Planet Webmaker

Explaining Open Badges through analogy | Doug Belshaw’s blog

May 24, 2013 04:31 AM

Mark Surman, Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation, wrote a post recently about the future of badges:

The thing is: there has been way more excitement and pick up of badges than we expected. Even though Open Badges only launched officially in March, there are already over 800 unique providers who have issued almost 100,000 badges. We are also starting to see the development of city-wide systems where learners can pick up hundreds of different badges from across dozens of learning orgs and combine them all into a single profile. Chicago is the first city to do this (June 1), but Philadelphia and San Francisco are not far behind. And, this is just the tip of the iceberg: orgs like the Clinton Global Initiative and the National Science Foundation are focusing on badges in a way that is likely to drive even more educators to pick up the Open Badges standard, making their badges interoperable with others.

Read the post in full here.

May 23, 2013 08:29 PM

One of the best ways to help people understand something they’ve not come across before is through metaphor and analogy.

A year or so ago, for example, my son had a cold and said “my nose is deaf” – and I knew exactly what he meant. It contained just the right balance of ambiguity.* When explaining Open Badges to people I’ve found “X is kind of like Y because of Z” helpful in getting them to grasp what I mean. The more useful metaphors, similes and analogies I can find, therefore, the better.

Below are some I’ve used recently to explain Open Badges. They may or may not help you or the people you’re talking to about badges. But give them a read and tell me what you think. Oh, and the animated GIFs are just for fun!

The difference between ‘a badge’ and ‘a badge system’

Mozilla is developing the OBI – the Open Badges Infrastructure. People are free to use it to create their own badges for whatever purpose they like.

It’s a bit like a water company providing the infrastructure so that instead of having to go to a well, you can get water coming out of a tap. What you use that water for, what you mix it with, and how you share it is entirely up to you.

A different analogy might be that a badge is akin to an ‘app’ in an app store. Mozilla may produce some badges of its own, but it’s looking after the entire ‘app store’ in terms of the OBI. This metaphor breaks down for two reasons, however: there’s no one place to see all of the badges (at present) and it’s not a walled garden as many app stores are. Anyone can use badges for any purpose without reference to Mozilla. It’s an open, decentralised system and standard.

Metadata in badges

Metadata is data about data. It’s like when you tag someone in a photo on Facebook – you’re adding data about the data already in the system. In this case the data is the photograph and the metadata you’re adding is the name of an individual in the photo. The index at the back of a book is metadata as well – data about the data in the book.

One way to think about Open Badges is that they’re a bit like barcodes that can be understood by humans. Just as when you scan a barcode you get extra data such as the price of a product, so when clicking a badge you get details of what the earner had to do to get the badge, the evidence for it, etc.

The metadata is hard-coded into the Open Badge. So, just like when you make a cake, it’s made up of lots of different ingredients (the name of the badge, the identity of the badge earner, the Criteria URL, etc.). Once you’ve baked the cake or the badge, you can’t change those ingredients or get them out. That badge is unique to the individual. If you’ve baked a chocolate cake and now you want a Victoria sponge, then you’re going to have to bake another cake. Similarly, you can’t change a badge once it’s been issued.**

Badge pathways

In life, some pathways and routes definitely lead somewhere. That could be a route into employment, a journey to a holiday destination, or some other ‘place’ that you want to get to. There are almost-guaranteed ways to get to that destination, such as going to a travel agent and getting them to take care of your flight, transfers and accommodation. Likewise, completing a recognised project management qualification greatly increases the chances of being employed as a project manager.

There are other ways of getting to your holiday destination and becoming a project manager, however. You could book all of the different parts of the trip yourself. You could hitch-hike. You could use websites like Couchsurfing or Airbnb. Likewise, with the project manager position you could have learned how to manage projects on the job and have lots of experience of delivering successfully. Or, indeed, you may have transferable skills.

But there are some people for whom the journey is the destination. They don’t have a particular path in mind – or, perhaps, they’re blazing a new trail unsure of where it will lead. Being able to capture the knowledge, experience and skills they gain along the way would seem to be a useful thing to do. It surfaces the slightly meandering journey that I think we’ve all experienced during our careers. Badges can help validate these non-linear pathways.

Badge quality

Think of the last time you stayed in a hotel. Unless that was booked on your behalf, how did you end up staying where you did? Some of it may have been down to money, but what other factors were involved? There would have been the 5-star rating system which, until recently, would have been one of the only ways to ascertain the quality of a hotel. But is that the only thing you used? I bet, nine times out of ten, it was either TripAdvisor or some other social ratings/recommendation system.

The value of an Open Badge comes from at least from three different places. First, there’s the reputation of the individual or organisation that issues (or, in future, endorses) the badge. Second, there’s the (essential) Criteria URL in the badge that tells the consumer what the earner of the badge had to do to get it. And, finally, there’s the (optional) Evidence URL that shows just what the earner did with that criteria. It’s a triangulation very much akin to deciding which hotel to stay at: the star rating, a description of the facilities/amenities, and reviews from sites like TripAdvisor.

The point here is that top-down ‘quality’ systems can work, but they’re even more powerful (and can sometimes be replaced) by horizontal, peer-to-peer recommendation engines. It’s the difference between how a system should work and how it actually works.

Badge equivalency

Deciding that one thing is equivalent to another is not something that Mozilla is (at the moment, at least) concerned with.

I think of badge equivalency as being a bit like mobile phone tariffs. There’s many different plans and tariffs that it’s possible to use/sign up for as a mobile phone user. Most of them offer fairly similar combinations of talktime minutes, SMS messages and 3G data. Some, however, may offer 4G data. Even if there are differences between providers, it’s still possible to weigh up what’s best for you. What you decide to be ‘equivalent’ might not be the same as what someone else believes to be so. It depends upon context.

There will potentially be many different providers of similar badges. The value of the badge will be ascertained by employers and other people providing opportunities by comparing those badges against the others available. Credentials are always used for a purpose, after all. Eventually, some kind of ‘BadgeRank’ algorithm (similar to Google’s ‘PageRank’) may help both earners and employers find the most relevant badges in their industry.

Badge backpacks

Badges are hosted in a badge backpack and then displayed across the Web. It’s similar to videos being stored on YouTube or Vimeo and being embedded on many different websites. Likewise, you can make them private or public. The difference here is that, once we’ve got federated badge backpacks, you will get to choose where your ‘videos’ (badges) are hosted as well as where they’re embedded.

Some of these work better than others. I’d very much appreciate feedback as well as any analogies you’ve used successfully!

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* More about different types of ambiguity in this paper that I (co-)wrote.

** So, technically, we are thinking very carefully about badge revocation but we don’t want people reaching into people’s badge backpacks willy-nilly and changing them. There possibly will be a ‘nuclear’ option for revocation, however – such as when you’ve accidentally awarded a PhD-level badge to a six year-old…

Image CC BY-NC-SA howard.hall

May 23, 2013 03:08 PM

(via THUNDERPAW_ INTRO)

May 23, 2013 04:31 AM

Last month Doug Belshaw, Badges & Skills Lead for the Mozilla Foundation, gave a keynote at the PELeCON conference. In a presentation comprised almost entirely of animated GIFs, Doug talks about the past, present and future of Open Badges.

You can find the slidedeck for this presenstation here.

May 23, 2013 02:12 AM

Open Badges started as a modest experiment: build open source badge issuing software for ourselves and others. As momentum around this experiment has grown, it feels like the opportunity is bigger: we could build openness and user empowerment into how learning — and professional identity — work all across the web. With Open Badges 1.0 out there in the world, now is the right time to ask: where next for Mozilla and badges?

When Mozilla and MacArthur Foundation first started work on Open Badges about 18 months ago, the plan was to build a badge interchange standard (like SMTP for skills) and a collection of open source software for issuing and sharing badges (Badge Backpack, Open Badger, etc.). We’ve built all these things. And we’ve put up a reference implementation that Mozilla and others are using. This was really the limit of our original plan: build some basic open tech for badges and put it out there in the world.

The thing is: there has been way more excitement and pick up of badges than we expected. Even though Open Badges only launched officially in March, there are already over 800 unique providers who have issued almost 100,000 badges. We are also starting to see the development of city-wide systems where learners can pick up hundreds of different badges from across dozens of learning orgs and combine them all into a single profile. Chicago is the first city to do this (June 1), but Philadelphia and San Francisco are not far behind. And, this is just the tip of the iceberg: orgs like the Clinton Global Initiative and the National Science Foundation are focusing on badges in a way that is likely to drive even more educators to pick up the Open Badges standard, making their badges interoperable with others.

Of course, the fact that educators and policy makers are interested in badges doesn’t represent a victory in itself. It just shows momentum and buzz. The real opportunity — and the real impact — comes when learners and employers get excited about badges. Mozilla never planned to build offerings for these audiences. Increasingly, it feels like we should.

In the Internet era, people learn things online and out of school all the time. Whether you want to make a web page, knit a sweater or get better at calculus, the internet makes it easy to learn on your own or with a group of friends outside of a school setting. However, there is no good way to get credentials or recognition for this kind of learning. And, even if there was, there is no trusted, verifiable way to plug that recognition into Facebook, About.me and other places that make up your online identity. People have no good way to show ‘what they know’ online.

Similarly, employers are increasingly turning to the internet to find talent. They use sites like LinkedIn that let you search online resumes. Or, increasingly, to sites like Gild and TalentBin that use data mining to find potential hires. The problem: these services do not offer granular or variable skills profiles. And, with some of them, there are significant issues around privacy: people are being offered up as potential hires without even knowing that these sites are collecting data about them.

Mozilla could offer a distributed, open source and privacy-friendly solution to problems like these. We could help learners show their skills in all their online profiles and also help employers search for talent reliably. However, to do so, we’d have to build a Firefox-quality offering for learners and employers on top of Open Badges. While this hasn’t been our focus up til now, I’m thinking more and more that this is something we should consider.

In some ways, there is a parallel to Gecko and Firefox. Gecko provides the underlying platform for shaping standards around our vision of the web. But we need a popular consumer offering like Firefox if we want this vision to actually become relevant in the market. Right now, with Open Badges, we’re mostly just playing at the underlying standards layer. If we really want to shape how learning and professional identity work on the web, we probably need to build our own offerings directly for the people who most want and need badges.

Now is the time to be looking at where the opportunity is in this space. Momentum and demand is amongst educators is growing. More and more start ups are appearing in the badges, portfolio and skills spaces. And likelihood that badges will be important for learners and employers is growing. We need to be asking ourselves: how can Mozilla — and its values — shape this space?

