World of E's

The Three T's of Badge System Design

Fri, 18 May 2012 13:40:00 -0700

We’ve been working on the Mozilla Webmaker badge system, or at least initial alpha badges for the Summer Campaign and it’s tough! We knew that going in - if it were too easy, then we probably wouldn’t end up with very valuable or robust badges - but that didn’t make it easier. There are many things to consider and it’s very easy to get caught up and stuck in the core question of what badges? That’s a really loaded question because its not just about what to call the badges - which is a rabbit hole of itself altogether - but its also considerations around specific skills, levels and granularity (which is a huge/tough one), assessment, experience, etc. We spent days trying to answer the what badges question - should we have an HTML Level 1 and Level 2 badge, or just an HTML badge (and what do those mean?)?; should we call them Ninjas or Samurais (note: we decided on neither)?, is there a Webmaker badge that everything aggregates up to and if so what are the badges that make that up?; are all badges the same granularity?, etc. The decisions at this level are also things that more people care about and have to sign off on so that also slows down the process.

I’ve since stepped back and looked at the process and realized that there were a few considerations that actually helped us move forward - and that those considerations were one or more steps removed from the badges themselves. I’m now calling this my 3 T’s of badge system design, and so far its proving to be a helpful place to start or at least move back to when you feel you getting buried in badge level decisions.

3 T’s of Badge System Design:

(1) Types - general categories of badges. Do you have skill badges or participation badges? Progress badges or achievement badges? To do this, you need a general understanding of the learning experiences, the community and most importantly, the goals of the badge system, but you don’t have to go super deep. You don’t, for example, need to know the exact set of skills that you want to badge. And you definitely don’t need to finalize the badge names ;). You just need to decide if you are badging skills or actions or achievements or progress, etc. Finalizing and putting some lightweight descriptions around your types of badges can really help you scope the system before diving into the questions around the specific badges that fall into each.

Our alpha badge TYPES*:

Skill badges - I developed this skill

Participation badges - I attended or hosted this event

Achievement badges - I made this

(2) Touchpoints - next you do Touchpoints or general description of how someone will earn the TYPE of badge. This starts to pull in assessment and criteria but again, you don’t have to go super deep at first.

Our alpha badge TOUCHPOINTS*:

Skill badges will be based on work that the learner submits, assessed by peers against a rubric. (note: this is probably even more specific than you need to go at first)

Participation badges will be based on registration for an event and proof of attendance.

Achievement badges will be based on work that the learner shares with the community.

It’s a good practice to think through if there are several possible touchpoints for each badge type (and the pros/cons of each approach). Thinking through this at the outset gives you more flexibility going into the technology considerations and helps you better work with any technology constraints you might have. For example, back up touchpoints for our badges might be:

Skill badges will be issued when the learner completes a learning challenge that cover the skills.

Participation badges will be issued by the host of an event directly to attendees.

Achievement badges will be based on completion of making exercises/projects.

(3) Technology - finally, you translate the touchpoints into high level technology requirements.

For the first set of touchpoints, our TECHNOLOGY requirements might look something like the following:

Badges integrated into the learning tool environment and the events site

A Gallery component that learners can submit work to with a voting or rating capability for skill/achievement badges

These can be more granular but don’t have to be at this point. Just think through the basic requirements and see where you net out. It may immediately become clear that something won’t fly and you can start to work around it right away instead of way later in the process. Going back to our example, maybe we would find out that we weren’t able to have a gallery component and if this is the case, we could go back to our touchpoints and decide to use another option for those types of badges and tie those badges to the learning exercises, and thus the learning tool, instead. That decision would most likely change elements about the assessments and the specific badges we ended up defining as well, so the information flow works both ways.

What you end up with is a general map of your badge system and a basic roadmap for what needs to be built to support the badge issuing. It could also help you evaluate existing badge issuing platforms to see if they have the features that meet your needs.

Next steps are to start to dive into each piece a bit more. Define a few of your skill badges and work through the work flow again - what is the specific touchpoint (rubric, rating required, etc.) and what are the specific features needed to support that. Press repeat, press repeat.

Again, this is the model that we’ve accidentally started to use with our badge system design. It’s not rigorously tested by any means, just seemed to work well for our first few iterations. Would love to hear back from folks on if this is helpful, where it breaks down, etc.

-E

*Note: our alpha badges are still in alpha so are subject to change

Where's the Web?

Fri, 11 May 2012 07:49:00 -0700

I’ve been re-immersed in the digital literacy world lately and have seen lots of different ideas and projects that get kids interacting with technology. I also recently subscribed to the Daily Papert and have been enjoying my daily dose of constructionist genius*.

