Tag Archives: webmaker

Maker Party: let’s spark a movement

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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.

New hackable teaching kit prototypes for Webmaker

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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 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.orggoing forward. This post shares the prototypes and summarizes the new thinking.

Kit prototype

How do hackable kits work?

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

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

Kit prototype -- edit

New Thimble prototypes

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

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

profile page

What’s the goal?

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

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

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

Building Webmaker 2.0

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

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

“Everything is a make”

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

The NYT -- Common CoreCan we flow great content like this into our these new prototype templates?

 How to get involved

How My STEM Project Led Me to The White House

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I attended the White House Science Fair as a representative of my MOUSE Corps team, Hudson High School of Learning Technologies, and Mozilla and Hive NYC. While there, I got to see amazing youth projects from all around the nation and shared my assistive technology project, The Dining Band, with fellow innovators/students and special guests such as Bill Nye The Science Guy, Kal Penn, and NASA engineer, Charles Boldon.

This event made quite the impact on me. I consider myself a maker, but it was inspiring to see myself as part of a larger movement. I was excited to hear about the president’s commitments to giving more students opportunities to learn more about science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), like AmeriCorps STEM volunteers visiting schools, or the Maker Party campaign from Mozilla and The National Writing Project that will inspire people around the world to have fun while learning new skills.

President Obama said, “We’ve got to do everything we can to make sure that we are giving these young people opportunities to pursue their studies and discover new ways of doing things.” Well, President Obama, we young makers will hold you to that promise and continue to utilize these opportunities provided to the best of our abilities.

MY DAY IN PICTURES

I was invited to the White House Science Fair after my MOUSE Corps team’s tech project won the top prize at the Emoti-Con NYC Youth Media & Technology Challenge:

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We designed a “Dining Band,” a wrist-mounted distance and temperature sensor device that helps people who are blind or visually impaired discreetly locate food on their plate as they are eating.

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Here’s me and 15-year-old Senqué A. Little-Poole from Hive Pittsburgh, who was there to showcase his research on how to use anti-virus cells to cure diseases.

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Here I am jumping in front of the US Treasury Department.

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This is moments before President Obama shook my arm (not hand), which was pretty awesome:

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I listened to Obama’s speech from the second row.

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Here’s me taking a selfie and talking about my project with Bill Nye (The Science Guy).

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I was very inspired by my fellow student makers — especially Easton LaChapelle, who created a neural activated biochemical prosthetic arm.

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P.S. I got to try the Fried Thunder, Cheesecake Chimichanga at Union Station in D.C.!

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