Category Archives: Mozilla

Webmaking as Connected Learning

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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?

Connected Learning: A New Synthesis Report Blog Image

These new resources on Connected Learning are highly recommended reading for anyone interested in the future of education and “learning by making.” As Mimi Ito’s accompanying post explains, the Connected Learning Research Network has tested their hypotheses with a series of case studies, design experiments and a national survey — all culminating in a new report synthesizing the latest theory and research.

What is Connected Learning?

(paraphrasing from the report’s introduction)

  • pursuing an interest or passion with the support of friends and caring adults
  • in ways that are socially embedded and oriented toward educational, economic or political opportunity
  • linked back to academic achievement, career success and civic engagement

What is Webmaker?

  • digital literacy through interest-driven making. empowering people with skills to build the web (and world) we want.
  • pursuing an interest or passion with the support of friends and mentors
  • linked back to achievement, career opportunities and civic engagement through badges

Connected Learning & Webmaker share…

  • Principles: Interest-powered. Peer-supported. Learning by making.
  • Design: Open. Production-centered. Shared purpose.
  • Values: Equity. Social connection. Full participation.

Webmaker as Connected Learning: 5 community stories

Here are five examples of how Webmaker’s first year experimented with bringing connected learning principles into practice, told from the perspective of of real community members:

  1. UNATTI — Interest-based making through openly networked learning events
  2. ZAINAB — From maker to youth mentor to career paths
  3. EMMA — Adult mentorship and youth-run projects
  4. JON — Mixing physical making with digital making. Spurring social innovation in product design
  5. MEREDITH — Talking back to TV: challenging media stereotypes through webmaking

1) UNNATI

code party

“i taught my parents! my brother and also few of my friends in school…..

here is  a thimble web page my father made….

My father is a coder now!!:)

My Mother too!!!”

  • Unnati is a 13-year-old from Erode, India. Last summer she signed up to take part in an openly networked, community-powered learning event called the  Summer Code Party.
  • When no one signed up for the event she wanted to organize in her town, she wrote to the Webmaker community asking for help.

Mentor-powered learning through digital making

  • Gauthamraj Elango, a 21-year-old volunteer Mozilla Rep, saw Unnatti’s message and decided to help, using Webmaker tools and community.
  • Gauthamraj picked webmaking projects geared to Unnati’s interests, beginning with a multimedia storytelling project called “Inanimate Alice,” showing her how to remix it using Webmaker tools like Thimble and Popcorn.

My love for web started with the Inanimate Alice Project.I loved it but it wasn’t a cake walk….i got stuck somewhere in the middle…and to help me Alice sent me Help!

  • With the help of her mentor, Unnati was quickly able to start making her own web pages and projects. These grew her confidence in digital skills like HTML and video remix, and gave her something fun to share with her family and friends.
  • Unnati was then able to bring her new skills into the classroom, creating a web page exhibit for social studies on the role of technology in education.
  • This lead to interest from her teachers and classmates. Unnati organized her own code party events at school, teaching her fellow students and later her parents.

ma and me!

Building social support for new interests

  • Unnati now identifies as a “proud webmaker,” and has become an active part of new community-led projects like Gen Open (see below). This provides ongoing social support for her new interest in digital making and the web.
  • She also advocates taking an interest-based approach to helping others like her gain digital skills, building off popular interest in music, for example.

One day I was watching a video based on the Popcorn project… it said the project was made to attract kids who love Film making to come and learn some code…. and I thought that was a great idea…And that we could apply the same idea for people who love music…. there are millions who love music… I am a music lover myself! :)

2) ZAINAB

Technology isn’t something I really expressed an interest in until recently. Gradually, I started getting into creating and designing technology, which led to webmaking.

  • Zainab is a 16-year-old high school junior in NYC, and a member of her school’s “MOUSE Squad,” a tech literacy program and member of the Hive NYC learning network.
  • Zainab participated in a series of Summer Code Parties last summer, from small  skill-shares with other Hive network teens to larger hack jams.
  • As part of that process, Zainab began running “train the trainer”-style events, showing other youth facilitators how to use the Webmaker “X-Ray Goggles” for workshops with middle school students after school.

Earlier this year, I was trained on how to use and teach others about X-Ray Goggles…. This was when I first started thinking about how to not only use the web, but to start making the web. From then on, I just basically started grabbing every opportunity I could to develop and gather more skills as a webmaker.

Social advocacy through webmaking

  • Zainab also used Webmaker’s Thimble to create her own social advocacy project for other youth.
  • Her “Take a Stand” template makes it easy for youth to create their own web page about a social issue or cause they care about, learning digital skills as they go.

I was motivated by the documentary “Bully,” and the purpose of my web project is for people to take a stand and make an impact on an issue that they really care about by creating a simple web page about it.

From mentorship to educational and career opportunities

  • Zainab wrote about her experiences on Huffington Post in posts titled “Don’t Be A User, Be a Maker” and “On Becoming A Hacker.”
  • Her longer-term goal: study electrical and computer engineering at MIT.
  • Webmaker and Hive have provided her with resources to help level up her skills, plus practical leadership experience and references that can help.

Some people might argue that it is not important to learn things like HTML and CSS, but in a world where we are being introduced to new technology every day, it’s a part of your world and you don’t want to be blind to what’s going on in your environment.

