Academic European Instructor Evil Robot

WHOA! I know, I know, I’ve totally been slacking on my “Blog Every Single Tuesday” rule. I’ve been busy. Really busy, and I haven’t had a chance to actually think about what I wanted to write. Thus, I’m doing a roundup post. Here’s some brief insight into what I’ve been thinking about and doing:

  1. Linking Past and Present
    I’ve been reading a book about German Reform Pedagogy (really brief, dirty definition): the thought movement that happened circa 1900 to 1930s that changed the face of education. A LOT of the ideas we believe in for education, like learning through making, collaboration, interested-based learning, etc were being talked about in this time. A parallel thought movement (does the name John Dewey say anything to you?) called “Progressive Education” was happening in the US. They’re NOT considered the same movement by the German educational academics (even though they happened at the same time, and they were talking about the same things and concluding with the same conclusions. Also, if you click the English button on the Wikipedia article Reformpädagogik, you get the Wikipedia article on Progressive Education…) Anyway, I’m thinking about the connection between the discussion happening NOW and these movements from the 1900s. Specifically, I’m wondering if Georg Kerschensteiner, one of the leaders of the German Reform Pedagogical Movement, actually conceived the pillars of digital and/or new literacies in a time when RADIO was new fangled and cool.
  2. Cultural Clashing
    I live in Europe, so I’ve been looking at the landscape of web literacy and learning programs here on the home front. I talk to people a lot about the work we do at Mozilla, and I keep wondering how we can get the awesome energy of the North American continent’s movement in the educational realm to percolate here in Europe. There’s tons of good programs happening, but it seems like the cohesion of our community here is faulty at best. There are pockets of innovation happening, but we’re not yet playing the role we’re championing in the US and Canada. In London and Berlin we’re finding ways to bring web literacy to a number of different groups, but what about the rest of Europe?When I talk to people about web literacy here in Germany, they’re sometimes skeptical, something I find pretty unbelievable. There seems to be a lot of people that still believe that web literacy skills will be gleaned without guidance, that these skills are somehow given, not learned. This misguided idea that the new generation are “digital natives” seems to be influencing the learning landscape, and I want to step up and change that notion (with a little help from my friends, naturally).
  3. Guiding the Guide
    Been doing tons of thinking and work on helping informal instructors access Mozilla content. Lots of people are wanting to run their own hack jams and teach this or that techie thing to youth and adults. A lot of these people need a little help, so we’ve been creating materials that give them step by step guidance and activities that will help them hit the ground running. Call it curriculum, call it learning materials, call it hacktivity kit 2.0, the point is we’re trying to make some resources that help those active community members run their own events and teach people things without having to go crazy figuring out the all important “what will we do!?” question. We currently have a wiki up. It’s just temporary, not all slick and beautiful, but we needed a holding place for some of this stuff. You are welcome to edit and add to it!
  4. Introduction to Web Native Film and StoryCamp
    StoryCamp planning, preparation and production is coming along. We’re all over it like white on rice, and we’re building some kick-ass stuff. What’s really cool is that with this theme, I get to spend a bit of time looking at crazy films from the 50s, and that is a load of fun. I also get to repurpose a robot I drew a few weeks ago.

WebPageMaker Open Web Nice Robot concept drawing:

StoryCamp Robots Invade Everywhere Evil Robot concept drawing:

Muwwwhahahha! Actually, this whole project is awesome and awesome fun, having a blast! Here, check out some of our mockups And don’t forget feedback is always welcome!



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It’s not *just* Popcorn

I’m really excited about the Popcorn Story Camp coming up this summer. The program planning is coming along nicely, and we’re beginning to make assets (which is always fun). Just check out Kate Hudson’s awesome branding sketches.

We’ve even already written the first draft of a sample curriculum to help webmakers and educators spread the joy of Popcorning. It’s called “Introduction to Web Native Film”, and it’s not just about Popcorn. The idea is that learners will get a solid footing in the definition and processes of Web Native Filmmaking, and they’ll do so while learning other webmaking skills like community etiquette, collaborative making, restaurant html and many more. No, this isn’t just about Popcorn, it’s about webmaking.

