Working with Educators on Hackasaurus

This week I have been working on building out the educational objectives, sample lesson plan and assessment rubric to go in the Hackasaurus jam-in-a-box. The process for this has been interesting because I am trying to do this in an "open" manner so that it is truly designed as an open educational resource. In order to do this I found myself working on a strategy to engage the education community to help review my work and most importantly iterate and come up with new ideas.

I have reached out to people through social media and direct asks. The response has been good and it is definitely a start. Many of the people who responded wrote me back with statements like:

"I know absolutely nothing about code or html, but I want to learn and help the project succeed."

"I would like to try and help. I have daughters now in bother senior / junior so it may be possible for me to run a Hackasaurus event."

"Count me in!"

This is really positive and so now the challenge becomes, what is the best way to work collaboratively with all of these kinds of contributors? At the moment, I am building out the jam-in-a-box on a wiki and then, connecting content mostly through etherpads.
This is kind of a hacky way of being collaborative. It really just let's people contribute by editing, but doesn't truly encourage webmaking.

I am inspired a bit by the way that p2pu is developing out their challenge template and I see that this is on git so Atul and I might fork it and try to develop it out for our purposes.


I like how essentially it is a table... but in my mind it is a sharing repository where educators can post lesson plans and resources, and just like git hub- fork ideas and build upon them and post new ideas. It can be searched, used and built upon.

I would love to hear other ways that could support working in the open- and I mean working- webmaking, not just editing!

Call for Educators!

Happy first day of back-to-school for many of you! I am writing because we are coming very close to shipping beta for Hackasaurus and I wanted to see if any educators are interested in working with me to give feedback and iterate on some of the Open Educational Resource materials that we are building. These resources include the design jam-in-a-box which gives you all of the tools that you need to run a Hackasaurus event- whether you are a teacher, parent, informal educator or a teen running a workshop.

In the next ten days I would like to get some specific feedback on the learning goals, learning assessment rubric and a superhero of the open web lesson plan/ design challenge.

If you are interested in helping, please shoot me an email at: jess (at) mozillafoundation (dot) org

Thanks and happy hacking and webmaking!