mozilla universe. If you’re working on Mozilla stuff, your feed should be there. Here’s how to get added.

Got more questions? Please add ‘em as comments here.

Meet the movement who will #teachtheweb

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“Geeky grandmas.” Middle-school teachers. Novelists. Programmers who have never taught anyone before. Science museum managers. Former girl scout hacker sailing enthusiasts. Secret superheroes in the “Librarian Justice League.”

I want to teach the web Steve Kirkendall

That’s a small cross-section of the 2300 participants who signed up to participate in Mozilla’s new “Teach the Web” open online course. Here’s a tiny sample of what some of those mentors made to introduce themselves and say hello. Lots more here. Meet the community who will teach the world the web.

Hi, I'm michelle

Mozilla wants us to take the web to the next level by teaching people about [the] web! All I want to say is just follow the people who contribute to what you like. Magic happens. –Vivek

A few of the x MOOC participants adding themselves to a global map

A few of yesterday’s new MOOC participants adding themselves to a global map

Students today enjoy the connectedness of social networking; it is part of their very being. My goal is to bring my instruction into that cloud to teach the content required in ways that inspire online responsibility and ethics in this new, very public world. –Sheri, Middle School Educator and “Geeky Gramma”

Flore

My goal in participating in this MOOC is to shift my paradigm from one of “using” things to one of “creating” things. The power and importance of creativity has been identified as something that we are born with, and over the years as we are “educated” we seem to lose the skill, or the motivation to create. — Doug Walters

stop work play play play

I do web programming myself but I do not have prior experience of how to teach it to other other people. –Pekka

John Graves

Ideally, I’m hoping that the course will encourage me to think about ways I can have my own students write the web and I hope to be able to gather a better sense of what that means. I think that this type of creation lends itself very nicely with the English classroom and I look forward to having resources in my class to be able to experiment next year. —

Ganesh




Get involved

8 ways to get involved with Mozilla Webmaker this week

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  1. Join @Mozilla for a global #MakerParty from June 15 – Sept 15. Make, learn and #teachtheweb together. Join the party: https://webmaker.org/en-US/party/
  2. Want to teach the web? Join a peer-driven 9-week online course starting May 2: https://webmaker.org/en-US/teach/
  3. Make your own teaching kits. Test these new Thimble prototypes for creating your own lesson plans for webmakin and digital literacy: https://webmaker.org/kit-prototypes/
  4. Just six months until Mozilla Festival 2013! Tell us what themes you think we should hack on together this year using #mozfest
  5. The @Mozilla OpenNews Source project is nominated for a 2013 GEN Data Journalism Award. We’d love your vote: http://app.wizehive.com/voting/dja2013/14522
  6. Check out Hive Toronto’s latest plans and funding proposal: http://explorecreateshare.org/2013/04/29/hive-toronto-drafting-core-beliefs-and-proposals-for-funding/
  7. Join a new G+ #TeachTheWeb community for designers and makers who want to inspire others through creative uses of the #Webmaker toolset: https://plus.google.com/u/1/communities/113102647862445788660
  8. We launched the draft version of the Web Literacy Standard last Friday! Discuss, give feedback, spread the word: http://mzl.la/weblitstd
  9. Hey, Mozilla India: join two back-to-back @Mozilla #Webmaker events in Nasik, India http://is.gd/xcPVBu and http://is.gd/XW2E09

 

New hackable teaching kit prototypes for Webmaker

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TLDR version of this post: we have new Thimble prototypes for creating your own hackable teaching kits. Please help test and make them better by sharing feedback through #teachtheweb or by filing a handy feedback ticket here.

In Mark Surman’s recent post about where Webmaker.org is headed, he lays out five key priorities for “Webmaker 2.0”

  1. Rebooting the brand to focus on makers of all ages
  2. Building a gallery to show all the awesome makes
  3. Creating a Make API so anyone can make a gallery
  4. Deepening learning with challenges + badges
  5. Making it easy to create hackable teaching kits with Thimble

This post is about that fifth element: making it easy to create hackable teaching kits with Thimble. Laura Hilliger, Julia Vallera and the mentor team have created new prototypes toward making this possible — and also updated their thinking and content strategy for hackable teaching kits on webmaker.org going forward. This post shares the prototypes and summarizes the new thinking.

Kit prototype

How do hackable kits work?

We want to make it easy for anyone to create their own teaching guides and lesson plans for teaching digital literacy, webmaking or any content relevant to mentors and learners. To that end, we’ve created a set of new prototypes in Thimble. The templates are built around three key teaching elements:

  • your learning goals. What are you trying to teach? What will people learn?
  • your learning activities. What activities, projects or hands-on making are you going to do?
  • additional resources. Cheat-sheets, handy reference guides, further reading, etc.
  • tying it all together. A complete kit then ties all these elements together into one handy link.

Kit prototype -- edit

New Thimble prototypes

Try them out now. Clicking on a template below will open the Thimble editing window, where you edit the content on the left and see how it will look when published on the right.

The templates can also make it easy for people to create multi-page teaching guides. Check out these two examples:

profile page

What’s the goal?

These prototypes are just a small first step. By eventually making it easy to display what mentors are creating through a gallery, and surfacing these community-generated resources onto webmaker.org/teach, we can:

  • showcase what others are doing. See how other educators and mentors around the world are teaching and making. Sharing great activities and lesson plans.
  • enable easier remix and localization. You can just hit the “edit” or “remix” button in Thimble to immediately start translating, moving stuff around, adding your own images and links, etc. When you’re done, you can just hit “publish” and publish to a new, easily shareable URL for what you made.
  • make it easy for people to work their own way. The beauty of working in Thimble and simple editable HTML and CSS is that people can create and share however they want. Your Thimble make could follow our existing template — or you could hack it to include whatever you want: a link to your own blog post or web site, article, third-party resources, etc.

We know not everyone likes to edit HTML — and we’re working on alternate workflow for that, like Mentor Mob.  This is just a small first step.

Building Webmaker 2.0

What’s our content strategy for these hackable kits going forward?

  1. Move to a “make-based architecture.” Up to now, our teaching resources / “Hacktivity Kits” have been their own separate content type. Moving forward, we imagine kits and educational content to be just another “make,” like any other — tagged so that mentors and educators can easily find them.
  2. Simplify our nomenclature and terms. We’re no longer referring to these teaching guides as “Hacktivity Kits” or “Hacktivities” — we’re going to simplify and streamline our nomenclature, using terms that are already familiar to people and easier to localize. (More on that soon.)
  3. Test and refine these Thimble templates in our MOOC. Through the launch of our new open online course, we’ll be in close touch with hundreds of educators, techies and mentors that can help us test, refine and create their own content. This will be made easier by new “save” functionality in Thimble — so our target is to have an early alpha version of this feature ready to test by May 23.

“Everything is a make”

They key design principle here is that, going forward for Webmaker.org, everything is a “make” – and it will soon become dramatically easier to see and remix what other people are making with Webmaker tools like Thimble and Popcorn.

The NYT -- Common Core

Can we flow great content like this into our these new prototype templates?

 How to get involved