The Popcorn Story Camp will run in youth organizations this summer. We’ll be holding and recording Webinars with totally awesome guest speakers. Learners will be invited to create a multitude of content surrounding their topics and at the end of the six weeks, the youth that participate in the Popcorn Story Camp will showcase their films and projects and share them with all of us.

Although this content is being created for the summer program, everything we’re doing is customizable and modular. We’ll have DIYs, Cheatsheets, Curriculum and Information that are supported by a six chapter film that covers things like Media History and Remixing. We’ll be creating online and downloadable resources to get filmmakers thinking about their craft in a whole new light.

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Learning Projects for the Webpagemaker

Make Me Pretty

Remember how ugly the Web used to be? We’re in the process of developing some learning content that uses that sad fact to teach basic web design concepts and help people level up on their HTML/CSS. We’ve thought up a slick way to deliver the curriculum using comments and will be using the method across the board. All the Make Me Pretty Projects have cool ASCII images in the code and ask a learner to “Make Me Pretty”. Learners tinker with the CSS and content to make each page their own. Here’s the first 3 ideas:

Stuck in the 90′s – We need a new name (“Stuck in the 90s” is kind of boring)

Sans Comic

Color Collapse

You can take a look at the curriculum here. And we’d love any feedback you have!

Popcorn DIYs

For Popcorn, we’re creating Do-It-Yourself templates that guide learners step-by-step through the process of making a Popcornified video. We’ve started with a single DIY that asks learners to pull an old commercial from the Prelinger Archive and add their own voice using popups. Kate Hudson is creating special templates for these DIYs, and we’ll be offering them through the Webpagemaker as well as other avenues (eg through mozillapopcorn.org, in the context of the Summer Story Camp, etc).

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Weekend of Webmaking

I spent my entire weekend making stuff in collaboration with newbie and oldie Webmakers. It was fun. Here’s my (brief) roundup on the three separate events.

Friday Night: Kitchen Table with Kids

All I had to do was offer “real” American Cheeseburgers to get an 8 year old and a 5 year old to let me show them some web stuff. I introduced them to the Hackasaurus XRay goggles. The five year old was interested for about two seconds, but then the ants in his pants must have started biting him because he decided to get up and run around. The eight year old spent some time hacking the zoo’s website and changing the names of the animals profiled there. She needed a lot of help and was a bit afraid of the code aspect. We hacked for about thirty minutes, and in the end she said (loosely translated)

“It’s pretty cool that you can mess the Internet up.”

Win.

Saturday: Popcorn Learning Lab – The next morning I got up early and headed to Berlin to help out Michelle and Cole. We started with some demos, then broke into groups. Group A took a look at the Popcorn Maker and Group B took a look at Popcorn JS. We hacked for awhile getting used to the tool/code and then we had lunch. When we returned, whomever had an idea for what to make pitched the idea. Then we formed groups and spent the rest of the day hacking on six ideas. Everyone hacked, everyone brainstormed, everyone made things and had fun.

Win.

Sunday: Earth Day Online – Headed towards Hamburg Saturday evening. Spent the night in a tiny German village and then Sunday morning I headed into the city. After hanging around in a cafe for a couple hours, I headed to the Betahaus Hamburg to hack. We had a VERY intimate group taking up the donated Betahaus space. Betahaus was wonderful, and a perfect address to gather webmakers in Hamburg. I hope we can work together in a more formal way in the future (Betahaus was kind enough to donate the space and have someone work on a Sunday, despite the fact that they are a young startup). HUGE THANK YOU! Admittedly, we spent a lot of time yakking, and just a little time hacking, but there was enthusiasm for the Mozilla tools and ethos. People are EXCITED about our work, and they want to help us.

Win.

In short, met a lot of potential contributors, got great feedback on tools and ideas and had fun webmaking all weekend.

Win.

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Initial Distill of Kitchen Table Lessons

Mozillians have been beta testing the Kitchen Table format. After reading a lot of good write ups about individual tests (from Joe, Jess, Lainie, Peter and others), I was inspired to start distilling lessons. I’m sure we’ll do more in depth reviews, but for now here are some things to think about if you’re going to run a kitchen table event.