With this in mind, Erin Knight is leading an effort over the next few months to look at different badges product options. She’ll be providing updates on her blog. And I’ll be summarizing here as well. If you have ideas on where Mozilla should go on all of this, we’d love to have you involved as we think this through. Comments here on this post are a good place to start.

Filed under: badges, drumbeat, education, learning, mozilla, webmakers

May 20, 2013 11:22 AM

cross-posted from the Webmaker blog

We use Bugzilla to work open and get stuff done

Webmaker, like many Mozilla projects, uses an issue tracker called Bugzilla for filing tickets and getting stuff done. These two new pages provide tips and tricks for filing bugs, and for getting the most out of Bugzilla:

1. Bugzilla for Webmaker — the best place to start. How to file a Webmaker bug, plus simple tweaks for making Bugzilla easier to use.
2. Bugzilla for Webmaker: PRO TIPS – for digging deeper. How to make it easier for users to file tickets, tagging, searching and tracking bugs, Frequently Asked Questions and more.

Anyone can create, comment or contribute to a ticket

We work open. Webmaker is an open source, non-profit project powered by a global community of friendly humans like you. Anyone can create a ticket, comment on a ticket, and contribute. Just because it’s called a “bug” doesn’t necessarily mean there’s something wrong. It could just be a to-do, or a suggestion. All your tickets are welcome — don’t worry if you’re doing it right. We’re a friendly community, and we want your ideas!

May 17, 2013 08:23 PM

Back in March, we kicked off the first in hopefully a series of train-the-trainer (TTT) events for webmaking.

The idea is to run events that train people who go on to train others how to teach the web. We focused on practicing an open and participatory ethos, adapting lesson plans, and facilitating events.

This is a post to share what we did and encourage people in designing their own train-the-trainer events.

How to run a Webmaker Train the Trainer

Our prototype, the Reps Training Days, ran for four days in Athens, Greece with 40 Reps from around the world. The agenda was based on Laura Hilliger’s research and insights on successful TTT program and on Allen Gunn’s participatory event methodology. It was made possible by the amazing Mozilla Greek community.

Our participants were Mozilla Reps, a fantastic ambassador program with some of the most active and thoughtful Mozillians. Reps have been early adopters and innovators with Webmaker. They organized nearly 50 events during last year’s Summer Code Party and are leading the way in developing tools, tutorials, and localization for Webmaker. It seemed like a natural fit to run our first TTT with them.

1. Participate in a Webmaker event

The first day of Training Days was spent observing and participating in a Hive Pop-Up, organized by Hive Athens. This was an opportunity for the participants to experience a webmaker event firsthand, to see the tools and activities in action, to learn about the logistics, and to understand the vibe.

We then circled up to discuss what we saw. Participants shared their reflections on what worked well at the pop-up and what they would change if they did their own.

2. Build the training agenda

Then we opened up the training days properly. While we had topics in mind we wanted to hack on together, it was more important that everyone in the room thought about what they want to learn or discuss. So we had an agenda brainstorm.

To do this: we split into groups for 3 people. On post-it notes, we wrote down topics. 1 topic per post-it and the encouragement to write it as concretely as possible.

Then everyone pasted the notes on the wall. We read them all and then clustered them by themes. This collaborative board formed both critical event documentation as well as agenda fodder for the coming days.

3. Teach someone something

To warm up to the idea of teaching, we then got into pairs. The task: teach someone something in 5 minutes.

One person would go and then switch. Even if you knew what was being taught, you were encouraged to play a good learner, asking good questions and prompting the teacher.

After this exercise, we circled up and discussed what we observed from this experience. For many, it was a great way to think about how to explain something clearly, using metaphors and knowledge building blocks. It helped bring people into a teaching mindset.

4. Make a learner profile

Now that we’ve been thinking about teachers and learners, we made small groups and hacked together a learner’s profile.

This goal of this activity was to think about who our learners are. We used Webmaker tools to make these profiles, which was also a fun, maker-y way to be introduced to these tools. Participants were encouraged to think about real people they want to teach.

5. Hack an event invitation

After we’ve made our learner profiles, we thought about the kind of event we wanted to run. Most of the participants have already organized Webmaker events in the past, so there was already some familiarity with the format.

Nevertheless, it was helpful to hack together an event invitation. The idea was to think about your target learner and to make an invitation that would speak to them. Again, we used Webmaker tools to quickly pull these invitations together on the web.

6. Deep dive into lesson plans

With a learner profile, an event invitation and some familiarity with Webmaker tools, we then introduced the hackable kits. These are remixable lesson plans that help mentors, trainers, etc. to teach the web. The idea is that they are adaptable to different contexts and that people can share new ways of teaching in a shared format.

Participants poked around in the kits and asked questions. We also did some fun icebreakers so they could see the activities in action and get some energy going.

7. Playtest lesson plans

Now came the fun part. We had to plan for a real live event the next day. So participants got into groups of five with one group facilitator.

They had to design a four-hour agenda for local youth. Using three recommended activities from the kits, they adapted the lesson plans. Then they walked through a script for the next day, including having people role-play as learners. It was a lot of fun to see and a great way to prepare for the big day.

8. Put training to practice at a live event

So with some nervousness, we got ready for the live event. About a hundred youth were coming. We split into different rooms, each group of five trainers getting about 20 learners.

While there were the inevitable challenges (the internet is down! one kid won’t listen!), the Reps did a terrific job. They rolled with their scripts, adapting them as they saw what was working. They also taught well in smaller pairs with their learners, sometimes adding new challenges or tools to fit their needs.

It was a beautiful and fun thing to see. All the training the days before paid off: the youth had a lot of fun and so did we.

9. Reflect on event, lessons learned and where from here

We ended the event with a closing circle. We talked about what we saw that day, what worked well, what didn’t. We each shared one thing we appreciated about the experience, and what we’re excited about doing next.

With that, we headed out into the city to enjoy the day and the rest of our time together.

10. Go forth and teach!

Each participant left the Training Days with a local plan. It was a short list of possible collaborators in their hometown, a date for a small team huddle to bring those people together, and then a date for a larger Webmaker event to organize with their new collaborators.

We also started interest groups in topics like localization and offline tools. And now, a few months later, the participants from Training Days are now “Webmaker Super Mentors”, mentoring people in an online course to learn how to teach the web.

In the coming months, we hope to keep remixing and improving these agendas, as well as work with people who are interested in TTT in their own cities or communities.

Let us know if you’d like to get involved! #teachtheweb

May 17, 2013 03:40 PM

DigitalMe is a non-profit based in Leeds, England that helps young people gain skills and confidence through new technology. They were the only UK winners of the Digital Media & Learning Competition and have proved to be   fantastic allies for Open Badges advocacy in Europe (and beyond!)

They’ve use their experience with Open Badges to create a new Badge Design Canvas that helps those designing badges think through various issues.

It’s a free download, available under a Creative Commons license!

May 17, 2013 10:49 AM

This is re-posted from Matt Thompson’s blog. Connected Learning wants to revolutionize the way people learn. How can Webmaker be a part of that movement? These new resources on Connected Learning are highly recommended reading for anyone interested in the … Continue reading →

May 15, 2013 07:29 PM

TechPro has just featured Open Badges in its list of open source projects worth contributions:

There’s no way to communicate exactly how important Mozilla is to the world wide web. Mozilla brought us an open source, forward-thinking browser when we needed one, threw us a mail client miles better than Outlook in Thunderbird, and now brings us an open source, HTML5-based mobile operating system in Firefox OS. In short: Mozilla’s commitment to excellence in open source has drive the web to where it is today…

A central, open repository for badges is ideal, and look forward to seeing Open Badges used on many Mozilla websites. You can check out this page to see how you can issue badges and this page to view how you can display user badges. Again, another trusted central site for managing user information, all thanks to Mozilla. OpenBadges is an up and coming project and could use all of the community support it can get.

May 14, 2013 05:32 PM

Doug Belshaw, Badges & Skills Lead at the Mozilla Foundation answered some of the most common questions he’s been getting recently about Open Badges:

What’s the quickest way of getting started issuing Open Badges?

There’s broadly three ways to start issuing badges. The first is to use a third-party badge issuing platform such as badg.us, forallbadges or openbadges.me. This is the easiest, but the URLs in the metadata of the badge point towards that third-party platform over which you have no control.

The second way to issue badges is to use a plugin for a popular Content Management System or learning platform such as WordPress, Drupal or Moodle. Doing this means that you don’t have to do any coding but the URLs in the Open Badges point back to your domain.

The third way is the most complex and involves being (or hiring) a developer and using Mozilla’s onboarding documentation to build your own badge issuing platform or plugin. Apparently it’s not that hard, but I haven’t tried it.

What happens when there’s millions of Open Badges in the ecosystem and everyone has thousands of them?

Well, first of all that will be awesome! The great thing about Open Badges is that the learner is always in control. That means you can choose which badges to display for what purpose. So, if you want to show all of your gamer and photography badges on Facebook and your professional badges on your online portfolio, you can.

The other thing to remember is that an Open Badge does not stand alone, but is part of a wider ecosystem of value. One of the best ways of imagining this is through badge-based learning pathways. In the same way that you collect cheeses/pies in Trivial Pursuit, so badges can work together to unlock a larger, meta-level badge. Once you’ve unlocked your competency-level badge, it would point back to the five skill-level badges of which it’s comprised.

Read the full post here.

May 13, 2013 08:48 AM

Week 3 of #teachtheweb is right around the corner, and I thought it might be nice to do a quick shareout of the planning and running of the MOOC.

Kudos!

Before I say another word, I have to give my partner in crime a gigantic love bomb. The word “collaboration” only begins to describe the epic brain connection Michelle and I have seemingly developed. Additionally, as Michelle noted, the entire Webmaker Mentor team has been massively supportive and absolutely integral to getting Mozilla's first MOOC off the ground. High-fives all around!

