Tag: Webmaker

Weeknote 05/2014

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Doug Belshaw

This week I’ve been:

Dealing with a build-up of email after Bett.
Explaining why we’ve merged two community calls into a weekly Mozilla #Teach The Web call.
Helping Laura Hilliger with a proto-glossary for Webmaker.
Creating a community survey to help us with the upcoming workweek.
Moving and redirecting everything referring to the Web Literacy Standard towards the Web Literacy Map on the Mozilla wiki.
Presenting with Tim Riches on Open Badges at Learning Technologies 2014.
Writing a blog post for DMLcentral on ‘disruption’, shiny technology, and education (sneak peek).
Outlining and starting to put together a bibliography for an upcoming Webmaker whitepaper.
Participating in the first #TeachTheWeb community call.
Feeling a bit run down and unproductive. Part of that’s probably to do with the uncertainty surrounding when we’re going to move. It’s out of our hands – which is one of the problems when there’s a chain involved!

Next week I’ll be at a Webmaker workweek in Toronto. I’m looking forward to it, but the weather (-12°C!) doesn’t sound much fun.

Image CC BY-NC Patrick Brosset

3 things I’m looking forward to at the Webmaker workweek

Posted on January 31, 2014January 31, 2014 by Doug Belshaw

Tomorrow I’m heading off to the icy wastelands of Toronto for a Webmaker workweek. As with everything at Mozilla, we’ll be planning and working in the open. You can see what we’ll be up to on this wiki page.

I’m helping the multi-talented Kat Braybrooke wrangle the Web Literacy Content ‘scrum’, but here’s what I’m looking forward to more generally.

1. Being F2F with colleagues

Working remotely is great, but virtual interactions differ markedly from embodied ones. I feel this acutely when I meet offline those I’ve only ever known online; it’s like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle with one explaining the other.

We’ve quite a few new shipmates, but one I’m looking forward to meeting in particular is fellow Englishman Adam Lofting, our new Metrics Lead. We’re going to try and figure out (if and) how we can measure users’ development of web literacy. I think it will tie in nicely with the upcoming OpenHTML research project we’re doing with Drexel University.

2. Creating the Web Literacy Map user experience (UX)

Although this will mainly be led by the radiant Cassie McDaniel, I’m excited to see the ways we can weave the Web Literacy Map throughout the Webmaker site. Laura ‘super productive’ Hilliger has already produced an ‘if that then this’ demo, so I’m interested in how we can iterate towards a delightful UX for interest-based pathways to learning.

One thing I do think we need to do is to carefully consider the (visual and verbal) language we’re using. We’ve moved from Web Literacy ‘Standard’ to ‘Map’ and so we’ve got infinite scope for cartographic metaphors. 🙂

3. Thinking through the wider webmaker ecosystem

Webmaker (big ‘W’) is Mozilla’s offering in a wider webmaker (small ‘w’) ecosystem. Brett Gaylor‘s team has done a great job of creating innovative, open, stable tools; now we need to connect them more concretely to other people who are doing awesome stuff.

Happily, because Brett’s team has created a Make API this should be easier than it otherwise would have been. In practice, it means people can pull content out of Webmaker and we can pull in OERs and other openly-licensed content. Win.

Finally…

My apologies, Kat. I take it back: Canada is not a frozen wasteland. 😉

Main image CC BY Roland Tanglao

Transitioning into a new role at Mozilla

Posted on August 12, 2013 by Doug Belshaw

TL;DR version: My ‘home’ at Mozilla is moving from the Open Badges team to the Mentor team. In reality it’s a kind of floating role that spans several different teams and focuses on using the Web Literacy Standard as ‘glue’.

I joined the Mozilla Foundation as Badges & Skills Lead 14 months ago. I’ve never really had a job description as such but, from the start, the plan was for me to work within (what was then) the Learning Team as an Open Badges evangelist/advocate in Europe. And, while I wasn’t doing that, I was working on a Web Literacies framework to underpin Mozilla’s Webmaker programme. I ended up writing this white paper.

With the help of a burgeoning community, we pivoted the Web Literacies framework I came up with into a Web Literacy Standard. Excitingly, it’s gaining some traction – and should gain even more when we launch v1.0 at the Mozilla Festival in October.

I’m delighted that Open Badges has become wildly successful; it seems not a day goes by without another big announcement with a big name backing it or an organisation aligning with it. I think that’s for all of the reasons that drew me to the project back in 2011 before I joined Mozilla.

The world doesn’t really need me out there all the time telling it how awesome badges are. There’s plenty of people doing that on Mozilla’s behalf. I’m not giving up my Open Badges evangelism completely* but I’ll be focusing more on the Web Literacy Standard. Given that we’re looking for people to align with the standard using Open Badges, there’s no escape in any case. 😉

We’ve got broadly three teams within the Mozilla Foundation:

Mentor team – work with educators to focus on teaching and learning the Web
Open Badges team – build, maintain and work with organisations integrating with the Open Badges Infrastructure
Webmaker team – build products like Thimble and Popcorn Maker

I’ll be floating across all three using the Web Literacy Standard as the glue to bind together the teams. I’d like to thank Carla Casilli who’s worked with me over the last few months on the Web Literacy Standard. I’ll be reporting to Chris Lawrence now instead of Erin Knight.

So to a great extent, it’s as you were. However, if I look at bit confused at any point when you meet me you’ll now know why: I’m getting to grips with a slightly different role that will shift my landscape and day-to-day interactions a bit. 🙂

* We’ve got a couple of new members of the Open Badges team, including Meg Cole-Karagoy (marketing), An-Me Chung (partnerships) and Jade Forester (global liaison).