Education

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. ...

[This is part 2 of a two-part post. Part 1 discusses the future of education and the possibility of customized online educational offerings as a disruptive innovation that might eventually grow to rival and even dominate traditional educational systems. It ended with a question: what does this have to do with Mozilla? I now attempt to answer that question.] Online education evolves to be user-driven, not vendor-driven By definition disruptive innovations allow users to do things they could previously not do, or could do only at great expense and/or effort. But while disruptive innovations make users’ lives easier, they typically make vendors’ lives harder, at least initially, because creating truly disruptive products can be difficult and expensive. (For example, think of all the industrial design, usability engineering, software development, and other work that Apple put into creating the iPhone and its simplified user experience for running mobile applications and using the web from a handheld device.) ...