Conspiring

We've been having calls with wonderful community members who signed up to help create the #teachtheweb experience. We've been calling them the Super Mentor Calls. The Super Mentor Kick-off call on April 19 had 41 attendees from 17 different countries. They are designers, developers, educators, makers, architects, librarians, youth workers, entrepreneurs, teens and more, who answered our call to be super mentors in #teachtheweb. This call was used to help the Super Mentors understand what we were asking them to do throughout the 9-week course. This blog post explains the job. We also used the opportunity to explain the concept of a cMOOC and to thank everyone for signing up before they even knew what they signed up for. Follow our Twitter List of Super Mentors The next week, April 25, we took some time to celebrate Super Mentor makes after many created introductions using Webmaker tools. We gave each other virtual high fives for being engaging, thoughtful digital citizens and shared a few moments of excitement centered around the fact that the Webmaker Community is full of intelligent human beings looking to change the world. Next, we explained our launch strategy with a “Heads up! It's going to get busy!” and proposed the formation of Study Groups. We created a lightweight google doc and asked if anyone would be interested in running a smaller study group during the experience. Many were, and the Google Doc started filling up with ideas for Study Groups based on interest, language and/or geography. We also talked about the content creation procedure and came up with a plan to braindump into Etherpads, filter and curate. We want to make sure any one who wants to contribute to the content of #teachtheweb can. If you want to help plan, see the planning page! We talked about the connection between #teachtheweb and #MakerParty (#teachtheweb is kind of like Party Prep), and the Super Mentors began to volunteer to spread the word about both initiatives in their local areas as well as online. Finally, Super Mentors volunteered to help moderate the various #teachtheweb channels during the May 2^nd Live Session and #teachtheweb Kick-off. On the #teachtheweb launch date, May 2^nd, we had a relatively quick call with Super Mentors to celebrate the G+ Community's growth and talk about the Live Session. Super Mentors signed up to participate via video, monitor channels, serve as tech support and help out on IRC. The session went, I heard, nicely. You can watch the video here. Yesterday, May 9^th, we spent a little time talking about how to get participants more involved and how to be better at sharing with each other and the larger community. We decided to try to give each other weekly report backs on how Study Groups were doing in the following Super Mentor calls.

Content Creation

Each week a post is released in the Planning section of #teachtheweb, which invites any and everyone to contribute their thoughts to a particular topic. The Super Mentors get extra reminders, but the content creation process is completely open. If you're interested in contributing your thoughts to a particular topic, check the planning page for new topic etherpads each Monday. Monday is also the day that we've been distilling these Etherpads into a digestible blogpost with extra readings, resources and tasks. The filtering and curation of everyone's braindump is massively interesting but quite difficult. The posts need to be relatively short to keep people engaged. We would rather that people spend their allotted MOOC time completing the weekly Make Projects and reflecting on their own work, instead of focusing too heavily on truncated descriptions of complex topics. We believe in Making as Learning, so we want to spend as much time as possible making, sharing, remixing, iterating and making some more. Tuesday's we post new topics to the #teachtheweb site. We also do shareouts in the Weekly Webmaker Community call. Thursday's are the days we do live sessions (only 3 throughout the 9 weeks, one on May 2^nd, May 23^rd and June 13^th) and Twitter Chats. Which leads me to the visualization piece of this post. This morning, I really just wanted to MAKE stuff. So I started fishing through the Twitter archive Jeannie Crowley created for #teachtheweb. Then I got a data bug and started looking at other numbers. I made two things:

A Visualization of Relationships between Words used in #teachtheweb Tweets

[caption id="attachment_1916" align="aligncenter" width="800"] Click the image to play with this interactive visualization thingie[/caption]

A Slightly Interactive Infographic

[iframe src="//infogr.am/teachtheweb-27148" width="550" height="2161" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none;"]

MOOC Attrition

One of the things that has been bugging me is the rumors of MOOC attrition rates. I've read percentages from 85% to 98% in the last couple of months, and I was worried that the participants in #teachtheweb will soon be dropping out and the conversation will come to a standing halt. Up until a few days ago, I was basically waiting for the ball to drop. Then I read this post from a mathematician at Stanford and decided to just stop worrying about it. It's easy to sign up for things. You just put in one of your many email addresses and that's that. It's easy to begin the journey into a specific community. You just use the hashtag, comment on people's posts, follow some people and start trying to know people through their digital representations and artifacts. But it's not easy to remain an active member of a community. Being active takes time, perseverance, patience, understanding, collaboration, connection, mentorship, and a whole mess of other things. We all participate in multiple communities, and it's natural that one community or another will take precedence on a given day. I just hope that the those of you who have found the Webmaker Mentor Community through #teachtheweb decide to give this community precedence from time to time. We're teaching the world the Web – and we definitely need your help.

May 10, 2013 01:14 PM

It’s great to see MacArthur Foundation, Open Badges, Cathy Davidson, and DML featured on The Chronicle’s map of the MOOC ecosystem this week. Open Badges don’t aim to disrupt traditional college credit necessarily, but they are an interoperable method to demonstrate skills and interests in powerful visual ways.

May 08, 2013 11:53 PM

NPR’s interview with Jeffrey Selingo about non-traditional forms of accreditation is a good listen this week. Selingo, an editor with the Chronicle of Higher Education and author of the book “College (Un)bound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students” talks about competency-based education and the future of skills recognition.

May 08, 2013 11:38 PM

Money-making
As a non-profit, Mozilla has access to four types of revenue: grants, gifts, donations, and earned income. Our earned income streams come through Firefox, which leaves the other three – grants, gifts, and donations – to be driven by our fundraising strategy (the focus of this post).

So far, and while we can always get better, we’re pretty good at securing grants. We’ve built meaningful working relationships with large philanthropies and government agencies, which contribute approximately $5M each year to Webmaker, Open Badges, and our policy work.

We don’t have a major gifts program (as yet; more on this later in the year).

And, while we’ve spent a fair amount of time building a small dollar donations program, it’s definitely not what it could be. Last year, we generated around $750K from e-mails to more than 500K people and an end-of-year presence in the main Firefox channels.

There are many and valid reasons for this result. Fundraising as a large-scale social enterprise is challenging and I believe we’ve done well to get where we are. But given our reach and the importance of the Web there is massive room for improvement.

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NOW: Help us get better at fundraising. Tell us what you think about Mozilla, our mission, and our fundraising.

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Solving Small Dollar Fundraising
Building an effective small dollar program is important for several reasons:

• It’s the most stable form of revenue available to the Foundation: small amounts of funding from a large and diverse group of donors;
• It mitigates risk by distributing external dependence and increasing revenue diversity; and
• It’s a meaningful contribution path for a large number of Mozillians who don’t have the time or capacity to code.

Grants and (eventually) gifts will always be crucial to the health and growth of Mozilla. They allow us to work with amazing partners, test new ideas, and launch new products. But building a sustainable small dollar program is our top development priority for 2013.

Enter the Study
Good fundraising – like many things – involves constantly questioning and challenging assumptions. We’ve used the first part of year to hold conversations to gain perspective and input from the Mozilla community: people who care about our mission and want to help it succeed.

We’ve asked what people think about Mozilla. Why they have chosen to become involved. Whether they think being a non-profit is central to what we do. Whether fundraising should be a part of that. And, if yes, how we can make it more effective. (Get involved and be heard.)

The Story So Far
The discussions have been amazing. We’re learning a lot about Mozilla and why our community and staff devote their time to the cause. And we’re also seeing themes emerge around how people view Mozilla, our mission, and our fundraising:

Being a non-profit matters. It’s the foundation of our brand, what differentiates our products in the market, and the source of a lot of pride. Not having external shareholders is empowering. But people resist being identified as a charity. The sense is that ‘charity’ carries connotations of need and behaviours that don’t apply to Mozilla.

Tension between being ‘mission-driven’ and ‘product-driven’. There’s a healthy, though challenging, day-to-day tension between the ‘why’ of our work, the mission, and the ‘what’, shipping products. That tension is surfacing more as we enter new markets with different operating cultures. And in terms of fundraising, the tension impacts decisions like whether to direct site traffic to fundraising or product marketing campaigns.

Fundraising has been a black box. Very little is understood about how or why we raise money. Most of the participants in the study wanted to learn more: to have a chance to engage and help shape our fundraising. So we, as the development team, need to get better at sharing our work. (This post you’re reading and this post and these posts and this dashboard are our first attempts to fix this.)

Donating is considered a more accessible contribution path than coding. Mozilla’s competitive advantage is and has always been its community. We don’t have the financial strength or employee base to go head-to-head with our competitors. When we win, it’s because of the people who contribute to our work. As our mission gains importance – as more things move to the Web – we will need to attract contributors from outside our usual channels. People who don’t code, but have other sources of expertise that can advance the mission (see the groundswell of educators gathering around Webmaker). Donating is seen as an easy yet meaningful way to become a Mozillian.

Online fundraising isn’t the only way to raise money. To date, small dollar fundraising and online fundraising have been synonymous. But as we scale Webmaker events around the world, as we get more people into more rooms, and as ReMo continues to grow and kick ass, we increasingly have opportunities to raise money in-person. We need to look away from the Lost Ark of online fundraising to new ways to engage directly with donors.

Donors want to know where their money goes. In line with trends across the non-profit sector, people want to understand the specific impact of their donations. Crowdfunding, social media, and micro-lending platforms have led donors to expect a direct relationship with the recipients of their support. We can do more to draw the line between a $30 donation and a scientist, teacher, or teenager learning how to express themselves on the Web. (We also need to get our act together around an annual donor report, most likely as a fork of the yearly State of Mozilla.)

We should be good at being a non-profit. One of the most interesting themes was the sense that if we’re going to be a non-profit, we should be good at it. That we should leverage all the advantages – volunteers, movement building, partnerships, activism, fundraising, etc. – that come along with it. Not at the expense of our strength – building meaningful products – but as a way of pursuing our mission and expressing our brand.

The study is also surfacing a healthy amount of skepticism:

• “Why do we need my $30 when we have all the Google revenue?”
• “I delete all those e-mails. I don’t think they’re effective.”

Confusion:

• “Doesn’t everyone get paid from the Google deal?”
• “Why do we even have a Foundation?”

And resistance:

• “We shouldn’t be asking people for money. It’s annoying and unnecessary.”
• “We need people closing bugs, not giving money.”

Perhaps the best finding so far is that many of people who work for Mozilla also donate to the mission. This means that the people who experience Mozilla on a daily basis continue to believe in the organization and its work. As a fundraiser, I know that one of the first things major donors ask is what percentage of employees also donate to the mission. So we’re in good shape.

What Next?
We want to talk to more people. But as we can’t take everyone to lunch (sadly!), we’ve put together a survey. Please take 5 minutes and let us know what you think about Mozilla, our mission, and our fundraising. This is your chance to help us rock. We hope you’ll participate.