But it has gotten me thinking about something missing from the conversation: The Web. The messaging is often SO similar to ours - interest-based learning, teaching kids to make, authentic assessment, customized pathways/experiences, programming to help make abstract concepts concrete, etc. - we are all telling similar stories and are after similar goals, which is awesome - but most of the practice and implementations we see are using closed technologies and systems. We see this all the time in the digital literacy and teach-people-to-code space. Learning providers use heavy programming and engineering technologies - or fake, sandboxed learning languages - and spend tons of money and resources to create (often impressive) tools and environments to scaffold the learning, but without broadly applicable understanding at the end. Where is the Web? Where are the open technologies and standards that learners can go on to use across the Web today? Not there. There are entrenched policies and proclivities, and probably a lot of unawareness, that guide people down these closed/sandboxed paths. But the Web is definitely missing and I think that limits the power of a lot of the innovation.

Why you should consider the Web.

The Web is THE platform for learning right now. In fact, it can be THE platform for almost everything these days. There is SO much opportunity for learning across the Web and we have an obligation to teach people things that will matter for them beyond individual projects or learning experiences. Web literacy is a top level literacy at this point for the general public.
The Web is THE model for the types of learning that we all clearly believe is the future of learning. Transparent, open, accessible, multi-pathway, participatory, etc. these are all principles behind the Web, and behind the learning innovation that we all care so much about and are investing so much time and effort into making happen.
The Web is THE THING that we can make on, learn from, etc. We can build stuff on the Web, as part of the Web. Learners can view source and hack on web pages or videos, etc. There is so much content that is part of the Web that we can leverage, or contribute to, that can support learning and making of all kinds.

How to build the Web into these conversations / learning experiences.

This requires a bigger conversation and some deeper thinking but I think there are a few easy wins:

Start (even end) with the Web stack (HTML, CSS, JS). These are much more powerful than you may think. These are the core technologies on the Web and someone with a little bit of understanding can do a lot on the Web, and someone well versed can make some pretty powerful stuff. Getting kids making things on the Web gets them one step closer to web literacy which is becoming more and more important and necessary in today’s world. The Web is where it’s at people and we have the opportunity to not only move folks from simple consumers to producers and active participants, but prepare them for success in a wide (HUGE!) range of jobs, not JUST engineering or programming.
Use Web technologies to build the scaffolded environments. You can do almost anything these days with open Web technologies. Then your work becomes more accessible to folks, and possibly more interchangeable or plug-and-play with other tools, works better or more aligned with and across the Web and possibly advances the technologies and standards. We all benefit if we are leveraging the same underlying components.
Consider opening up the back door. Open up the code! Now, this isn’t always possible for folks but when it is, its a really powerful thing. Suddenly your tool or content can take on a life of its own through community remixes, forks, etc. The learners themselves can hack the tools to make it do something better or more advanced. That’s the ultimate pinnacle for learning, afterall, to have someone not only understand and use the stuff you’ve created, but actually take it the next step further.
Bake in sharing at the core. Help learners share their work and encourage remixing and repurposing of that work. The Web makes this possible and pretty darn easy. We all know transparency in learning is valuable, and we even spent some time talking at a recent conference about the rash of research lately (which I still need to look up) on the benefits of letting learners see the work of others for their own learning (ahem, view source, ahem). Lots and lots of options for and opportunity through openness and transparency.

I am sure there are more ways, and I would love to hear about them! Let’s do this together!

-E

* To cut Dr. Papert a bit of slack, he was writing about this stuff before personal computers, let alone the Web. I’d love to have a conversation with him today about how he would leverage the Web for his work.

JISC webinar on Web Literacy

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 12:04:00 -0700

MichelleL and I gave a presentation on our webmaker / web literacy work through JISC last Friday.

Mozilla webmakers

On webmaking and the Web:

We want to help people understand that the Web is like Legos - you can build original things, take things apart or remix them, create and weave stories and narratives around your creations, etc.
Part of this is about making learning fun and relevant again, but its more than that. Webmaking skills are important life skills.
Why is the Web such an important part of this:

The Web is a platform for learning
The Web is a model for learning - transparency, openness, access, collaboration, participation
The Web is the thing we can build and learn with

Why is webmaking important? I’ve written about this before so check that out for more (also, the Web is about interconnectedness of information and pathways…win!)

