Education

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! ...

Are you an undergraduate or graduate student who loves Mozilla and wants to help us teach the world about it? I’m happy to announce that we’re now accepting applications for a summer student internship with the Mozilla Foundation, in support of our new Mozilla Education program; for more information on the internship please see the detailed description. (Note: If you’ve already emailed us about your interest in this, we’ll be in touch if we need further information about it. But if you want to email us again feel free to do so. . . .) ...

Well, sort of. . . . One of our proposed Mozilla education activities for 2009 is creating a central web site for Mozilla educational resources and related content and activities. We don’t have a standalone site yet, but we do have the education.mozilla.org domain now up and redirecting to the Mozilla Education section of the Mozilla wiki. Keep an eye on the site as we continue to add more content over the coming weeks. Also, please feel free to add relevant content yourself; follow the site naming conventions so that we can keep consistency in our URLs. ...

As is evident from Mark Surman’s recent “Why Mozilla Education?” post and all the stuff we’ve been adding to the Mozilla Education planning page, we’re getting involved with a lot of activities around the general theme of Mozilla and education. In order to coordinate all these activities we’ve decided to hold a weekly Mozilla Education teleconference call among Mark, Dave Humphrey, myself, and others working in this area. Because Mozilla is a public project we’re inviting anyone to participate (or just listen in) who has an interest in Mozilla and education. ...