Category Archives: Webmaking

Webmaking as Connected Learning

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Continue reading →

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

Posted on by
5

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

Screen Shot 2013-04-29 at 12.28.54 PM

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 →

Maker Party: let’s spark a movement

Posted on by
1

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 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.

Maker Party 2013

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.

Firefox 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.

Maker Party Timeline

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.