Overall

  • Follow the KISS principle – a couple people (including myself) have written that they tried to do too much in the session.

Adult Newbies

  • Generally find the Goggles cool, but really need the instructional and explanation layers.
  • Need a specific ask
  • Need real motivation (“Why should I care about CODE?”)
  • Generally more interested in using the web better
  • Willing to play, but seem to crave a little more in-depth instruction and understanding (“Why am I doing this?”)

Teen/Young Adult Newbies

  • a very loosely structured remix ask seems to work well (even if they spend too much time collecting assets)
  • quick on the uptake of how to use the tool
  • questionable deeper understanding – having fun playing, but probably need the instructional and explanation layers for retention of tags, attributes, etc. Interest driven learning + some guidance works really well.

Adult/Young Adult/Teen Intermediate

  • Quickly bored with the Goggles, quickly bored with the sandbox
  • apparent disinterest can be fought with more immersive games
  • need activities to inspire further learning, more advanced content for “almost webmakers”

Kids (pre teen, or early teen)

  • an “assignment” like Inanimate Alice or a specific remix seems to be the way to go
  • younger kids need a theme and specific ask

All that tells me that:

  • we should be figuring out a way to build in instructional and explanation layers in the web maker/learning tools
  • adult newbies with low or non existing intrinsic motivations will be a hard sell (even if they have extrinsic motivations)
  • we’re right on the money with our approaches for teens
  • we need to figure out next steps, new projects and resources for intermediate coders (activity/mission scaffolding)
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Kitchen Table Beta with Adults

On Thursday, I did my first kitchen table beta test with friends (all of them over 30 with limited web skills). I started with a frank and honest statement about how I feel about webmaking and why it’s important. I was brief, but passionate about it. Then we did an activity I’m calling Existential Questions.

You ask three existential questions and have each person write a one word answer to each of the three questions on post its. You then put the post its on the wall and talk about whether or not you can reach enlightenment on the answers via the Internet.

My questions were:

  • Why are you here?
  • What do you know?
  • What do you want to learn?

This activity was EXCELLENT for starting a deep dive of what the internet is, why it should be open, what competencies are needed. This is the activity to do when you want to gage the web ethos knowledge in the room and frustrations stemming from using the Web. I asked “Can you learn patience on the web?” leading to a discussion about searching the web from a philosophical perspective.

“How do we learn the patience to find what we want?”

“The problem is that internet is full of opinions, but what you search for is knowledge.”

The ability to search and detect bullshit were skills people lacked, and they were obviously frustrated by this. These statements surprised me, as I was not really expecting this group to have problems with any of the Exploring skills.

This discussion would have gone on all night, if I hadn’t bridged the conversation into Hackasaurus.

For the next step, I stole a screen from the Popcorn Event Kit Slideshow and talked a little about HTML(structure), JS(function) and CSS(style).

Then, I demoed the Goggles and asked everyone to choose a page and remix it. One of my friends did exactly what I thought he would do and moved his (losing) football team to the top of the score table.

Another friend made the temperature for the weekend warmer, and the weather sunnier. People helped each other and had fun playing with the goggles. They were enthusiastic about the play for a little while.

Then came the questions

“And now?”

“What are we supposed to do now?”

I explained to my friends that I only wanted to show them that they have the power to change the web, that it’s a system and that they have control over the system. They said

“Ok, but we still don’t know anything more than that there’s a cool tool from Mozilla that lets a look at the parts of a page. We don’t know what any of this means though.”

I opened Text Edit and walked them through writing an HTML page from scratch. I explained tags to them. We laughed by making the page I was writing really ugly on purpose.

“Yep, that’s how most websites look!”

This was more successful for learning than the Goggles were in this group. A two-paned collaborative coding environment at this point would have been a much better tool to use here, I didn’t think about HTMLPad until later (my bad).

After showing them how to write a basic (ie 5 tags) page, we were 1.5-2 hours in. I felt like we needed more time, that we were barely scratching the surface, that we should practice HTML and build projects together. I would have continued, but because the invitation was so informal, it was difficult to allot more time for the session. People were ready to stop using the computers, though they were more than happy to continue discussing web skills with me.

