At the Mozilla Summit in Brussels this weekend I saw three technologies in particular that could revolutionise the (learning and teaching) world I inhabit. I’d include Open Badges, Webmaker and the Web Literacy Standard in there, but I blog enough about those. 🙂
There were awesome ideas at the summit as well – most notably around User Personalization (UP). But for this post I want to focus on things you can play with right now. I’ve written more generally about the Summit on my conference blog and you can see some photos I took in this Flickr set.
1. Together.js
Together.js is two lines of JavaScript you can add to a website to enable realtime collaboration. Check out the video above to see some scenarios in which it could be useful. For online teaching and learning I think this is awesome.
2. AppMaker
While Mozilla AppMaker is still in ‘pre-alpha’ it can be used now and has an exciting future ahead of it. AppMaker is a really easy and straightforward way to create HTML5 cross-platform apps that can be used on FirefoxOS and, indeed, on any device that supports the Web.
Read more about AppMaker on the Mozilla Labs blog.
3. Shumway
Flash on the Web is past its best. It was a dying, proprietary platform even before Steve Jobs hammered the nails in the coffin. However, there’s still some decent Flash-based stuff out there, so how can we make it accessible in a secure and HTML5-friendly way?
Enter Shumway. It’s currently in Firefox Nightly and should work its way onto the main release channel in a few months.
Were you at the Mozilla Summit? What did you see that was awesome?
At the beginning of September, I decided to turn my ‘out of office’ auto-reply on for the whole month. Here’s what it said:
Hello!
Thanks for your email. I’ll get to it during my morning ‘internet ablutions’ (as William Gibson would put it).
If you need a quicker response than asynchronous communication can provide, please do consider one of the following (in order of preference):
* IRC – I’m on the Mozilla server in #badges, #foundation and #learning (see https://wiki.mozilla.org/IRC)
* Twitter – I’m @dajbelshaw
* Skype – I’m doug_belshaw
—–
Doug Belshaw
Mozilla Foundation
Current timezone: BST (GMT +1)
http://mzl.la/weblitstd
http://openbadges.org
http://dougbelshaw.com
This was actually more for my benefit than for anyone else’s. It gave me a way to internalise that I don’t need to fret about emails at all hours of the day. Working for a geographically-distributed organisation like Mozilla can have huge performative issues if you’re not disciplined with your time.
So what did I learn?
- People will seek you out if they need you urgently. But that only happened a couple of times and it was resolved quickly via Skype chat.
- Colleagues respect work/life balance more than I tend to assume. If it’s 9pm in the UK then they don’t tend to expect an immediate answer.
- Some issues resolve themselves if you don’t answer straight away.
- Email is a chore to many people. Quite a few people expressed solidarity.
It’s certainly been eye-opening to me. I’ve taken my auto-responder off now (I don’t want to abuse it) but I’ll be employing it again during my impending Belshaw Black Ops.
Image CC BY Esparta
This week I’ve been:
- Resolving knotty Web Literacy Standard issues, sometimes through consensus, sometimes through fiat. This document is what we’ll be using for v1.0 (two days left before ‘code freeze’)
- Hosting the Web Literacy Standard community call. You can catch up here.
- Writing about what I’m using now to backup/sync my files, my mental health and this time of year, as well as more about Minimum Viable Bureaucracy.
- Getting confused as to why I kept get notifications for people subscribing to my Spotify ‘Electro House’ playlist. I then realised it’s because I was featured on Lifehacker.
- Talking to Computing At School about non-linear learning pathways and Open Badges.
- Attending the Scottish Learning Festival in Glasgow. I met up with friends old and new and wrote it up here.
- Setting up a new tumblr called EduSpam.
- Taking Friday off unexpectedly after my son came home from school ill (after only being there 30 minutes!) I now feel terrible while he, of course, has recovered and is bouncing around…
Next week it’s all about the ‘code freeze’ on v1.0 of the Web Literacy Standard. I’ll also be doing a lightning talk at SuperMondays in Newcastle before heading off to Brussels on Thursday for the Mozilla Summit.
