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.) ...

[This is part 1 of a two-part post; part 2 is here.] Lately there have been a flurry of posts and associated comments discussing possible future activities that the Mozilla Foundation (and by extension the Mozilla project) might undertake in support of its overall mission and the principles of the Mozilla Manifesto. This post is an experiment in thinking about an area the Mozilla Foundation (and Mozilla in general) might consider getting involved in, one possibility out of the many that have been discussed in the various posts referenced, and one of a number of themes that might inspire particular elements of an overall strategy. As usual, these are my personal opinions only. ...

I spent October 25 and 26 in Toronto attending the FSOSS 2007 conference put on by Seneca College. I didn’t attend the conference primarily to hear the conference presentations; my main aim was to talk with the people associated with two projects that the Mozilla Foundation has funded, namely the Mozilla-related educational activities at Seneca College and the Mozilla-related accessibility work at the University of Toronto’s Adaptive Technology Resource Centre. However as it turns out some of the presentations I saw had interesting connections with my Seneca and ATRC discussions. In this post I’ll give my thoughts on how Seneca’s efforts relate to the broader world of business and education. (Note that these are my personal opinions only, and do not necessarily reflect the positions of the Mozilla Foundation or Seneca College.) ...