These are my friends, so I asked them for feedback. One said that there was a step missing between “this is what HTML is” and “this is what the XRay Goggles do”. She said that I really should have put context around the code by showing the source of an entire page earlier in the hour. Another comment was about the step after remixing,

“What am I supposed to do now?”

One of my friends commented:

“Children are more interested in the play aspect of remixing, whereas adults are more interested in the ability to do something real. We have real problems to solve, and we want to solve them while we’re learning.”

I asked whether or not they wanted to learn more about HTML and CSS. They all said no. I didn’t ask about if they wanted to learn to code, I asked them if they wanted to learn more about HTML/CSS.

Here begins the subjective:

Many adults want to increase their searching skills, increase their ability to use the web more efficiently and be able to participate more. They have tools to do this and are interested in learning to use those tools (kitchen table for WordPress was requested), but I can imagine many adults are just not interested in learning how those tools are built. Many will feel that they are past the “I can learn to code” point. I’ve been in that situation a lot, and thus far the solution has been to help people learn what they want to learn and what they believe they can learn. There will be people who want to go to the next level, and there will be people who do not AND THAT IS OK.

Perhaps there are different levels of web literacy? Perhaps the “Generation of Webmakers” is really the next generation? I absolutely think we need to be teaching basic programming and computational thinking to youth, but what about adults? What do we consider “web literacy” in adults?

I’m interested in getting this group the help they want. Helping them reach a technical level of expertise that makes their lives easier and allows them to participate in the amazing ecosystem that is the world wide web. Perhaps in the case of web literacy, the technical level needs to be subjugated? It’s not just about the media (code) but a way of thinking. I think this group needs to understand what code is, what is possible, what limitations there are. HTML/CSS is an example of understanding, but it isn’t understanding itself.

In traditional literacy you need the technical level (characters, words, sentence structure, grammar…), you have to be able to read to understand the story. With web literacy, you don’t have to be able to read (or understand) the code to understand the story, because the story is translated from the machine language to a language that you can understand (visual and written language). It seems like this fact will greatly influence educational concepts for different audiences.

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the Webmaker and the Meat of my Job Description

At Mozilla we’re working on something we’re calling the Webmaker. It’s a couple of things, but at the base level it’s an underlying, consistent toolset that can be used to create or participate in learning experiences.

I’ve been thinking on this thing for a while (since draft one), and I haven’t said anything much about it yet. I will now rectify that. As I’ve said in previous posts, I am a systems thinker. I can’t understand the pieces and parts without understanding the whole. I’ve been doing a little drawing.

The tool is modular and slotted to have seven overarching components:

  1. the Editor
  2. the Mission Library/Maker
  3. the Gallery
  4. the Badge Issuing widget
  5. the Assessment Builder
  6. the Template Collection
  7. the Hacktionary API

My drawings slightly disagree.

First, I collapse the Gallery and the Template collection. The Gallery is supposed to be “A place to save / share / show off / invite remixes of the things you create,” while the Template collection is “Starting points for things you might want to remix or just tinker with for learning reasons.” I don’t see any reason to separate the two because

  1. separating them will lead to confusion from the user on which is which (“Hey, what’s the difference b/w this set of thumbnails and that set of thumbnails?”), and
  2. I think we should give people the ability to remix each others work.
  3. Further, I think that we can designate remixes from originals and learning templates from ‘non learning’ templates (ie those that were not prepared with learning in mind) through metadata and filtering, rather than the creation of two different collections.

Secondly, I’m dump the “Mission Library” (ie templates of learning missions) into the Gallery (as I’ve defined it above). The Missions should be tagged, filterable, etc, but I don’t think there needs to be a separate collection for them.

The “Mission Maker” on the other hand, is definitely separate from the Missions. It is “a way to create guided learning experiences and games.“ The Mission Maker helps people create Missions which are learning templates that live in the Gallery – make sense? Good.

Ok. Here’s where I ended up:

  1. the Editor
  2. the Gallery
  3. the Mission Maker
  4. the Badge Issuing widget
  5. the Assessment Builder
  6. the Hacktionary API

But there’s something missing for me. Another component. The lost consideration. The Meta level. The glue. The Interface. The thing that all of this sits inside. The thing that tracks progress, gives an overview of the system, recommends pathways for learners that need guidance, brings in social. The thing that makes this a personal experience for people and gives them the ability to learn what they want. We need to talk about that at some point.

