Storytelling- Day One of Design Sprint "Webmaking for Journalists"

Today was the first day of the Open News - Webmaking 101 design sprint. Thanks to Hive NYC member Peoples Production House for graciously volunteering to host us! The team for our sprint includes:

pictured: erin knight, chris lawrence, michelle levesque, dan sinker, atul varma, brian brennan, jess klein and mark surman (not included are some top secret special guests who shall be named later this week!)

We started the day airing out our joint concerns about the direction of the project. It turns out, I wasn't the only one who was concerned about the tool not making sense within the range of potential tools that we might be developing at Mozilla. We all discussed what a journalist would want to make- and agreed that a journalist would want to use the web to tell their story. While this might sound simplistic, this is a topic that I am much more comfortable developing a project around compared to something like Webmaking 101 for Journalists. As I talked about in my last post, here is an example of a potential user who has a deep interest and motivation to make something (a story) using the web- and thus there is the opportunity to embed learning into this moment. Also, I think that the idea of storytelling has the potential to reach different kinds of learners (although it could certainly appeal to journalists)- including filmmakers, poets, youth etc.

We came up with a few goals for the week, including:

• create a dirty working prototype- it doesn't have to be pretty, just having some functionality
• designing some badges for the prototype

After determining our goals, we set to work reviewing the learning objectives for the project. This is a key thing for us to to review, because we wanted to make sure that the project fell within the scope of web literacies that are being defined for Mozilla.  We had a good conversation about what could be included and what was out of scope for the project. Here is a little venn diagram that shows the domains within Mozilla's web literacies that this particular project will be addressing.

Essentially, there are 6 clusters/modules/ steps that we will be exploring through this exercise in helping people to tell their story through the web (below). While we will offer the skills in a series, ideally the user will have the opportunity to take these modules out of any particular sequence.

1. All about Tags
2. Style Your Stuff
3. Images
4. Links and the Open Web
5. Embedding and Beyond
6. Sharing

In our first brainstorm, we discussed using these 6 modules as guides for badge distribution within the context of the prototype.

Tomorrow we will be mapping these modules and learning objectives to storyboards for the instructional overlays and starting to work on developing out the content and copy for that section. I am really excited with the direction that this project is going and with our re-envisioning of the learning objectives as well as scope.