Favorite slides (adapted from a Mark Surman presentation):

On The Skills:

Mozilla is building learning content, badges and software to scaffold webmaking and learning. But a critical part of that is really understanding or enumerating what webmaking means from a skill perspective.
So after a bunch of research, including interviews, focus groups and first hand experience, we are proposing an initial definition of web literacy. Kudos to MichelleL who drove this work.
We didn’t dive in to all the skills but the parts to highlight are that:

There are 25 of them, and only a few of those cover what some may call ‘coding’. This is not about programming, but a general literacy, with a combination of hard and softer skills.
The skills are currently grouped in columns reflecting skills needed to: navigate or consume the Web, create lightweight content and contribute on the Web, share and participate, build more advanced things on the Web and protect yourself and your content.
Most importantly, this is still in alpha or request for comments form - we definitely want feedback. And we know this will evolve anyway - both because once we are really using this definition, we will learn things that we can feedback into it, but also because the Web itself evolves.

Questions

We got some good questions including:

Doesn’t all content eventually become something owned by Google, Facebook or YouTube at this point?

This was an great question with lots of subcurrents so the answer was manyfold as well:

Part of this is about teaching people how to control their own content, understand things like ownership and privacy on the Web, be able to make informed decisions about where and how they share their stuff.
Part of this is about empowering people to not be confined to CMSs, proprietary technologies or forms for building and sharing things and thus demand more openness. If we are all demanding more openness and Web technologies, the big companies will follow. We’ve already seen it start to happen with YouTube (from Flash and proprietary technologies only, to supporting WebM and HTML5). We will see more of this.

How do you plan to recognize these skills?

Badges! We are developing a webmaker badge system that will recognize development of these skills, motivate learning and help create pathways for people to become webmakers and level up.

There are no mention of Web 2.0 tools in your skills. How do you see this fitting in with Web 2.0 tools?

We are not focused on specific tools and technologies, other than some of the basic open Web building blocks like HTML, CSS, JS. We want to teach conceptual and social skills that can then be applied or layered on whenever someone is using one of the millions of Web 2.0 tools/platforms out there like Twitter or Facebook.

How does this map to computer science requirements / pathways?

We are not focused on making more engineers - we are focused on a more general literacy that can be relevant and important in everyone’s lives. That said, there is some work going on to look at this link. Andrea Forte, from Drexel, is looking at how early webmaking experiences translate to entry level computer science curriculum and requirements. Again, these skills are a big deal across the board. ;)

JISC recorded the session and ~~should be posting~~ [update 4/30] has posted a link next week so check back or watch on the Twitter.

-E

Hacker Literacies

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 06:55:00 -0700

The ignite talks from this year’s DML Conference are posted. I wasn’t able to get to the Ignite talks at the conference due to the inevitable impromptu side meetings that always pop-up (which is kind of the beauty of conferences like these).

But in perusing them this morning, one that caught my eye was Rafi Santo from Indiana University talking about Hacker Literacies. There is a lot here that aligns with our thinking and goals around webmaking and web literacy, so I wanted to dig in a little further.

Highlights (transcribed from the video so with some paraphrasing):

We are not talking about hacking like “breaking into banks and stealing credit card numbers”, but “what I am talking about is a certain kind of technological industriousness - a maker disposition that’s tied to innovation and creativity.

Again, this is very much aligned with our concept of webmakers and web literacy. These skills are more about building a webpage or knowing how to code but about an approach to learning and to exploring the world. Rafi called this “technological industriousness”. John Seely Brown coined the phrase “entrepreneurial learner” - its all about a sense of ownership, control and empowerment…over technology and the Web, over learning and the pathways we take (and choose!), and over our lives in general. I know, its mind blowing stuff.

All technology is political. All technology is made by people and people are political and those politics get baked right into the technologies when they design it whether they like it or not….What a hacker understands is that technology is malleable and if it doesn’t line up with our values, we can change them.

Again, it comes back to this idea that we are talking about something bigger here. The individual skills add up to way more than just the sum, but an approach to everything in life. It’s about moving people from consumption to production, not just so that they can make things (although that’s cool too), but so that they don’t take things for granted, or accept things as they are. So that they don’t just remain oppressed, but understand that they have a voice, they have a channel for that voice and they can change things.

The Internet [read: Web] was not an accident. All the things that we like about it - the openness, transparency, participatory culture - these things were by design.

YES. The Web is awesome for so many reasons and we should use it - both as a medium for connecting people, empowering people, helping them build things…but also as a model for what we are trying to do here. Open up education/learning, allow for the emergence of many pathways and connections, make learning and assessment a transparent experience and exploration and connect learners together at web scale.

Digital literacy is about empowerment through technology. Hacker literacy is about empowerment in relation to technology.

This is pretty deep. I had to stop and think about this for awhile. But it’s really powerful. I think it’s both a leveling up thing, and a literacy thing. Leveling up: I think we probably need to start with some of the technology as the medium, but we shouldn’t just stop there, at the what-I-can-do-with-them-stage, but use that as lessons about a broader sense of what’s possible across technology and in our lives in general. Literacy: he talks about these as hacker literacies, we talk about web literacies - the word literacy is in there intentionally. Again, its not about just a few hard skills, but a broader set of competencies that stitch together for possibility and opportunity. And many argue that these literacies should first order literacies like reading and writing…I definitely think we are moving in that direction.