What Will Happen From There
In early June, we will:

1. Post the final results and analysis of the study;
2. Use the results to shape a new fundraising strategy; and
3. Work to engage every Mozillian – including you – in what we hope will be our most effective end-of-year campaign ever.

So far we’re thrilled at the number of people who actually want to step up and help Mozilla raise money. The challenge is on us, as a team, to make sure you can and to do so with pride.

Filed under: Mozilla, Pitch Geek

May 08, 2013 06:42 PM

This is re-posted from Mark Surman’s blog. Plans are coming together for Mozilla’s Maker Party 2013. And I’m getting excited. Last year’s party had people making things on the web at 700 local events in 80 countries. This year it’ll … Continue reading →

May 08, 2013 03:35 PM

I spend about half my time working for Mozilla working on a new, open learning standard for Web Literacy. The other half of the time I’m evangelising Open Badges in the UK and Europe. Unsurprisingly, with the latter a lot of the same questions come up time and time again. These are legitimate concerns and curiosities that people have, so I thought it would be a good idea to have a URL I could point them towards.

Are Open Badges ‘transferable’?

It depends what you mean. Open Badges are issued with a learner’s individual identifier ‘baked’ into it. So if you try and take my badge and put it in your backpack, it’s not going to work. It’ll be rejected.

If, on the other hand, you talking about the ‘portability’ of badges then, absolutely, that’s exactly what we’re aiming for. Multiple badge backpacks, a completely open and decentralised system, and learner sovereignty. The learner earns badges from issuers and then chooses where to host and display them.

Why is Mozilla interested in creating a system for credentialing learning?

We’re a non-profit that believes in the Web. We believe that it’s a fantastic platform for innovation – but only if it’s open, democratic and built upon standards. Because learning today happens anywhere, including on the Web, we want a credentialing system that can bypass the ‘gatekeepers’ to learning. We want better ways to credential experiences, knowledge, interest and skills.

Are all Open Badges public?

What happens if I invest time in Open Badges and then Mozilla pull the plug?

We’re a non-profit who work (radically) in the open alongside the community. The OBI is a Mozilla product, but it’s more of a model where we’re the lead developers and advocates than having something than can be ‘pulled’. We’re committed to OBI for the long-haul, but even if we were all on several planes that crashed the Open Source community could still develop the infrastructure.

How can Mozilla maintain the quality of Open Badges?

‘Quality’ is an interesting word. Another variation of this question is How can Mozilla guarantee equivalency between badges? The short answer is, of course, that we can’t. That’s because we’re the ones developing the technical standard, but not those that are developing all of the badges within the ecosystem.

The OBI is a platform for innovation. We’ve already seen many high-quality badges that have been produced by lots of different organisations. But, of course, there will be poor badges. The value of the badge doesn’t come through how difficult it is to issue them, but upon the rigour of what you have to do to get them, and the evidence they point to. That’s within the metadata in the badge itself.

CC BY Kyle Bowen

One of the newer metadata fields that’s available within the OBI is a field that allows you to enter the URL of which standard you’re aligning to. So whether it’s a badge that aligns with the Common Core or the Web Literacy standard, there’s something you can point to as a common reference point. The ‘endorsement’ functionality that we’re working upon could then allow organisations to endorse certain badges as being good/valid representations of that standard.

What’s the quickest way of getting started issuing Open Badges?

There’s broadly three ways to start issuing badges. The first is to use a third-party badge issuing platform such as badg.us, forallbadges or openbadges.me. This is the easiest, but the URLs in the metadata of the badge point towards that third-party platform over which you have no control.

The second way to issue badges is to use a plugin for a popular Content Management System or learning platform such as WordPress, Drupal or Moodle. Doing this means that you don’t have to do any coding but the URLs in the Open Badges point back to your domain.

The third way is the most complex and involves being (or hiring) a developer and using Mozilla’s onboarding documentation to build your own badge issuing platform or plugin. Apparently it’s not that hard, but I haven’t tried it.

What happens when there’s millions of Open Badges in the ecosystem and everyone has thousands of them?

Well, first of all that will be awesome! The great thing about Open Badges is that the learner is always in control. That means you can choose which badges to display for what purpose. So, if you want to show all of your gamer and photography badges on Facebook and your professional badges on your online portfolio, you can.

The other thing to remember is that an Open Badge does not stand alone, but is part of a wider ecosystem of value. One of the best ways of imagining this is through badge-based learning pathways. In the same way that you collect cheeses/pies in Trivial Pursuit, so badges can work together to unlock a larger, meta-level badge. Once you’ve unlocked your competency-level badge, it would point back to the five skill-level badges of which it’s comprised.

How can we trust an Open Badge? How do I know someone hasn’t just bought one?

Both very good questions. A combination of the Criteria URL and the Evidence URL should help with this, I think. The (compulsory) Criteria URL states what the earner had to do in order to be issued the badge, and the (optional, but to my mind very important) Evidence URL points to work done in order to get the badge. This is anything that can be displayed on the Web – images, text, videos, etc.

Do people buy qualifications now? Of course they do. Will people attempt to (and sometimes be successful in purchasing) Open Badges? Almost definitely. But the difference between traditional qualifications and credentials, and Open Badges is that the latter leave a breadcrumb trail of evidence. My Great Uncle built his entire adult life on a the claim that he attended Oxford University. After his death we found this to be false. That wouldn’t really have been possible in a badge-based system. He would have been found out very quickly!

Why are Open Badges any more than stickers? Aren’t they just extrinsic motivators?

As stated above, the value of an Open Badge comes through the metadata contained. Learning design is the hard part of creating an ecosystem of badges; it’s the 90% of the iceberg you don’t see. So, of course Open Badges can be used to extrinsically motivate. But, like all credentialing systems, if designed well then they can also promote intrinsic motivation.*

*My rejection of intrinsic/extrinsic motivation as a binary will have to wait for another blog post…

How can issuers ensure their badges are taken as seriously as possible by institutions/employers?

An Open Badge is a metadata-infused credential. Whether badges are taken seriously depends on how trustworthy, relevant and useful they are to others. That’s a function of the reputation of the badge issuer but also on the rigour of the Criteria URL. What did the individual have to do to get the badge? Was that worth doing? Is there an Evidence URL pointing to what that individual actually did?

It’s a fact of life that people like (and trust) good-looking things so it’s worth spending some time on the visual design of the badge. But that’s the tip of the iceberg: it’s the learning design, the partnerships and the thinking through how individuals can ‘level up’ that’s important. DigitalMe have a great CC-licensed badge canvas resource to help you think through some of these things.

Finally, it’s worth having a useful way to display badges to institutions and employers. Purdue University, for example, have an iPad app that students can use to show their badges at interview. Badges can also be displayed on pretty much any kind of website, including e-portfolios and wikis.

Why would I want an Open Badge instead of a degree?

This is the $64,000 question, but one that misses the point in the short term. Often when a new technology comes along we think in terms of either/or. In practice, however, it’s more and/and/and. How can we use Open Badges to credential those things that we think are important but we don’t currently have a way of capturing? How can we make credentialing more granular? How can we make learning more personalised through badge-based ‘playlists’ or ‘pathways’? These are the questions which interest us a lot more than ‘Can X replace Y?’

Have you got any more questions? Ask away below! (or on Twitter / Facebook / Google+) If I get enough I’ll probably do another one of these in a few weeks’ time.

Header image CC BY Bilal Kamoon

May 08, 2013 01:10 PM

Exciting thinking about the value of badges has come out of recent meetings in Maine, as senior director of learning and badges Erin Knight outlines. Join us on Wednesday’s community call to discuss.

Open Badges Values / Principles:

• Empower the learner. The end game is about helping learners improve their lives, get credit for what they do, and give them the data/ammunition necessary to do the things that they want to do. There are other ways we’ve talked about this - redefining learning, rethinking accreditation, but ultimately its about putting the learner in the driver’s seat.
• Agency. This is similar to the above and is specifically about control. The learner should control their data. They should control the interactions around that data. They should be able to collect and share any badges they want, even “smaller” or social ones that might mean something to them. They should decide who sees badges or what stories they want to tell about themselves (through the badges). 
• Open. This is a loaded word, but its important in every meaning of the word. Badges should remain open in that anyone should be able to issue them. Many ask to restrict what can be badged so that its easier to establish equivalencies but that means we are restricting the possibilities for learners. The onus is on us to figure out how to make sense of that data. There should also be tools to support badging that are free and open source. As mentioned before, no proprietary or closed system should control the badges, the learner should. Open, open, open.
• Interoperable. A single badge might carry some value in some contexts, but a group of badges that tell a more complete story about a learner is so much more powerful. Especially when those badges are earned across experiences. This requires that badges be interoperable. This requires that badges align with the open standard. If we can have consensus at that lower level, then anyone can build tools on top of badges to make them more useable, more shareable, more valuable, etc.
• Distributed. We are working towards a more distributed ecosystem of recognition. That means each touchpoint in the ecosystem should be distributed - issuing, validating/endorsing, sharing, using badges, etc. Badges should be and go where the user is, and the badge information and value should follow. 
• Credible. We think badges can be the real deal - can lead to real results like jobs and credit and advancement. We need to continually think about what gets badges to these standards without squelching the other features of badges. I have some thoughts on that here.
• Flexible/Innovative. (or “Weird.”) At the same time, we need to “keep digital badges weird”. We shouldn’t force all badges to be a one level or for one particular goal, we should build tools and frameworks to allow for innovative uses for badges.
• Community-driven. The community is gold. We can’t do this alone, you can’t do this alone. We are stronger together and a community that shares resources and findings, vets ideas and builds this stuff together is the community that wins. Our community is the lifeblood of the badges work and we need to codesign our future together. (*hugs!*)
• Something we are proud of. We are those feel-goody people that want to be proud of what we do. This means both not being evil, and also producing high quality stuff. On the former, I think we’re doing pretty well already but there is real risk of closed solutions segmenting or threatening the ecosystem and we should fight against this. On the latter, from the conceptual framework and the whitepapers, to the software and technical framework, to the toolkits and implementations, we want to walk away proud. There is a lot that we are proud of but turns out that this is pretty challenging to do all the time when there are so many moving pieces. But its a standard that we should all hold ourselves to and find ways to get there together.

You can read the post here.

May 07, 2013 08:37 PM

We’ve been doing some strategy and planning work for Open Badges and the general badging work, and one thing that became clear was that we have some implicit values and principles that we have carried and/or want to carry with us into the future work.

