Education

It’s now less than three weeks until the November 27 submissions deadline for the Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge. To get folks excited about the challenge Richard Milewski has taken Sean Martell’s great Jetpack design and put together this awesome promotional video that takes the Jetpack for Learning concept into the third dimension of Second Life. Thanks, Richard! [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxin2fDNnHg&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]

My apologies for not passing this on earlier: Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, Spain, is organizing a three-month course on Mozilla technologies in cooperation with the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Europe. The course is almost completely on-line, but it includes a one-week face-to-face “sprint” session in Madrid in July; students are welcome to apply for financial help with travel costs for the Madrid portion of the course. The course is open to international students and will be taught in English. You can find further information—including a course outline, important dates, FAQ, and a forum—at mozilla.libresoft.es. The deadline for applications has been extended to June 20, so get your applications in soon! ...

For today’s instance of our weekly Mozilla Education call at 11 am EDT / 8 am PDT / 1500 UTC we’ll be talking about a proposed multi-disciplinary multi-school “meta-project” to move the Processing programming language to the open web. (Processing is currently Java-based, though there is a JavaScript port in progress). I’ll also be glad to answer any questions people might have about the SoftHum workshop that I attended last week and blogged about.

For this week’s instance of our weekly Mozilla Education call I’ll be talking about various systems for doing online presentations and related activities (e.g., screen sharing, attendee chat, audio and video broadcast, and so on), including Dimdim, WebEx, GoToMeeting, ePresence, MegaMeeting.com, and OpenMeetings; feel free to also share your experiences with these and other systems. I’ll be doing the presentation itself using one such system, Dimdim; click on “Join Meeting,” and enter the meeting room as “hecker” and the ID as “mozillaeducation.” However please use the standard Mozilla Education teleconference system for the call itself. ...

For this week’s instance of our weekly Mozilla Education call we have a presentation from Pascal Finette on the online course being done for the Mozilla Labs Design Challenge. The online portion of the course is being done using WebEx, and Pascal will (among other things) talk about their experiences using WebEx for online presentations and communication. We’re looking at Dimdim as a (partially) open source alternative to WebEx, and are using Pascal’s presentation as an opportunity to do a live test of Dimdim. We’d like to get as many attendees involved as we can, in order to do a proper test, so please attend this call if you can! ...