Finally, Rafi’s marching orders are below, with my commentary:

position kids as designers and makers of technology (= webmaking. check.)
talk with kids about relationship between tech and values (help them understand intentions, biases, etc. - this comes back to the idea of moving us out of ‘elegant consumption and acceptance, and approaching the world with a sense of “I can change this if I want/need to” which is part of this newer literacy)
integrate hacker literacies into digital literacies (see above)
embrace hacking everywhere - everything should be hackable (yes! hack the planet!)

-E

OBI Public Beta

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 07:35:00 -0700

We are announcing today that we launched the Public Beta of the Open Badge Infrastructure. Huge milestone and huge kudos to the team for making it happen.

What’s the OBI?

The OBI is the ‘plumbing’ of the badge ecosystem. It is a specification for badges, set of repositories (“Backpacks”) for storing badges and APIs for pushing badges in and pulling badges out. It’s an important piece of this badge experiment because it moves us beyond more silo’d systems, allows the learner to collect badges from lots of different learning experiences and provides the structural components to enable badges to be transferred and leveraged across the ecosystem for real results like jobs or credits.

What’s Public Beta?

With this Public Beta launch, the OBI is now publicly available for use. Badges can be pushed in and pulled out and earners can store badges in the middle in their Backpacks. And more! Specifically, Public Beta includes:

New and improved issuer API
Backpack feature upgrades:

Store badges
Manage badges
Import badges
Group badges
Publish groups to a unique URL and add narrations/notes around each badge to share

New displayer API
New documentation
Legal docs! Privacy policy, terms of use and FAQs specifically for the Backpacks.

Wait, weren’t you already in beta?

Yes and no. We were calling it ‘beta1’ which was a made up word to mean that it was a step up from alpha but not quite all the way to beta. It was essentially the initial issuer API and Backpacks, but was available basically by invite only. We should have called it a ‘developer preview’ but hindsight, something something. This Public Beta (capital B!) is a proper Mozilla beta (security review, user data committee review, on Mozilla servers, etc.) and its publicly available! Woo!

What does it look like?

Technically like this…

But really like this…

(Sample Badge Backpack)

And this….

(Published group of badges)

How can I get involved?

Be a badge issuer or a badge displayer
Earn badges and push to your Backpack - in fact, you can earn your first badges at openbadges.org
Check out the code. Fork it. Get Technical Documentation. https://github.com/mozilla/openbadges
Join our community calls: https://openbadges.etherpad.mozilla.org/openbadges-community

What’s Next?

We are moving to a much shorter release cycle - releasing things at least every two weeks, but possibly more quickly as we go. But we are aiming to move from Beta to 1.0 by the end of the year. In addition that work, plus bug fixes along the way, we are also working on some lightweight tools that make creating and issuing badges easier, and eventually will most likely do the same for displaying badges.

Who should we congratulate?

The team for being some of the smartest, hardest working game changers I’ve known, as well as our community who have been advising us every step of the way. Thanks to you all - congratulations!

-E

Reflections on Reflections on Badges

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 07:22:00 -0700

There have been a bunch of posts from really smart people reflecting on badges over the past month, leading up to and following the DML Competition culmination and DML Conference. There is certainly a dose of skepticism across some of the posts (like here and here), mostly coming back to the question around motivation and rewards. In fact, Mitch Resnick held a session about his motivation-related issues with badges at the DML Conference, but unfortunately the room was so small, that most of us weren’t able to squeeze in, so we formed an Occupy Badges makeshift session to talk about badges ourselves.

After getting an update on Mitch’s session and catching up on some of the posts, the common concern is around introducing badges as extrinsic rewards into learning experiences where intrinsic motivations may be at play, and potentially disrupting a delicate balance of motivations or existing interest-driven learning. (It should be note that this is a generalization and there is more nuance to their claims - definitely worth a read).

I’ve been wanting to add some of my reflections on these reflections (get all meta) for awhile now and finally scheduled some time - a meeting for myself - to dive in so here it is:

On intrinsic vs extrinsic motivations:

There is a classic scenario referenced a lot: kid gets good grades in school because he wants to do well and then his grandparents start giving him money for every A. When the grandparents stop paying the kid later on, the kid suddenly isn’t motivated to get good grades anymore. It’s called ‘crowding out’ - the intrinsic motivations get crowded out by the extrinsic motivators. That’s the core of the argument against badges - that badges will be yet another extrinsic motivator that will squelch any existing intrinsic motivations.

