One of MoFo’s main goals for 2015 is to come up with an ambitious learning and community strategy. The codename for this is ‘Mozilla Academy’ although that’s likely to change. As a way to get the process rolling, I wrote a long post in March outlining what we might include in that strategy. Since then, I’ve been putting together a team to dig into the strategy work formally. More Mozilla Academy Strategy Update
Category: education
The power of an open mobile Web
The mobile Web is experiencing a watershed moment: over the next few years, billions of first-time users will come online exclusively through their smartphones. Mozilla believes it’s critically important these users find a mobile Web that’s open and invites creativity. More The power of an open mobile Web
You did it! (maker party)
This past week marked the end of Maker Party 2014. The results are well beyond what we expected and what we did last year — 2,513 learning events in 86 countries. If you we’re one of the 5,000+ teachers, librarians, parents, Hivers, localizers, designers, engineers and marketing ninjas who contributed to Webmaker over the past few months, I want to say: Thank you! You did it! You really did it! More You did it! (maker party)
How do we get depth *and* scale?
We want millions of people learning about the web everyday with Mozilla. The ‘why’ is simple: web literacy is quickly becoming just as important as reading, writing and math. By 2024, there will be more than 5 billion people on the web. And, by then, the web will shape our everyday lives even more than it does today. Understanding how it works, how to build it and how to make it your own will be essential for nearly everyone. More How do we get depth *and* scale?
The Instagram Effect: can we make app making easy?
Do you remember how hard digital photography used to be? I do. When my first son was born, I was still shooting film, scanning things in and manually creating web pages to show off a few choice pictures. By the time my second son was walking I had my first good digital camera. Things were better, but I still had to drag pictures onto a hard drive, bring them into Photoshop, painstakingly process them and then upload to Flickr. And then, seemingly overnight, we took a leap. Phones got good cameras. Photo processing right on the camera got dead simple. And Instagram happened. We rarely think about it, but: digital photography went from hard and expensive to cheap and ubiquitous in a very short period of time. More The Instagram Effect: can we make app making easy?
Who wants to teach the web?
People who teach others about the web are key to the future of Webmaker — and maybe even the future of Mozilla. I’m not talking only about teachers in classrooms getting their kids into HTML. Although that’s part of it. I’m talking about anyone who a) is excited about the culture and technology of the web and b) wants to help others get more out of the web they create and communicate on everyday online. We’ve been calling these people ‘mentors’. But, more simply, they are people who love the web want to share their passion. More Who wants to teach the web?
Mozilla Maker Party: a global lab
Over the last three months, Mozilla set up a global lab. It’s called Maker Party. And its goal is to do real world experiments that invite people to teach, play with and test the thinking behind Mozilla Webmaker. This lets us learn and improve as we go. In this post I outline the questions we’re asking. In follow-on posts, a bunch of us will look at what we’re learning. More Mozilla Maker Party: a global lab
Mozilla and Badges: where next?
Open Badges started as a modest experiment: build open source badge issuing software for ourselves and others. As momentum around this experiment has grown, it feels like the opportunity is bigger: we could build openness and user empowerment into how learning — and professional identity — work all across the web. With Open Badges 1.0 out there in the world, now is the right time to ask: where next for Mozilla and badges? More Mozilla and Badges: where next?
Tinkering together
‘Making is learning’ is a big theme for Mozilla this year. It’s at the heart of Mozilla Webmaker. More importantly, it’s the north star idea guiding the grassroots mentor community we’re building around the world. We want millions more people to get their hands dirty with the web. And we expect they’ll learn something as they do. More Tinkering together
Explaining Webmaker crisply
We’ve been honing our description of Webmaker recently. Partly, this is so we can explain Webmaker to the world. But it’s mostly aimed to clarifying what we’re building and who we’re building it for as we move into the next phase of development. More Explaining Webmaker crisply