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Hive Hacks the Day

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Last week, a group of developers, designers, educators, programmers and learning innovators came together to hack for a better web. The Project:Connect hackathon, hosted by Facebook, MacArthur Foundation, the Family Online Safety Institute and Mozilla, kicked-off the fifth Digital Media & Learning Competition, to advocate for the innovative use of new media in support of connected learning.

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At the event, nearly fifteen teams of professionals worked to create plans and prototypes for tools to enable a more equitable, social, and participatory internet.

We were proud (but far from surprised) to see that Hive NYC was in full effect. Representatives from City Lore, Exposure Camp, Global Kids, Institute of Play, Iridescent, MOUSE, New York Public Library and WNYC Radio Rookies were all in attendance, and spent the day iterating on new and existing ideas to help young people access and leverage the web for everything from building community support frameworks to gaining better information access in schools.

Teams quickly got into “less yak, more hack” mode. Large Post-it pads lined the walls as wireframes were drawn, domains were purchased and minimum viable prototypes were built. At the end of the day, each team had five minutes to present their pitch to a panel of judges that included: Cynthia Germanotta, co-founder of the Born This Way Foundation (also known as Lady Gaga’s mom); Chris Bevans, Founder of CBAtelier, creative director for Billionaire Boys Club and MIT Media Lab Fellow; Diana Rhoten, Chief Strategy Officer at Amplify; Anne Collier, safety expert, on the Facebook Safety Advisory Board and editor of NetFamilyNews.com; and Dave Steer, Manager of Policy Communications at Facebook.

Team Emoti-Con advocated for a youth-led campaign to advocate for blocked URLs at schools and libraries to provide greater access to students looking to leverage the web for conducting research and creating web-based media projects. A special bookmarklet would enable youth, parents, students and educators to submit URLs for review, and start a dialogue about which websites should be used for educational purposes.

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Team Emoti-Con advocated for unblocking URL at schools and libraries.

Team Truth pitched a new web app called Cyberstoop, which calls upon local communities to help keep youth connected. Teens would enter their zip code to find local businesses willing to share their wi-fi during after school hours, providing greater opportunities for access to do homework or surf the web. Congratulations to this team for winning 3rd place in the Social Tools for Social Good category!

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Team Truth called on local businesses to share wi-fi access with students after school.

The That Could Be Your Sister team proposed a youth-led, virtual neighborhood watch on behalf of victims of sexual cyberbullying. This was the only team that had a high school student participate–big kudos to Temitayo for joining us! According to their prototype, a social media bookmarklet would be used to report images and videos that engage in “slut-shaming,” and micro-communities would rally to reach out and support victims. Click the image below to hear more about their pitch and the movement Temitayo and Radio Rookies have already started to build. Listen to the story that Temitayo and Radio Rookies produced for WNYC on the topic of sexual cyberbullying, check out their complete pitch presentation, and follow @couldbeyoursis on Twitter.

Screen Shot 2013-05-14 at 6.49.28 PMCongratulations to this team for winning 1st place in the Social Tools that Enable Control of Information category!

Winners-thatcouldbeyoursister

That Could Be Your Sister addresses sexual cyberbullying with a community-based approach to “Protect Our Sisters”

We’d like to congratulate all of the winners and everyone who participated! We look forward to sharing updates on how some of these projects continue to develop. Until then, let’s keep exploring ways to co-create experiences that help young people enhance their civic participation on the web!

Making and Reflection: Learnings from Hive Toronto’s NASA Youth Space Challenge

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This is a guest post by Kathryn Meisner, Director of Hive Toronto.

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In last week’s inaugural #teachtheweb Twitter chat about making and learning, participant Chad Sansing succinctly outlined key ways we can learn from making: “design, iteration, documentation, publication, reflection, failing w/ gusto.” In my response, I heartily agreed but noted that reflection is often the missing piece of this puzzle.

The “making as learning” approach is baked into Hive member organizations’ work with youth and it also underlies the way Hive Toronto functions as a network. In efforts to build the reflection piece into the Hive Toronto puzzle, we held our first post-pop-up “High Fives and Debrief” session to discuss most recent event, the NASA Youth Space Challenge.

TLDR

In a nutshell, this debrief conversation showed us:

  • We are indeed meeting a need within the Toronto community
  • Our collaborative process is working
  • We run a mean pop-up

However, in order to level up we need to:

  • Be more proactive about making these opportunities accessible to more youth
  • Tweak some of our collaborative and event-planning processes

The NASA Youth Space Challenge

On April 20th, Hive Toronto hosted the NASA Youth Space Challenge. It was one of 8 locations worldwide that offered a youth branch of the NASA International Space Apps competition. Space Apps “embraces collaborative problem solving with a goal of producing relevant open-source solutions to address global needs applicable to both life on Earth and life in space.”

This pop-up was initiated by MakerKids, a Hive Toronto member – another first for Hive Toronto! MakerKids took on a programming role and worked collaboratively with other members to create stations that utilized their organization’s skill set but added a space twist. I could not be the event lead for this pop-up because I was going to be out of the country on event day. Ashley Lewis, a Hive member via TiffKids, MakerKids, and Girls Learning Code, stepped up to be the lead.

In true Hive pop-up style, the NASA Youth Space Challenge brought together 5 member organizations to provide awesome making and learning stations for youth to explore in a self-directed, interest driven way.

In addition to MakerKids, participating Hive member organizations included Boys and Girls Clubs of Canada, Story Planet, FabSpaces, Girls Learning Code as well as the Centre for Planetary Science and Exploration and Mozilla’s Webmaker team.

NYSC - FabSpaces Continue reading →