We decided to write them down and turns out, that process alone was valuable for our strategy work. They have already been useful as a guide on our strategy and a litmus test for possible directions or opportunities. And that’s after just throwing them up on the fly. We want feedback and thoughts so that we can refine and agree on these, and in the process, set a direction that we can all work towards together.

Open Badges Values / Principles:

• Empower the learner. The end game is about helping learners improve their lives, get credit for what they do, and give them the data/ammunition necessary to do the things that they want to do. There are other ways we’ve talked about this - redefining learning, rethinking accreditation, but ultimately its about putting the learner in the driver’s seat.
• Agency. This is similar to the above and is specifically about control. The learner should control their data. They should control the interactions around that data. They should be able to collect and share any badges they want, even “smaller” or social ones that might mean something to them. They should decide who sees badges or what stories they want to tell about themselves (through the badges). 
• Open. This is a loaded word, but its important in every meaning of the word. Badges should remain open in that anyone should be able to issue them. Many ask to restrict what can be badged so that its easier to establish equivalencies but that means we are restricting the possibilities for learners. The onus is on us to figure out how to make sense of that data. There should also be tools to support badging that are free and open source. As mentioned before, no proprietary or closed system should control the badges, the learner should. Open, open, open.
• Interoperable. A single badge might carry some value in some contexts, but a group of badges that tell a more complete story about a learner is so much more powerful. Especially when those badges are earned across experiences. This requires that badges be interoperable. This requires that badges align with the open standard. If we can have consensus at that lower level, then anyone can build tools on top of badges to make them more useable, more shareable, more valuable, etc.
• Distributed. We are working towards a more distributed ecosystem of recognition. That means each touchpoint in the ecosystem should be distributed - issuing, validating/endorsing, sharing, using badges, etc. Badges should be and go where the user is, and the badge information and value should follow. 
• Credible. We think badges can be the real deal - can lead to real results like jobs and credit and advancement. We need to continually think about what gets badges to these standards without squelching the other features of badges. I have some thoughts on that here.
• Flexible/Innovative. (or “Weird.”) At the same time, we need to “keep digital badges weird”. We shouldn’t force all badges to be a one level or for one particular goal, we should build tools and frameworks to allow for innovative uses for badges.
• Community-driven. The community is gold. We can’t do this alone, you can’t do this alone. We are stronger together and a community that shares resources and findings, vets ideas and builds this stuff together is the community that wins. Our community is the lifeblood of the badges work and we need to codesign our future together. (*hugs!*)
• Something we are proud of. We are those feel-goody people that want to be proud of what we do. This means both not being evil, and also producing high quality stuff. On the former, I think we’re doing pretty well already but there is real risk of closed solutions segmenting or threatening the ecosystem and we should fight against this. On the latter, from the conceptual framework and the whitepapers, to the software and technical framework, to the toolkits and implementations, we want to walk away proud. There is a lot that we are proud of but turns out that this is pretty challenging to do all the time when there are so many moving pieces. But its a standard that we should all hold ourselves to and find ways to get there together. 

What are we actively working against?

This list looks like the opposites of all of the above, but a few highlights:

• Data about the learner not for the learner. In our recent offsite, @iamjessklein had a revelation that most, if not all, of the data about learning out there is not for the learner. That’s really broken. 
• Spy-ware. There’s a surge of attention around scouring the web to determine things about individuals or ‘score’ them, and then selling that information to employers. The individuals probably have no idea that this is happening. There is certainly some value in some cases, like the one in this recent NYT article, where some unsuspecting individual is rewarded for previous work or interaction with a job offer. But in most cases, its just spying and making decisions about people without giving them a chance to have their say. Badges should be all about giving people their say - letting them tell the story that they want to tell, but in an evidence-based, verified way.
• Replicating accreditation. A centralized system or body for judging or OKing badges would be bad for badges. If we are embracing open and distributed, as I hope we are, we need to find and open and distributed way to build trust and assurance into badges. I’ve written more about this here [referenced above].
• Closed and siloed. If badges do not meet the open standard or are stored in a system that is closed, we lose the real power of the ecosystem. To empower the learners, we need to let them have access to the broader ecosystem, craft their own pathways and write their own stories without predetermining the set they can work from or the constraints they are under.

We have a real opportunity for change and impact with the badges work, but we feel that the values/principles are important pieces for realizing that opportunity. As you can see from the list above, these principles do not define the solutions - there are still a lot of things to answer or figure out, but knowing the guiding principles can in some cases make those answers easy or keep us on course as we start to tackle them.

I’m sure the list is too long - maybe 3-5 is the magic number. Let us know what you think. Comment below or join us on the community call tomorrow to dig in.

-E

May 07, 2013 05:54 PM

Carla Casilli, badge system design lead at Mozilla, wrote this reflection on current badge efforts across the organization:

Our work within Mozilla—co-creating great open source software, working with longstanding contributors, interacting with our larger volunteer community—ties in perfectly with badges. Recognizing people for being great at their jobs, acknowledging active collaborators, encouraging folks to deepen their participation is a no-brainer for a community-built and reliant organization like ours. Consequently, we’ve begun to develop and pilot internal badge systems within different areas of the organization. Not surprisingly, this growing group of Mozilla badge systems is revealing itself as fertile ground for investigating the development of a variety of badge systems…

Some Mozilla badge systems pertain directly to education and learning, some are more heavily focused on capturing and acknowledging prior work, while others are based on encouraging greater commitment to the community. Different badges for different requirements and all of it happening under the Mozilla tent. Nice.

The list of Mozilla badges for 2013 (in very loose chronological order):

• Webmaker badges
• Web literacy standard badges
• WebDev badges
• Capture Mozilla badges
• Webmaker Mentor badges
• SUMO badges
• Engagement badges
• QA badges
• MDN badges
• Student reps badges
• Creative badges
• Affinity badges
• Air Mozilla badges

You can read the full post and comment here.

May 07, 2013 04:08 PM

Plans are coming together for Mozilla’s Maker Party 2013. And I’m getting excited. Last year’s party had people making things on the web at 700 local events in 80 countries. This year it’ll be bigger. But, more important, I think this year will plant the foundations for something that lasts well beyond the campaign: a movement of people who want to teach 10s of millions of people how the web works.

Mozilla has built this kind of movement before: when we first launched Firefox. Many people just downloaded Firefox 1.0 because it was great. But others became on-the-ground evangelists and promoters. They told their friends about Firefox. They installed it on other people’s computers. They showed them how to use bookmarks, and pop-up blockers and add-ons. And, over 10,000 of them of them put up money to tell the world about Firefox in a historic two-page Sunday New York Times ad.

In my view, the mentors and local champions who will step up to organize the Mozilla Maker Party are just like the early enthusiasts who helped Firefox get to 500 million users. It’s these people who will show the first million Webmakers what they can make. Who will start awarding badges that reward people for their skill and creativity on the web. And who will create excitement about all the tools and programs across the web the empower people to make and create. These mentors and local champions are the core leaders that Mozilla needs if we want to teach the world the web.

Building on last year’s successful Summer Code Party, Maker Party 2013 has a number of pieces designed specifically to help mentors and local champions succeed. Five that I’m really excited about are:

1. Teach the Web: a nine-week free and open online course for people who want to be Mozilla mentors and local champions. It’s highly collaborative, convening nearly 3,000 participants to share their teaching practice, learning materials and learn to hack the web on the way. The course started last week, but you can still sign up here www.webmaker.org/teach

2. Super mentors: these are the passionate volunteers who really make the online course and marquee Maker Parties happen. They are experienced in teaching the web, running events and creating teaching materials. Starting with their work on Teach the Web, the Super Mentors are the leadership core of the larger Webmaker Mentor community. We already have over 100 super mentors. We hope to have many more by the time Maker Party 2013 is done.

3. A big tent with more than 40 partner organizations joining the Maker Party and carrying out making-and-learning activities across the globe. Like Mozilla, these organizations are part of a growing movement to teach the web and promote the maker spirit with hands-on learning. This network of partners is critical to growing this movement: there is no way any one organization can do this on its own. Mentors can bring their own organizations into this tent as a way to get publicity and recognition, or just as a way to be part of the party.

4. Hackable Activity Kits: simple ‘instructables’ that you can use show people how to make web pages, Popcorn videos, etc. The guides are hackable, forkable HTML pages so you can customize them. OpenMatt explains these kits well in this post.

5. An improved webmaker.org: We’re launching some new features on webmaker.org June 15 to designed for making and learning on the web. Not only have these tools have been designed with mentors in mind, we’ll also be taking mentor feedback and improving them on a constant basis.

While the Maker Party campaign runs from June to September, Mozilla’s hope is to build a lasting network of people around the world who want to teach people how the web works. In September, we’ll be inviting mentors and local organizers to stay involved in Webmaker. This will include invites to MozFest 2013 in London this October, opportunities for continued online mentoring and local organizing and a chance to help shape where we take the Webmaker mentor program in 2014+. In many ways, Maker Party is a kick off for these lasting activities.

If you are someone who wants to teach the world how the web works — or even just show a few people how to get more creative online — you should get involved. You can start by joining the Teach the Web course or just signing up for Maker Party 2013 updates. Also, start thinking about what you might want to do in your town or city in the coming months. Getting people excited about the web is actually pretty easy. And fun.

Filed under: drumbeat, mozilla, webmakers

May 07, 2013 03:38 PM

Data is a buzzword nowadays. Whether it’s sifting Big Data to influence business, or the promise of Open Data to transform government, or Data Analytics winning elections, data is constantly in the news. But one thing that gets glossed over in all the buzz is that data is hard. Really, really hard. One of the hardest parts is cleaning, standardizing, and formatting data in a way that journalists and others can start to work with. These are real challenges faced by newsrooms and we’re hoping to make some of that a little easier with two new Code Sprints we’re happy to announce today.

First up: Dedupe

One of the biggest problems with data sets is figuring out if information in one set of data is the same as information in another. When you have a small set of data, the work is pretty straightforward. But as your rows increase, the work becomes daunting. Derek Eder and Forest Gregg at Chicago’s DataMade have been working on an automated process for deduplification of data, and we’re happy to help get it to a state where running it through huge datasets is as simple as a few calls from the command line.