This binary view of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation is too simplistic. Dan Hickey, an assessment and motivation guru out of Indiana University, has a nice summary for those of us with less expertise on different theories of motivation and learning, and points out:

One of the things that has been overlooked in the debate is that situative theories reveal the value of rewards without resorting to simplistic behaviorist theories of reinforcing and punishing desired behaviors.

The ‘crowding out’ concern is real (and should be considered with grades as well!) but too simplistic for learning and these complex social environments. We all agree on the issues, and we run the risk of doing nothing about them if we cling to overly simplistic interpretations of theory or research studies. It’s also worth noting that badges do not have to just be a carrot, but can be built as tools for formative assessment, empowerment, roles/identities, etc. This means we need to put some thought into the badge system design, but that’s exactly what the competition and other parallel work right now is focused on.

Don’t muck up interest-driven learning

There is another set of related concerns that go something like this: there is a lot of youth interest-driven learning already happening and its awesome because it is separate and pure and we aren’t mucking it up with adult-imposed rules or rankings, etc. Badges are just another top-down adult-driven system of rules that will just interfere with the learning.

There are some HUGE assumptions in here. The first is that all youth have opportunities for interest-driven learning and the second is that those that do understand that this is valuable and legitimate learning. I don’t think these are true. I don’t think most kids have opportunities to explore their own interests - instead are forced down the pathways we prescribe for them in school. And if they aren’t inspired by the topics or projects at school, then they are labeled as bad students and that’s not something kids can rise above very easily, or in most cases at all. Most don’t understand that there are other avenues. For those kids that are lucky enough to have some opportunities to explore interest-based stuff, usually in afterschool programs, I doubt that many understand that this learning at all, and that its legitimate and important and could lead to a lot of opportunities for them. They aren’t as empowered by these experiences as they could and should be. These are the gaps that this badge work is looking to fill - to recognize learning and help learners use it for real results like jobs or credits, as well as to help learners find other learning opportunities.

There are some smaller assumptions like badges are only for youth, which they aren’t and that badges are only created and issued top-down and they don’t have to be. But the big assumptions are the dangerous ones.

Badges as a silver bullet:

There were some concerns around badges being positioned or thought of as THE solution. It might have seemed that way at the DML Conference because there was so much attention paid to them. But badges are not THE solution. In fact, badges themselves are not even A solution, but part of a toolkit and common approach of redefining learning to be something that occurs beyond classroom, beyond age 22, etc., recognizing and legitimizing more types of learning and helping the learner have more choice and control about pathways and interests. Badges are the representation, the gateway, the conversation starter, but its really about this new way of thinking and approaching learning that is the powerful part.

I’ve also heard things like “why are you focusing on only one approach” or “one form of assessment”. It’s worth reiterating that badge itself only represents the learning, assessment, experiences and evidence behind it. There aren’t any constraints on the learning or the assessment behind the badge - and that’s by design at this point. If you stop and look at the badge systems people are developing, you will see that there is a lot of thought going into how to utilize badges for specific learning experiences and how to be innovative about assessment, etc. Badges don’t limit this at all.

Another flavor of the silver bullet concern is that we are moving too fast and have one standard too soon. But again, the standardization is only at the level of what information is included with the badge - there are no constraints on the learning and assessment part, at least not from Mozilla or the badges themselves. If there is still concern about the standardization at the level of the badge - I’m not sure how we would really truly give this a solid try if we weren’t working together. A bunch of siloed systems are not going to help empower the learner or help them create their own pathways. We need some way for the badges to work together - for the learner - and be tapped into a larger ecosystem of opportunity and access. That’s what the Mozilla Open Badge Infrastructure is supporting.

A few last small(ish) reflections:

Education vs Learning: I think its worth making a distinction between ‘learning’ and ‘education’. Education is a set of policies, content, structures and expectations that we define and force youth through. That sounds negative and its not meant to be, education systems are important for many reasons. But learning is so much more than that - it’s any experience where people learn something and that can happen inside a classroom but can also happen in a seemingly limitless amount of ways outside of classroom, and across lifetimes. It’s all that other learning that isn’t currently consistently recognized or valued. That’s where badges can fit in, or at least that’s the current hypothesis we are working under. That’s not to say that badges don’t or won’t have some value in formal education, but there are some bigger questions to think through there - it won’t work if we just overlay badges on the existing system or trying to force the existing system on top of badges.

Badges are not a Mozilla solution - this experiment, and its success, is not dependent solely on Mozilla. We are building the infrastructure to support the badges, but its on everyone else - the learning providers - involved. It’s on them to continue to offer awesome learning experiences, be innovative and authentic about assessment, design badges that amplify that learning and empower learners, etc. But again, if you look at the types of badge systems proposed for the competition, this is exactly what people are doing.

