Education

For those following this blog, note that I’ve changed the canonical site name from blog.hecker.org to frankhecker.com. Any links and feed URLs referencing the previous domain name will still work for the foreseeable future, but if and when you have time you may want to update your bookmark list, RSS newsreaders, and related information to reflect the new name. A little history by way of background: I was around when the Internet was first being commercialized, and I had the opportunity to register hecker.com for myself if I really wanted to. However I passed because I didn’t have a server to associate with it and I thought I needed to be running an actual server in order to register the name (though I’m not sure that was the case even then). When I finally got around to having a personal server in the late 1990s I found that hecker.com had already been taken by a company that registered thousands of surname domains so that they could offer a shared domain service in which multiple people could have their own personal subdomains under a top-level domain: jane.smith.com, john.smith.com, and so on. So I settled on the next best thing and registered hecker.org instead for use as my primary domain, at the same time registering frankhecker.com (as well as the .org and .net variants) to prevent anyone else from getting it. ...

I’m currently working on putting together a draft plan for Mozilla Education activities in 2010. I’m a bit blocked on coming up with a coherent plan, so I thought I’d try to unblock myself by blogging my thoughts on the subject. These are informed by the recent feedback on Mozilla Education I solicited from several Mozilla folks, as well as the Mozilla Education 2009 report I wrote earlier. Note that I’m thinking out loud here, so this will be somewhat long and rambling. ...

We received a lot of submissions for the Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge just prior to last night’s deadline. In order to accomodate last-minute entries, we’ve decided to further extend the deadline through midnight (US Pacific time) tonight, Tuesday, December 1. There will be no further extensions. We’ve received a lot of good submissions thus far, and the Jetpack for Learning team is hard at work preparing for the next phase of the challenge. ...

Do you have a great idea for a Jetpack or Firefox extension to help support learning online? Would you like a chance to attend an intensive Jetpack design camp in Austin TX and stay over to attend SXSW Interactive? Then you have less than a week left to send in your submission for the Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge. To give you a little more time to prepare your submission, we’re extending the deadline for submissions to midnight (Pacific time) on Monday, November 30. If you’re in the US please relax and enjoy your Thanksgiving dinner before you send in your submission, and no matter where you live feel free to take time this weekend to polish it. ...

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! ...

For those of you participating (or interested in participating) in our weekly Mozilla Education teleconference calls, here’s what to expect the next few weeks: First, for this week’s call Philipp Schmidt will be talking about the Open|Web|Content|Education course he’s helping us organize, and that we’ll be officially announcing this week. Next week (March 23) we’ll have Pascal Finette talking to us about the online course Mozilla Labs is putting on as part of the first Design Challenge. We’re still looking for a suitable topic and presenter for the March 30 call; please let me and Dave Humphrey know if you have suggestions. Finally, on April 6 we’ll skip the weekly Mozilla call and instead participate in the first of the teachingopensource.org teleconference calls, for anyone interested in the general topic of teaching open source practices. Hope you can join us! ...