A clear early use for the tool is in deduplifying campaign finance records, which can often be a slog. We’ve recruited the help of Derek Willis and others from the New York Times—a href=”who know something about

The DataMade team have done a great deal of heavy lifting already—“we’ve solved the most of major engineering challenges of scaling up on large datasets,” DataMade’s Eder says—but getting a lower barrier to entry on the tool is time and money well spent. If you can program Python, you can fork and start running Dedupe today. If you want to wait for the simplified version, we’re expecting development to wrap up early this summer.

Next up: FMS Parser

The US Treasury releases a statement of, essentially, the Federal Government’s checkbook every day at 4pm EST. Unhelpfully, they release it as a straight-up text file or a PDF. Newsroom developers and info-hackers Cezary Podkul, Burton DeWilde, Thomas Levine, Jake Bialer, Brian Abelson, and Michael Keller started work on scraping and parsing that daily statement at the Bicostal Datafest earlier this year.

The team got far enough along at the Datafest that they approached us about helping to turn it into an open API that any newsroom developer can access. With our Code Sprint grant, the team will take this once nearly-inaccessible dataset and transforming it into an easily accessible API that returns machine-readable JSON. In this time of cutbacks and budget wrangling, the FMS Parser should offer developers and journalists a new way to dive deeply into governmental spending.

The tool should see some immediate use too, as the team of developers working on it include newsroom developers at Reuters, the Daily Beast, and the Huffington Post (along with our Knight-Mozilla Fellow at the New York Times). While it’s still being developed, you can fork and follow at the FMS Parser Github repo.

Onward

A month ago I announced a reimagined Code Sprint application process, and we’re excited to help tools like this get the funding and attention they need through it. We’re always looking for developers and newsrooms with great ideas they want to build (along with newsrooms that want to betatest them), so please drop a line. Let’s do this!

May 07, 2013 02:41 PM

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.

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.

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.

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.

• MONDAY: Top story #2. Coming out of the previous week’s Webmaker call. Focused on community celebration or CTAs. OR: A guest post, highlighting partners / thought leaders. (e.g., http://blog.webmaker.org/how-my-stem-project-led-me-to-the-white-house )
• TUESDAY: All-hands story or presentation. Could be a lightning talk, Popcorn video, or just text + CTAs (e.g., http://popcorn.webmadecontent.org/yah )
• WEDNESDAY: How to to get involved with Webmaker this week. Our top CTAs, brainstormed from the Webmaker call. (e.g., http://openmatt.org/2013/04/30/get_involved-2/ )
• THURSDAY: Top story #1. Coming out of the Webmaker call. Ideally focused on community. Or could be about planning for the future. (e.g., http://explorecreateshare.org/2013/05/01/new-hackable-teaching-kit-prototypes-for-webmaker/ )
• FRIDAY: Webmaker hotlist. A fun Friday treat. (e.g., http://openmatt.org/2013/05/02/hotlist-6/ )

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.

May 07, 2013 02:21 PM

Last week we launched #teachtheweb, a Mozilla Open Online Collaboration (MOOC – more commonly “Massive Open Online Course”). The first week was all about Making as Learning, and today, I'm going to write a reflection. Not an update about Webmaker stuff, not a plug for the MOOC (which is awesome, and you should totally join it), but a reflection on the idea Making as Learning and whether or not that's always true. During Week One of Teach the Web, I was thinking about why I'm such a proponent for this type of learning, and I tried to develop a healthy level of skepticism. I was asking myself whether or not Making is always Learning. Over the weekend, I paid extra careful attention to tasks I would consider making and considered whether or not I had learned. I did learn. But does it count?

• I learned that there's a farm nearby that delivers organic vegetables. I learned this when I was preparing to make dinner.
• I learned that using metal brushes to restore old painted wood works well in combination with heat guns and spatulas. I learned this when I was making a piece of furniture suitable to be brought inside.
• I learned that New York still holds mystical power for 15 year old girls, as it did for me at one point. I learned this when I launched the first German Storycamp at a high school nearby. I learned this through their making.

I think Rafi Santo said it best when he said “Is making, in fact, learning? The short answer: yes, but it’s complicated.” In addition to nodding to everything he says in that post, I find myself thinking about this bit in particular:

“And it’s why I prefer talking about the Maker Movement as having strong lessons for learning, as opposed to just making, which can be construed as more solitary. Making in and of itself can sometimes involve the sorts of steps I described here, but not always. That’s why the answer is complicated. I’m willing to say that someone is always learning something when they’re making, but they learn best when it entails the sort of process, community and well configured structures of participation I describe above.”

Learning something vs learning best. How deep does the learning have to be in order for it to be considered intellectual growth? Who defines what “emotionally mature” means and when a person has reached that maturity? Is it necessary to make a distinction between what I learn as I'm making and what I learn through other people's making? Are the lessons I learn through making, however trite they may seem, worth more when I learn them in a community of practice? At which threshold do we say that a particular pedagogy is working? Despite my attempt at skepticism this weekend, I agree with Rafi that you always learn something through making. I think that something, no matter how small it might seem, is a lesson that has value – if you take the time to reflect on why it has value. But then perhaps I've already learned how to learn. None of this in any way negates the fact that making and learning together is where it's at. We'll explore that in more depth starting today, with Week 2: Connected Learning in Practice.

Related articles

• #teachtheweb: An Online Course(michellethorne.cc)
• Teach the Web (MOOC)(zythepsary.com)

May 07, 2013 11:47 AM

Our work within Mozilla—co-creating great open source software, working with longstanding contributors, interacting with our larger volunteer community—ties in perfectly with badges. Recognizing people for being great at their jobs, acknowledging active collaborators, encouraging folks to deepen their participation is a no-brainer for a community-built and community-reliant organization like ours. Consequently, we’ve begun to develop and pilot internal badge systems within different areas of the organization. Not surprisingly, this growing group of Mozilla badge systems is revealing itself as fertile ground for investigating the development of a variety of badge systems.

Because we work in the open, because many people might find our badging work to be useful as background research into their own work, because we’re large enough that not everyone here is yet aware of the badge design work that’s happening at Mozilla, and because a number of folks have been inquiring about where they might earn badges, I’ve gathered all the badge work that is currently underway or planned for 2013 into this single blog post.

Some Mozilla badge systems pertain directly to education and learning, some are more heavily  focused on capturing and acknowledging prior work, while others are based on encouraging greater commitment to the community. Different badges for different requirements and all of it happening under the Mozilla tent. Nice.

The list of Mozilla badges for 2013 (in very loose chronological order):

• Webmaker badges
• Web literacy standard badges
• WebDev badges
• Capture Mozilla badges
• Webmaker Mentor badges
• SUMO badges
• Engagement badges
• QA badges
• MDN badges
• Student reps badges
• Creative badges
• Affinity badges
• Air Mozilla badges

Webmaker Badges
Many of you are familiar with the Webmaker badges that we debuted at MozFest last year. Those included mini-skill badges earned for learning basic aspects of html and css, along with badges for activities and participation at MozFest 2012. Good news! We have more planned for the coming year. In fact, I’ve just written a great shareable tweet for webmaker badges and I’ll share it here because, this summer it’s going to come true. “Coming soon: Mozilla #webmaker badges built on the community-driven Mozilla #weblitstd; assessed and awarded by peers to peers.”

No doubt by now you’re curious. “What are the peer assessed badges that I will be able to earn this summer?” Good question. Here’s what will be available: badges for remixing, HTML, CSS, composing for the web and credibility. But how did we arrive at these? There’s something more at work here, and that brings us to our next badge system.

Web Literacy Standard Badges
If you haven’t been following our work with Web Literacy, there’s still time to get in on the action. We’re working with the Mozilla community to develop a web literacy learning standard. A standard to which organisations may choose to voluntarily align. We’ve made great headway and we’ve just announced our first Web Literacy Standard draft! For those of you who need a TL;DR of this work, here’s another tweet length explanation, “Co-creating a web literacy standard w/ the Mozilla community. Addressing assessments & badges. Join us: http://mzl.la/106TtlP #weblitstd” Feel free to share that statement on your twitterstream.

Over the last month or so we’ve worked through a mountain of content to a series of areas that we’re calling strands for now. There are three primary strands: Exploring, Building and Connecting that are composed of competencies like remixing, HTML, CSS, sharing, credibility, collaboration, security and privacy. These competencies will be used as a foundation for web literacy badges. Web literacy badges that you’ll be able to earn accomplishing projects here at Mozilla, but that you’ll also be able to earn for work done elsewhere on the web. With the development of these badges we will accomplish our goal of developing a distributed learning environment as well as a distributed badging network, stewarded by an organization dedicated to keeping the web open and free. That’s hard to beat.

I’ll certainly have more to share about web literacy badges again in the future. Indeed, here are two “-quel” badge pathways posts to further explain where we’re headed with the web literacy badge work.

WebDev Stewards Badges
We were really excited to hear that the Web Development stewards were interested in issuing badges recognizing the meaningful contributions that volunteers have been making to Mozilla over the years. They had already put together some basic criteria and done some preliminary thinking about what their badges should represent and how they should be awarded. With that much work already considered, the team felt emboldened to try something new with this endeavor: working with the community to develop the designs for these badges. Considering that these badge represent community participation, it made a sort of beautiful sense to us that they be designed by community members. And so they were.

We received a number of really wonderful designs, some of which made us think hard about what we were communicating through the visual designs and some of which just made us say, “ahhhhh.” There’s much more to say about badge visual design and we’ll cover that in a future post, but I’ll note here that these designs correlate quite nicely with the subject matter that they’re meant to represent. Friends, this is no small feat. Kudos to the team on that. I wrote a bit about these before and I’ll revisit the process of getting to the final product in another post, but for now I’ll just let these badges speak for themselves. (To learn a bit more about our design process, read this fine post by John Slater.)

Capture Mozilla Badges
I learned of the Capture Mozilla badges through a surprise posting on Yammer. Learning about these badges was like earning a stealth badge—surprising and delightful. Mozilla team members finding ways to acknowledge their contributors in ways that are public and shareable through Open Badges. Yes! Of course, we were excited to hear about it and we reached out to Dia Bondi, who along with Sean Bolton and Dino Anderson, is endeavoring to encourage people to contribute to the Mozilla repository through recording their experiences on video, even in less than perfect ways. Knowledge permanently captured is knowledge that continues to work.

Attempting to counter the inaccurate notion that on-camera skill is required or that a lot of preparation is involved, Capture Mozilla turned to badges as a way to be able to “talk about [the] project in a way that acknowledges other people’s contributions.” The team is thinking about the next steps for Capture Mozilla badges, in particular deepen the badging structure. Dia notes that “badging will allow the project to scale.” Music to our ears. People, earn those badges!