More to come I’m sure.

-E

More Roadmappin'

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 07:23:00 -0700

The Learning Group got back together last week to re-roadmap based on all of the developments in the last couple of months. Good news is, we are a lot more clear on objectives and able to scope more than we were a few months ago.

The updated roadmap, with the most attention paid through remaining Q1/Q2 is here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Learning

Q1 Achievements:

We actually did everything on our original list in Q1 - we’ve been busy!

We published the initial version of the web literacy skills which has gotten a lot of interest and feedback. MichelleL is working on the next version of these skills, with some more definition and scope, to be released at the end of Q1.
We released our first set of design principles.
We did an initial audit of the curricular resources we have, as well as some of the external options. There is more work that needs to be done here but lots of progress was made.
We prototyped the first Pilot, this one for journalists through Open News (more from Jess here, here and here), which allows people to build out their story online and in doing so, learn some basic web literacy skills.
We worked with the engagement team to develop the initial event kit and learning offerings for that kit. That is set to launch at the end of Q1 as well.

HUGE Q1 so far, and its not even over yet. There are a few more things that we will release before the end of March. Kudos to my kickbutt team!

Q2 Highlights:

Summer Campaign. You’ve all probably heard about it - if not read this and this and this. It’s a Mozilla day of action around learning webmaking skills, followed by a summer of opportunities and resources for more learning. And its going to be awesome. Needless to say, the summer campaign work is a huge priority for us and is threaded into everyone’s individual goals.

Webmaker Tool. We realized that we’ve been building the same experience over and over again and so are abstracting out the reusable chunks into a Webmaker Toolkit. This will include things like a side-by-side editor where you can edit the HTML on the left and see the live page rendered on the right, a template/mission library where you can pull in templates on top of the editor to build stuff and learn things. A mission maker that lets you create your own missions. A public gallery where you can publish the things you’ve made. A badge issuing tool to inject badges into all of these experiences, etc.

Mission Maker. This is technically part of the Webmaker Tool work, but has a much higher level set of goals. We’ve made some really awesome and beautiful stuff to date but that’s not scalable. We want other people to be able to build on our stuff, or even create their own stuff that plugs into our stuff. So we are working to build a learning offering (or ‘mission’) model that specifies the necessary pieces for building missions, and then some examples on top of that for you to dive into, fork or use as a model for a totally new idea. These missions will be lightweight, hackable pages that present a particular challenge and allow you to learn some HTML, CSS or JS by hacking on the page directly. Cool, right?

Instructor Community. We’ve been gaining some momentum with building a community around the web literacy skills and content but in Q2, we hope this is going to really take off. In addition to launching an initial site for instructors, we are going to be holding a set of instructor conferences in SF, Boston and London in late April/early May to not only solidify those networks, but also to do some massive requirements gathering around how to best support that community.

Pilots. We’ll be launching our Open News pilot, currently called StoryThing, which allows journalists, or anyone really, build out a story online and learn some HTML, CSS and stuff about the open Web in the process. We are also working with the ever awesome Popcorn team to develop a pilot to layer some more learning elements (or surface them, really) into the film/video making process through Popcorn Maker.

Big quarter coming up - what else should we have on our radar?

-E

* Photo attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mkrigsman/2852232536/

A Week to Crush all Weeks(tm)

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 12:16:00 -0800

We just returned from a crazy packed week that I’ve now dubbed the Week to Crush all Weeks(tm). Last week crushed all other weeks in: productivity, output/achievements, networking and exhaustion. ;) Here’s a little peek into everything that went down:

EVENT KIT SPRINT

Some Learning Group and Engagement folks locked themselves in a room (with snacks and an amazing view of the Bay Bridge (see below)) for 3 days to come up with a way to easily and efficiently support folks in running events around webmaking learning content. I was only able to drop in for part of one day, but lots of cool ideas were surfaced. I won’t try to dive into the details since there are so many good posts about it by Jess here, MichelleT here, Ben here and MichelleL here.

Note: this awesome mockup was developed at the sprint by the equally awesome Jess Klein - more on her blog.

Highlights / Takeaways:

Event menu - help people pick the best format for their event
Layer on the learning - pick the skills/topics that you want to teach through the event and find resources from us and other folks
Get support - lots of checklists to help streamline organizing
Hack the process - use the resources to create your own event or experience to fit your own needs.

