Mozilla

Updating my analysis to reflect the renewal of the Google deal.

Four graphs show that almost all of Mozilla’s revenue comes from Google et al., and the majority of its expenses go to software development.

Some thoughts on Mozilla for people who don’t know Mozilla.

Following up from my previous post on my experience with Coursera, here are a few links of interest (mostly) relating to online education, with a focus on “competency-based education,” i.e., education directed specifically at teaching people to become competent at one or more tasks or disciplines: “Hire Education: Mastery, Modularization, and the Workforce Revolution” (Michelle Weise and Clayton Christensen). Clayton Christensen is famous for his theory of “disruptive innovation,” which I think is useful not so much as a proven theory but rather as a way to structure plausible narratives about business success or failure. When Christensen fails in his predictions it’s usually because he doesn’t pay attention to things that don’t fit neatly into his preferred narratives. For example, he and co-author Michael Horn previously hyped for-profit education companies and failed to see that for many of them actually educating students was not the point. Rather those companies identified a “head I win, tails you lose” business proposition in “chasing Title IV money [i.e., government-subsidized student loans] in a federal financial aid system ripe for gaming.” This represents a second try by Christensen and his associates to forecast the future of post-secondary 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. ...

Just a quick note to let all of you know that I’ll soon be leaving the Mozilla Foundation to take a new position as a sales engineer in the Federal sales group at IronKey. My last day at the Foundation will be Friday, December 11. Those of you with whom I worked pre-Mozilla know that this is a return to what I’ve done for most of my career (and I’ll be working with folks I’ve enjoyed working with previously). It’s been fun and interesting to work at Mozilla, but it’s time to move on. ...

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]