Webmaker Mentor Badges
The Webmaker Mentors group is tearing it up with their work on the Webmaker MOOC, ”Teach the Web” that is taking place May through June. The team is testing out a number of theories with this work. And they’re integrating badges into their approach. They’ll be offering a series of four Mentor badges. These badges are nicely reflexive in that they reinforce the very thing they seek to recognize, because when you earn the Mentor badge, you in turn become able to review other people’s work for mentor badges. All in all, a great system that encourages community participation while also acknowledging learning and growth. By the way, these badges will also help folks ramp up for Maker Party 2013: Learn, Remix, Share—coming to you this summer (or winter, depending on which hemisphere you call home).

SUMO Badges
SUMO badges are in the planning stages. Roland Tanglao is busy working his way through some foundational aspects of this badge system. For those of you who are curious as to how this comes together, you might be interested in taking a look at the fun google spreadsheet I’ve devised to helps folks (and myself) think through content.

Engagement Badges
With the recent Firefox OS work, it sort of makes sense that we’d want to start acknowledging peoples’ participation through badges. Emily Goligoski has been working with Chelsea as Engagement start thinking through their four proposed badges aimed at Mozillians and Mobilizers who have participated in Firefox OS launch activities: Firefox OS Events, Firefox OS Trainer, Firefox OS Launch Day and Firefox OS Core Team. It’s still early days and these may change, but suffice it to say that they’re on their way to acknowledging their contributors in a new and dynamic way.

QA, MDN, Student Reps, Creative, Affinity, Air Mozilla
We’re very much looking forward to working with these groups to implement badges. Certainly, QA, Mozilla Developer Network (MDN), and Creative are essential components of what constitutes Mozilla to the outside world. Student Reps provide some of the major firepower behind our offering.  Affinity is weighing the options about ways to acknowledge types of commitment, both financial and temporal. They’re also working hard to ensure that their badges have rigor and value associated with them. Air Mozilla is the newest kid on the badges block. This bunch represents a wide variety of potential badges emanating from Mozilla. We can’t wait to work with them to bring them to life.

Thank you!
That’s a quick summary of the groups within Mozilla who are interested in developing badges or are already in progress with them. If I’ve missed mentioning you, or if you’re interested in working on badges in your area, please contact any member of the open badges team: we’re all happy to work with you. We are deeply grateful to the Mozilla folks who have already reached out to the Open Badges team seeking new and innovative ways to enhance their communities, recognize commitments and acknowledge participation. To say that we’re excited about next steps is to significantly understate our enthusiasm. Just a quick heads up on some immediate next steps, shortly we’ll be meeting with Annie Elliott to begin thinking through metrics for Mozilla badges: another exciting avenue to explore.

And finally, a quick and specific note of thanks to David Boswell for his fantastic work with the Community Builders and Grow Mozilla teams; he and they are proving to be invaluable partners in the ongoing development of badges here at Mozilla.

—

More soon.

Tagged: badge system design, inspiration, mozilla, openbadges, tools, web literacy standard, webmaker, webmaker badges

May 07, 2013 05:36 AM

The New York Times ran an interesting story about alternative forms of career prep that are worth considering in a changing educational ecosystem:

Jasmine Gao, who is 19, just wasn’t the classroom type. So instead of languishing in college, she dropped out after her freshman year.

Ms. Gao decided that she didn’t want to continue studying at Baruch College, part of the City University of New York. At first she considered transferring to Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, but she changed her mind when she saw that her tuition bill would be around $44,000 a year, with only a small amount of financial aid available. “I didn’t want to come out of college with $200,000 in debt and have to spend 10 years paying it off,” she said.

Yet she still sought a way to nurture her interest in technology. A year later, Ms. Gao holds the title of data strategist at Bitly, the URL-shortening service based in New York.

How did she catapult from dropping out of college to landing a plum job? She became an apprentice to Hilary Mason, chief data scientist at Bitly, through a new two-year program called Enstitute. It teaches skills in fields like information technology, computer programming and app building via on-the-job experience. Enstitute seeks to challenge the conventional wisdom that top professional jobs always require a bachelor’s degree — at least for a small group of the young, digital elite.

Read the story in its entirety here.

May 06, 2013 09:28 PM

“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.”

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.

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

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”

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

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

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. — Joel Malley

Get involved

• Join the course. It’s still not too late to sign up — join any time!
• Watch the video from the first live session.
• Check out what people are making. The Google Plus community is full of amazing makes, stories and conversation.
• Join the conversation using the #teachtheweb hashtag on Twitter.

May 03, 2013 08:53 PM

Today we officially kicked off #teachtheweb, a massive open online course (“MOOC”) dedicated to helping people teach the web. It’s convening nearly 3,000 participants to share their practice, teaching materials and to learn and hack on the way.

A huge shout-out goes to Laura Hilliger, fellow MOOC conspirator, for her leadership and savvy to pull this together! And to the Webmaker Mentor team for the wisdom and support.

Here are a few lessons from the course worth highlighting so far.

The Makes

We’re firm believers that you learn best by making.

That’s why there’s no formal instruction or lecturing in this course. Instead, each week we share a prompt that you can respond to with a “make”.

To start, we invited participants to:

Introduce yourself Webmaker style by using Popcorn Maker, Thimble or the X-Ray Goggles and share your make with #teachtheweb.

Already there are loads of great hacks from the community. And in this way, people both learn how to use the tools and mess around with code, and they can also express themselves creatively while getting to know one another.

Check out some of them:

The Study Groups

The other thing about MOOCs is that they are massive. And fire-hose-y. There’s a lot of information on a lot of channels with a lot of people.

So one way we’re mitigating that is with study groups.

Groups are formed based on:

• interests: like toymaking, libraries, or mobile HTML
• language: like French, German and Spanish
• geography: like Webmakers in the UK, Indonesia, and the Balkans.

We also encourage people to organize physical meet-ups, so they can connect with fellow learners and build a local network.

And if they don’t see a group on a topic they care about, it’s all hackable. So they can go in and add one!

The Chatter

The communication channels of the MOOC can be quite overwhelming. We’re trying to meet people where they are, while also playing to the strengths of different tools.

So far, the most important channels are:

• the Google Plus community
• the #teachtheweb hashtag on Twitter
• and the Teach the Web website itself

We made this diagram to help explain how the channels work together and definitely welcome feedback on how to improve them!

The Super Mentors

The people that really make this course run are the Webmaker Super Mentors.

These are passionate people experienced in teaching the web, running events and/or creating teaching materials.

The Super Mentors are:

• shaping the course each week by developing and giving feedback on the curriculum
• leading study groups and surfacing great makes and conversations for the larger group
• providing tech support
• and in general being warm and friendly faces in the course

It’s been so inspiring working with these 90+ Super Mentors so far. It feels like they’re really the heart and soul of Webmaker.

Keep Learning

As a MOOC facilitator, I’m really learning a lot about helping people online and encouraging learning & making. Simplification is key, as is emphasizing how the experience is flexible and adaptable to participants’ needs.

I’m also keen to learn from legendary MOOC facilitators like Philipp Schmidt and Mitch Resnick from MIT’s Learning Creative Learning and other online learning experiences like #etmooc.

If you’re interested in joining the #teachtheweb experiment, hop onto our G+ community and follow the #teachtheweb hashtag!

May 02, 2013 06:44 PM

• Understanding a DDoS attack with Pong — Vice Magazine’s Motherboard helps you visualize a denial of service attack works. Interesting visual analogies of how the web works.
• new Art, Copy & Code film– great example of “web-made movies” / “web-native cinema” / “social video.” It gathers data like time, location, weather and what’s happening on the web — then weaves them into a video that’s unique every time.

• Here is Today — Simple and beautiful data visualization, putting your day into epic context. Like Powers of Ten for time.
• The Build — Great personal storytelling. These bike-makers make the transition from website into film totally seamless.
• Churnalism – Spot plagiarism or questionable sources in your media diet. Just plug in text or a URL, and this checker will look to see how much of the article is ripped from another source — and what source it’s ripped from.

• Meta-piracy inception. What happens when pirates play a game development simulator and then go bankrupt because of piracy?
  
• Boards of Canada code puzzle. Like an easter egg math or code puzzle. More context and latest developments here.
• Is it worth the time? This handy chart helps you decide.

• Red Panda Gymnast – Red Pandas are also known as “Firefoxes,” so we have a soft spot for them. This one does 300 pull-ups a day.
• The lost city of Heracleion — the discovery of an entire city sunk beneath the waves. Doesn’t have much to do with the web, but the photos are amazing.

May 02, 2013 04:12 PM

Re-posted from OpenMatt.org. 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 … Continue reading →

May 01, 2013 01:09 PM

My colleague Matt Thompson wrote an update on the Hackable Kits. Go check it out: http://openmatt.org/2013/04/30/hackable_kits/

This work has been evolving for a while. Check out these actually related articles:

Related articles

• Hacktivity Kits != Event Agenda, but they sure are close...
• 1-Pagers and Contributing
• Hacktivity Kits and Modular Curriculum
• All the posts where I use the word "hacktivity"

May 01, 2013 12:44 PM

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

 

April 30, 2013 07:35 PM

Kevin Carey wrote this story for The Chronicle of Higher Education about the need for information-rich forms of accreditation. It’s told from a hiring manager’s perspective and includes mentions of the work that Degreed and Accredible are taking on in this space. Carey writes:

Colleges will have to grapple with issues of privacy and control. While students are shielded by strong federal privacy laws, they’re also given little control over personal information—like how their transcripts are formatted—that’s vital to their education and eventual employment. Credible evidence of learning needs to be liberated from the bureaucratic clutches of the registrar and made available to students so they can present it to others as they choose.

Much of the interesting work in this area is taking place outside the academy. The Open Badges project, sponsored by the Mozilla Foundation, is at work on a system that allows students to earn and display credentials from participating organizations in a standard format that can be universally recognized.

Read the story in its entirety here.

April 30, 2013 03:54 PM

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.

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.

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.

April 30, 2013 02:26 PM

Okay, not really first. There are three posts that for historical purposes (they are the remnants of the test phase, but they highlight why it needed a test phase to begin with =). [...]

April 30, 2013 09:49 AM

Last time I made the "blue file", a file describing which kanji is decomposed (visually) in what way, I did not have the knowledge that I do now: [...]