(you thought I was kidding about the view, didn’t you? This is from the new Mozilla SF office)

DML BADGE COMPETITION FINALS

The DML Competition (focused on Badges for Lifelong Learning) culminated in 2 days of awesome work at the California Academy of Sciences. What better place to get together to think about how to capture and extend the value of informal learning experiences, than this fantastic space full of school groups exploring science?! I was so impressed by the quality of badge systems that were pitched - this whole badge idea has come a long way since Barcelona. The funded projects were announced on Thursday evening and now we roll into a year of development and implementation of the badge systems.

Highlights / Takeaways:

A sense of “we’ve come a long way, baby” - in just a year and a half, this exploration of badges has gone from a ‘what if’ discussion with a small group in a dusty corner in Barcelona, to a movement with real potential.
Rockin’ badge system ideas with badges covering a wide range of skills including STEM skills, digital citizenship, manufacturing jobs, financial planning skills, etc.
Lots of buy-in and momentum around badges and coming together around common issues of supporting learning of all types across all ages.
Huge community potential - we want to capitalize on all of the momentum and community around badging and help support groups - funded or nonfunded - moving forward.

OPEN BADGES WEBSITE / DEMO LAUNCH

The Open Badges team produced a slick demo and new openbadges.org site that allows folks to come in and not only better understand Open Badges, but also start earning badges themselves, check out their Backpacks, etc.

Highlights / Takeaways:

Cool new spiffy look and feel
Quick and easy entry points for various audiences - funnel people directly to the info that is relevant to them.
Learn about badges and earn your first badge in the process!
Push the badge to your Backpack and check out all the features

DML CONFERENCE

The week ended at the Parc55 hotel for the DML Conference. Per usual, lots of energy and excitement - I really dig these people. They think like me, like Mozilla. They care deeply about democratizing and opening up learning, especially through the use of technology. There were only 6 sessions across 3 days with lots of good stuff each session (and I left after day 2), so I know I missed out on a lot. But the networking was probably even more valuable which is common with conferences but on a whole new level with DML.

Highlights / Takeaways:

Occupy Badges: we had a make shift session to dive even deeper on badges. More to come on this in a separate post.
Learning to make by making has traction in this crowd. Lots of excitement around the Mozilla Learning work.
“Make” is a loaded word and means lots of different things to people so we need to take that into consideration for the branding.
Lots of focus on supporting informal learning for youth - which is super important. But need to build in ideas around adults as well. Lifelong learning FTW!

Schew! Oh and did I forget to mention that I also traveled with my 4 month old as well? Just to make things as high energy as possible? ;)

-E

What is webmaking?

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 13:09:00 -0800

Mozilla is building a generation of webmakers. We are defining webmaker literacies. We are building pathways for people to learn webmaking by webmaking. But what the heck is webmaking? What is our vision really all about?

The initial list of webmaker skills starts to pave the way for our definition of webmaking, but I think there needs more context and nuance here. Lots of smart people are working on a more public facing brand/definition around webmaking so there’s that to look forward to, but in the meantime I wanted to log my thoughts on what (I think) it is and what it isn’t.

Webmaking is not just coding.

We are seeing a number of teach-to-code initiatives popping up which are certainly compelling and we hope to work closely with many of them moving forward. But when we say webmaking, I think we are talking more broadly, more at the literacy level. Our ultimate webmaker curriculum suite will have coding in it in some capacity (or again, we’ll point people to all the great stuff emerging), but it will have a much broader set of skills as well. Even just glancing back at the current iteration of the webmaker skills, we can see some of the foundations of coding in the Building column (and some HTML-y stuff in one chunk of Authoring) - but there are 4 OTHER COLUMNS! Even with this 101 content, we are aiming at higher level competencies and literacies that people can use to shape their pathway forward, not dictate one path for them to go down. If they decide to be coders - great! - but they will hopefully be better coders because of the full range of skills they’ve developed and honed along the way.

(NOTE: MichelleL dives further this as well on her blog)

Webmaking is not a static thing.

Webmaking is made up of a set of hard skills like HTML, CSS, etc., but a host of ‘softer’ skills like collaborative making, awareness of the open web, etc. The softer skills, as evidenced by the controversial category name, are fluid and personal. We know they are not static. But with webmaking, even the hard skills are not static. Things evolve fast, new technologies and standards come out everyday. So its important to teach people enough of the hard skills to know enough to build what they want to build but we also need to teach them how to refresh those skills, stay up on current developments, contribute to the evolution.

Webmaking is (can be) about jobs.

Webmaking skills are real, job relevant skills and not just for future web developers, but people across many disciplines. Journalists, filmmakers, scientists, business professionals, doctors, teachers…most of these skills are relevant. Through the Open Badges work, we’ve talked to a lot of employers about what they are looking for and in addition to the basic digital skills, they want people that know how to collaborate, innovate and think critically. All webmaking skills! Again, its about arming people with the range of skills needed so that they can shape their own pathway and excel.