We can do that later. Let’s go back to the Mission Maker:

Right now, there’s a few of us defining and building the initial “missions” (AKA Learning Templates) for people to use during the Summer of Code Party. That same group of people is trying to figure out the “Mission Maker”.

I must, at this point, reference Audrey Waters who has been talking and writing about Bad Pedagogy for a while now. Last year she talked about Codecademy’s lack of pedagogy and how Khan Academy’s lecture demonstrations aren’t special just because they’re using technology (agreed on both counts). Just yesterday she quoted an article in the New York Times:

“The challenge for Codecademy and others catering to the hunger for technical knowledge is making sure people actually learn something, rather than dabble in a few basic lessons or walk away in frustration. “

“Making sure people actually learn something.” That sentence is what I consider the meat of my job description. We build fun, exciting things, but at some level someone needs to step back and say, “That’s very cool, but the learning that happens there is completely peripheral.” If we’re going big in learning, then learning is the focus.

If we’re going to give people a tool for creating their own lessons, then we need to figure out the flow, functions and wording required for a NON educator to make learning experiences that actually teach something. Yesterday I did a quick hack to begin thinking about this. At this most basic level, a non educator MIGHT have enough prompting to be able to make something that could be used for learning. Is Mozilla, with this particular tool, creating a product or a process? Because Missions should support learning, I feel the Mission Maker needs to be about both.

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Embedding Webmaking

Background: There’s a beautiful piece of land across the street from my house, 13 hectares, undeveloped, unspoiled, natural biotope in the middle of Dresden North. It’s home to a number of protected species, and it’s the only park-like land in several neighborhoods. My neighbors and I founded a citizen initiative in July, 2011 after a developer submitted plans to build a bunch of horribly ugly buildings with no purpose. We’ve been fighting (and winning) against the implementation of those plans. I’m organizing an event with the nonprofit my citizen initiative founded in December of last year.

The event is a street festival with a little make contest for kids. We’re inviting preschools and elementary schools to participate and build dragons with their kids. There will be a exhibition of the dragons and prize money for the most creative dragon as well as the best documented make process. We’ll be posting their documentations online, with images and artifacts from the festival, to show the world what Dresden schoolchildren are making.

Along with the documentation of the make process, one of the program points is a Hackasaurus kitchen-table-like session. I’m going to show kids how to use the XRay Goggles and remix the nonprofits website to become a website of Dragon something something. I’m going to introduce whomever wants to learn to the underlying structure of the WWW. This session is alongside of things like shooting a bow and arrow, painting, glass blowing, soap box derby, etc.

I had to FIGHT for the Hackasaurus session. I wrote the initial program including the documentation point for the contest as well as the Hackasaurus session for the day of, and everyone in the planning committee said “That’s too much Internet, this is a street festival.” “No one wants to have computers at a festival!” Oh? Really?

I told them that from Tokyo to New York to Kenya, kids have loved playing with Hackasaurus. I explained to them that the web fits in everywhere. I told them that documenting the make process was necessary for the nonprofit and our own press.

I told them what I know to be true – Webmaking can be embedded in anything.

The discussion carried on. It made me realize just how much work we have to do. A lot of people simply do not see the possibilities of webmaking. These people are computer literate, but they are far, far away from web literate. They don’t understand webmaking, so they don’t think it’s an important concept to teach. I am extremely interested in reaching this group.

There are a lot of people doing awesome things online and with the web and they’re showing others how to participate. We definitely have a responsibility to them. We need to support them, help them find learning materials that work. For sure. But I think we also need to get outside of our own comfort zone and evangelize to those people that are not yet converts to the community. I’m pretty confident that the Summer Campaign will have a real effect here.

In the meantime, I’m doing three separate kitchen tables to spread the love (and test the format). Two of them are now directly targeting the group called “Adults that are a little resistant to change”.

And on May 12, 2012 – there will be Webmaking sessions at a street festival in Dresden where kids can remix the web, and I’m sure they’re going to dig it.