April 30, 2013 09:49 AM

• Clean, plugin-less web technologies
• Japanese language studies and teaching
• language philosophy
• theory of knowledge
• problem solving through critical thinking

April 30, 2013 09:49 AM

I figured I'd make some pizza for dinner. It looked good going in the oven, and tasted excellent going in my mouth =P

April 30, 2013 09:49 AM

For your enjoyment I offer the following bug report on the sun bugtracker for java. [...]

April 30, 2013 09:49 AM

First off, the header. The header is a cropped version of the "larger version" of the latest image that got added to my (but potentially anyone's) Flickr account. It uses PHP with the PEAR::Flickr-API package to get a fix on the data required to build the URL for the image, then loads that URL into the GD package (comes compiled into PHP 5), which builds a jpg object off of it, crops it, and then sends that on as actual jpg file data. This is then used as background image for the header div, which is wrapped in an anchor to the Flickr page for that image. Which is nifty.

April 30, 2013 09:49 AM

Last May a sparrow hawk decided to hawk away in our garden block, in the middle of the city (Rotterdam). We managed to get pretty close to it, so my mom and I decided to take a few pictures of it. Lots of duplicates, but after some selection-making I ended up putting five of them online, starting at this picture. The fifth picture has moderate safety set, because it shows the sparrow hawk eating the sparrow (gasp! nature! too horrible!)

April 30, 2013 09:49 AM

My baby, as it were, except I would be a rather negligent parent if I considered it that. Nihongo resources is the website I run for Japanese education material - online dictionaries and lessons, and a downloadable book on the grammar of Japanese are available, and I hope to, over the coming two years, drastically increase the volume of content as well as its footprint on the internet.

April 30, 2013 09:49 AM

This entry is a backlog entry, linking to an article on language being the root of all evil originally posted November 10th, 2005 [...]

April 30, 2013 09:49 AM

• M.Sc. Artificial Intelligence, University of Amsterdam (9/04 - 6/08)
  Thesis project: "Distributed Perception Networks; effecting consistent agent organisation and optimising communication volume in a distributed multi-agent network setting"
• B.Sc.Artificial Intelligence, University of Amsterdam (9/00 - 9/04)
  Graduation project: "The History of the Frame Problem", co-authored with Tijn Schmits
• Visiting student Japanese, Leiden University (10/02 - 1/05)
• Student technical computer science, Technical University Delft (9/98 - 8/00)

April 30, 2013 09:49 AM

Japanese word frequency lists are hard to come by. Or rather, impossible. There is one list on the Monash Nihongo ftp Archive, but it's based on newspapers... and we all know the kind of language you find in newspapers isn't exactly what you find "in real life". [...]

April 30, 2013 09:49 AM

I found view source chart an indispensable plugin for firefox. While I could spend another 2 weeks writing my own version of it, but I figured Jennifer deserved the $10 she charges for it. [...]

April 30, 2013 09:49 AM

I got fed up with Java's inability to properly handle unicode strings due to it relying on a 16 bit "char" primitive. Unicode (at the time of writing) basically covers a space that requires 4 bytes, and char is only 2 bytes 'wide', so it just ... doesn't work. Strings report the wrong length, substring selection can chop up unicode glyphs mid-byte-sequence, it's a mess. [...]

April 30, 2013 09:49 AM

I won't lie - I like to create stuff, and programming things is creating things. I mostly code for things that end up on the web (such as nihongoresources projects) but I also program things for fun just to see if I can. I program mainly in Java and PHP, though I imagine this might be extended with C# in the nearby future given the job I now have.

April 30, 2013 09:49 AM

I like to bake bread. I particularly pride myself on my French bread, which without patting myself on my shoulder is better than most Parisian boulangeries. I should know, because our last Paris trip was, in part, one to find a boulangerie that made baguette that surpassed mine. You would imagine that as a home baker this would not be too hard, but none of the "well ranked" boulangeries got even close. Poilâne had decently tasty baguette, but still not as good. This was very weird. Also, disappointing. Lastly, it means I will simply keep making French bread.

April 30, 2013 09:49 AM

An interesting alternate theory to plate tectonics. Presented a bit too american "listen to me being right"ish, but as a hypothesis certainly worth examining. I'd love to see some studies into it.

April 30, 2013 09:49 AM

Professional publications [...]

April 30, 2013 09:49 AM

Making the current version of my personal homepage was, and I will not lie, fun. It's a mix of technologies that all work together to present what seems to be fairly straight forward and simple data. Which means that I did it right. If it looks ridiculously complicated, that would be lying about what the content is, and if it didn't make it to your browser in a meaningful way, then I would have failed in my programming. [...]

April 30, 2013 09:49 AM

The browser, mind, not the artistic music and singing. [...]

April 30, 2013 09:49 AM

Well, this is something novel. [...]

April 30, 2013 09:49 AM

This entry is a backlog entry, linking to an article on intelligent design originally posted October 6th, 2005 [...]

April 30, 2013 09:49 AM

This entry is a backlog entry, linking to an article on the dev stance in open source software originally posted December 26th, 2005 [...]

April 30, 2013 09:49 AM

One of the musea we went to on our Berlin trip was the Alte Nationalgalerie, or 'old' national gallery. The only reason it's called that is because they built a newer one for even more art, but until that gets reopened (aye, newer and under construction already!) here are the pictures we took at the old one.

April 30, 2013 09:49 AM

I got a new laptop, courtesy of "The Company". [...]

April 30, 2013 09:49 AM

After a day of listening to the podcasts of Penny Arcade and doing some coding, the commenting system is a go. I had to make sure that entries and full sections have 'allow commenting' so that I can post stuff like my CV without you lot being able to comment on it (seriously, don't want to =). [...]

April 30, 2013 09:49 AM

A while ago I wrote a TeX package for automatically adding font markup to a multilingual text, or more specifically a multi-unicode-block text, so that I could simply write my Japanese grammar book in English and Japanese, without having to manually add font codes every time I used them together. Because I needed to do low level character bytecode evaluation, I ended up writing in for PerlTeX, which is just a perl wrapper for 'whichever flavour or tex you are using" (it literally wraps whatever TeX engine you use in a perl thread, and intercepts piped data), and more specifically for the XeTeX version of TeX. XeTeX is basically TeX dragged into the 21th century by expecting all its input to be in utf8 encoding, and being able to work with unicode in general. This unlike plain TeX, which was designed during an era when internationalisation was a non-issue. [...]

April 30, 2013 09:49 AM

int13h.com is most certainly the most important link you will follow in your life. Click it now. You know it makes sense(tm).

April 30, 2013 09:49 AM

Some more photographs. These cover the Berlin Musical Instrument Museum, and the Berggruen-Picasso Museum (neither of these have their own understandable website, so linking is a bit hard) as well as some loose ends. [...]

April 30, 2013 09:49 AM

This entry is a backlog entry, linking to an article on the minimal speed of objects, dictated by a discreet spacetime universe, originally posted July 30th, 2005 [...]

April 30, 2013 09:49 AM

An update for those wondering where stuff is: I just sort-of-finished moving over a four day period. The four day period I have off from work. In between moving and unboxing everything, I did a little bit of programming (I wrote a properly unicode aware charactger array and matching unicode string for java, because java hasn't supported unicode since 2006). [...]

April 30, 2013 09:49 AM

You no doubt know of the spinny blady coffee grinders you can buy. I own one, and there are two major problems with it. 1) it gets quite warm while it's grinding, and 2) it doesn't grind. It punches the beans in the face until they explode in small fragments, which it then proceeds to punch in the face too. This doesn't lead to the most uniform grind. The following is my idea of a good coffee grinder: dual stone wheel on a variable height spring, which crushes by virtue of rolling over the beans at a height that the bean cannot accommodate. Slowly decreasing height means low-friction crushing, which means the coffee doesn't change flavour. The design would be reasonably simple too, I shall try to sketch it out in SketchUp soon and put the image link up for illustration.

April 30, 2013 09:49 AM

While writing the code for this homepage, I ran into the annoying problem that you cannot load javascript into the javascript stack after a page has finished loading. This means that using javascript to load something through an xmlhttprequest that happens to have a "script" element in it, is going to just sit there in the DOM tree without actually being loaded into the javascript stack. [...]

April 30, 2013 09:49 AM

I hate the 'I made this!' kid from the Gracie end-of-simpsons production house notice so very much... as well as the people who thought that was a good production house notice for on a guaranteed long running show. [...]

April 30, 2013 09:49 AM

Getting all the web tech and unicode text to play nice together is a chore. It really is. So, thanks to Dan Grossman the following should always be observed:

• use encodeURIComponent() on any bit of text you are sending through a javascript call to a webpage (what people like to call AJAX, even though it's not always A, and half the time not even AX). don't use escape().
• if you're calling a php script, first call urldecode() if it was a POST request. If it wasn't, don't, PHP will have decoded the content already and explicitly calling it again may screw up your data

[...]

April 30, 2013 09:49 AM

• Best poster award bachelor poster presentations, faculty of AI at the University of Amsterdam - 2004
• Second place ThinkQuest competition (shared ƒ15.000 - €6800 converted) - bio\WEB educational website - 2000

April 30, 2013 09:49 AM

This entry links to my article on personal freedom (elucidated via the crowd-winning technique of using sex as example) and what this actually means in terms of thinking about one's opinion in regards to various freedoms. [...]

April 30, 2013 09:49 AM

I'm working through my backlog of photographs (1650 for 2008 so far... This is going to take a while O.o). Of course, the vast majority are not of a quality that I consider online-publishable (let alone publishable in other media) but it's still a considerable backlog to work through. For the moment I've put some pictures up from when I went to Nanoose Bay with Arty-chan and her mom in March 2008. Click on the header to be transported to my Flickr account to see all of them =)

April 30, 2013 09:49 AM

This entry is a backlog entry, linking to an article on fallacious generalisation, originally posted September 11th, 2008 [...]

April 30, 2013 09:49 AM

Finally almost caught up with all my old photographs - I wrapped up my Berlin set by processing what was left: the Berlin Zoo (no, we didn't see Knut) and a shot of the inside of the DZ Bank (which is bizarre). [...]

April 30, 2013 09:49 AM

With the weather being pleasant, I decided to take a stroll through my parents' garden and take a few pictures. The result is actually fairly enjoyable so I figured I'd set up a set for it, starting at this photograph.

April 30, 2013 09:49 AM