open web

The People Piece: Passion and Curiosity

December 20, 2012 education, techie, work in progress

Earlier this month, Mark wrote a post called Webmaker 2013: Product + Community, and we’ve seen a slew of posts that talk about the evolution of Webmaker from the product perspective, so I thought I would write a little about the people piece. We have big aspirations for Makers and Mentors in this community. Not

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The Power of Contribution

August 27, 2012 education, techie

As part of our attempts to understand what drives the auspicious event hosts who are willing to try out event formats, tools and other materials that we’re creating, we took some time this summer to call them up, and ask them how we can better support them. A couple weeks ago, I got an email

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Hacktivity Kits and Modular Curriculum

July 25, 2012 education, techie, work in progress

We’re in the process of creating Hacktivity Kits for each of our software tools and for a variety of event types. The kits contain information on the Mozilla Webmaker initiative as a whole, specific information on the particular tool and event format that the hacktivity kit is for, and then modular content that allows a

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And we have #StoryCamp liftoff!

June 19, 2012 education, techie

On Thursday, StoryCamp will hold it’s first livecast with Damian Kulash from OK Go. Yesterday we introduced the first new Popcorn template to the facilitators of the 27 youth centers participating in StoryCamp and fielded questions on the teacher’s guide. The guide includes tons of resources for educators and learners alike. We’ve got six weeks

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Offline, Offroad, Off my Rocker

January 17, 2012 education, psychobabble, techie

Missed me, didn’t you? Two full weeks of me not writing you and telling you the things floating around in my brain must have been excruciating. I mean, really, it’s not just self importance, now is it? I’ve got a couple of things to tell you, but I promised Mark Boas and Laurian Gridinoc that

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My Year in Review

December 27, 2011 education, psychobabble, techie

Seems like I should follow suit and do a “Year in Review” post. I do so like to comply. I was moving around quite a bit this year. This post took me forever to put together. January: Ran the first New York City version of the Producer’s Institute for New Media Technologies, started working with

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Hackjam Parking Lot

December 19, 2011 education, techie

This past week, we ran a Hackasaurus/P2PU hackjam to implement functional changes to the P2PU platform and create challenges curriculum for Hackasaurus. It was a whirlwind three days. While we had specific goals, we also had a lot of ideas that aren’t in scope for this phase of the Challenges Project. Those ideas deserve some

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Failure = Lesson Learned

December 6, 2011 education, techie

Today I was finishing up a one page summary called “10 Things that Make a Good Challenge”, a distilled version of Chloe Varelidi’s excellent post, and I read and reread these lines “By tinkering learners feel safe. They’ll try new things and fail multiple times before mastering a skill,” several times. I’m thinking about failure

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Response to Mozilla as teacher

September 13, 2011 education, techie

Inspiration for this post is: Mozilla as teacher by Mark Surman When I read the first line of Mark’s post “We need to teach the world to code,” I was immediately wary of the wording. It’s true that a basic understanding of HTML and CSS will go a long way in helping people rearrange the

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Give us the Easy Ask!

September 6, 2011 techie

Today I want to focus on the easy ask. What can you ask your users to contribute that is easy? It seems obvious, doesn’t it? It seems obvious to me, but I find myself searching for the easy ask a lot of times, so I thought I would write a short post reminding everyone to