Webmaking is understanding, building and innovating.

We want to help webmakers not only learn basic skills, but use those skills to build things that matter to them (in fact, we’d prefer it if they learned the skills BY building the things), and by actually innovating around the initial skills so that they are leaving their mark and making the web better for webmakers to follow.

Webmaking is about capitalizing on the affordances of the Web.

Personally I think webmaking should include being prepared for and able to capitalize on the affordances of the web. When you look at things like learning - the Web opens up the possibilities for learning (open ed courses, learning games, collaborative discussions, wikipedia, etc.) but simply having an internet connection is not going to necessarily help people take advantage of these options and learn more. They need to understand how to find and evaluate these opportunities, how to participate and share information, etc. This is a hugely important piece of webmaking to me.

Webmaking is about empowerment.

It is a high-paced, information-saturated world out there and it is very easy for people to just be consumers - to simply take things in and accept everything at face value. Part of webmaking is empowering them to take control, to realize that things (the Web for one) are not immutable, to develop and assert their own voice, to question information, to remix things and channel inner creativity, etc.

Webmaking is a way of life.

We want to prepare people for participation and contribution in today’s (and tomorrow’s) digital society and global economy. Webmaking skills can set up an approach to life in general that fosters not only looking-under-the-hood, embracing failure, tinkering and remixing, but also participation, citizenship and action. These are not just life skills but ultimately a way of approaching life.

Again, this is my personal opinion of webmaking. While I know that many Mozilla colleagues would agree with a lot of the above, we also need to scope it to a clear and concise definition that we can all get behind. As I mentioned, that work is in progress so more to come on that.

I am also not trying to imply that we think we can teach everyone all of this, but I think our concept of webmaking should be this far reaching. We should want to change the world (or more to the point, give people the tools to change their own worlds) and with that as a guiding principle, we will build more thoughtful, powerful and holistic learning experiences.

-E

(Working) Learning Design Principles

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 10:48:00 -0800

I posted a braindump a few weeks ago on things that felt like important considerations for our learning offerings. I’ve built on that list a bit more and presented it on the Learning Community call today. We got some great feedback and are looking for even more insight as we continue to evolve this list. These are important to get (mostly) right before we get too far down the road of developing our learning content. The current principles are listed below and the working document can be found here.

One thing to note: there are definite crossovers between these - overlaps which I think makes sense. If we do this right, there should be a diversity of deliverables and options but with a thread of a consistent feel or approach throughout. People should get a feel for what Mozilla learning is like/about and that feeling should carry throughout all of the different pathways we provide.

(WORKING) LEARNING DESIGN PRINCIPLES

Learning to make by making. Less yak, more hack.

Built around tools and making exercises that ‘help teach’
Learning is a byproduct of making

Hacking on things they care about at the core.

Authentic, interest-based learning
Meaningful making vs. arbitrary tasks
i.e. stories for journalists

More pathways == better. Avoid (even “fight”) one prescribed way to learn.

Leverage existing content and pathways.
Balance self-driven options, authority/faciliated options, peer options
Ultimately: choose your own adventure approach
Offer/support multimedia options (online, offline, synchronous, asynchronous, etc)
Support various levels / entry points (age, skill level, learning types, etc)

Support / encourage the “social”.

Encourage social interaction, collaboration, peer learning and sharing
Leverage peer assessments and mentorship

Build in fun / play.

Explicit fun in cases where it makes sense, but also implicit
Promote / support interest-driven exploration and tinkering
Capitalize on intrinsic motivations already existing
Support both:
- Fun (pure enjoyment) vs Play (tinkering, messing around)
- Might be two separate principles?

Embed assessments in the learning and learning in the assessments.

Be innovative about assessment - honor the nature of the learning experience / making
Authentic and relevant assessments built into the learning experience
People should be able to learn more through taking the assessment as well as assessing other people’s work

Support graceful degradation - Fail well.

Help users when they get stuck
Build in trial and error as much as possible
Congratulate people for failing; congratulate people for trying alternative methods

Give recognition.

Legitimize this learning - make it count beyond the learning experience
Build in badges

Design for extensibility / scale beyond ourselves.

Make it easy to run events around learning content - event kit + plug and play content
Modularity
Mentorship and teach the teachers
Nurture a community that can run itself

Reveal the universe.

Show people everything there is to learn and how - let them see where they fit into it and where they can go.
Recognize that not everyone wants to get to the same point you do

Produce consumer grade web experiences and software.

High quality, authentic experiences
Build experiences that feel like Mozilla

Again, more context on some of these can be found in my previous post.

What’s missing from this list? Are there other principles that we should consider? Again, here’s the working document - feel free to add thoughts directly to the etherpad.

-E