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Embrace the BORING then get CREATIVE

You know what? Writing curriculum is freaking BORING. You know why? Because educators are taught that learning requires specific activations in the brain. Long-term memory encoding happens through meta-cognitve processes. For information to be truly learned, various centers in the brain need to be activated. Educators are aware of the psychological strides needed for a learner to really learn something (ie learn it and know it for the rest of their lives). Thus, educators create curriculum with the actual psychological learning process in mind.

Snore. Boring. Necessary.

It’s important to know WTF you’re trying the learner to have in the long run, and the pieces and parts to get there. It’s important to know what individual skills are that make up the bigger picture. It’s important to present this information in a way that actually activates working memory processes. Yep, it’s boring, but it’s also necessary if you want anyone to learn anything.

My theory is that the reason traditional curriculum is stiff is because whomever was writing it stopped at the halfway point. They said “Oh, here, someone can learn this now. Done.”

But there’s more to do! Inject the fun, making, and play into the boring, and not only is the curriculum not boring anymore, the learner will have better retention rates (it’s been proven, fun, hands-on, making, playing, discovering – these thing matter).

Compare and contrast:

  1. I want Tristan to learn robotics. I give Tristan a refrigerator box full of random pieces and parts, everything he would need to build a robot. I say “Here, start making a robot.”
  2. I want Tristan to learn robotics. I prepare a guide on building robots. It’s very basic, but enough to make a differential drive robot. I give him a refrigerator box full of random pieces and parts, everything he would need to build a robot. I give him the pointers I wrote. I say “Here, start making a robot.”

Here’s the likely results:

  1. Tristan might make a cool sculpture, but without any other input, it’s about 99.9% that Tristan will not learn anything about robotics. It’s fun, he’s tinkering and making, but the competency I’m trying to teach him is lost.
  2. Tristan can begin exploring that box of pieces and parts and putting things together. When he gets stuck, he references the guide. He begins to understands the basics and builds on that knowledge all by himself. Tristan will make a robot and in the process, he’ll learn varying aspects of robotics. (And, in the end, his robot is so rad, he’ll be interested in taking his knowledge further.)

I’ve written the boring for the Web Literacy skill “Designing for web”. And now I get to get creative with the learner. All I have to do is think up the refrigerator box. What’s in there for the learner to play with and how will the learner build on the basic knowledge contained in the boring and get creative constructing her own knowledge? How will we inspire play when so much theoretical knowledge is contained within the skill?

I think the Hack Book is a really good start to this “refrigerator box”. I’m looking forward to building this out with fun learning experiences, and when a learner needs it, the reference pieces. I’m thinking up ways to present the theoretical without the learner realizing they’re learning best practices or design theory.

And, as always, I’d love to hear your feedback on my process :)

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Rockin out at DML

This week has been a whirlwind of activity. Monday we launched the P2PU and Youpd.org challenges, which you should check out. Then it was a jump into DML.

The Digital Media and Learning conference was an opportunity for a large segment of the Mozilla Foundation staff to come together. We started the week doing a sprint for the Event Kit and Event site Mozilla is working on. The Kit is a series of how-tos, curriculum and resources that will help you organize and run an event. We’re creating multiple pathways for a person to jump into making and learning in collaboration with each other. We were highly productive and have created a model that will scale, which (judging by the conversations I had with people at DML) is going to be hugely important.

Michelle Thorne and I will be mini-sprinting next week in Berlin to finish creating v.01 of a bunch of how-tos helping people get started organizing their own events. We’ll also be preparing Mozilla content to make it easy for people to grab an event agenda and start making.

This morning we had an impromptu Mozilla Learning Group gathering in which we discussed our path forward. We are diving into the Web Literacy curriculum and talking to a bunch of different organizations and go-getters about ways we can support the innovative making and learning they’re doing. We talked about how much we have to do, and we spent time hashing out the logistics of how to do it all.

Last night at the Mozilla Science Fair, I talked a lot about our goals. I talked generally, I talked specifically, I talked about web literacy, community, collaboration. I think that the attendees were able to glean the roots of the Mozilla ethos and will begin to help spread that ethos in their own worlds.

In short, it was a crazy week. A crazy, productive, awesome week.

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