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.

Badges: Level Up your Webmaking Skills

Badges are huge topic in the digital media and learning world and something that I have been working with in some form ever since I have entered into the realm of educational technology. To be honest, I have struggled with my feeling towards badges, that is to say, assessment for skills that you aren't always given credit for.

The Mozilla Open Badges Project describes badges on their wiki:

Badges give you public recognition for your skills, achievements and learning beyond the classroom -- unlocking job and educational opportunities.

The reason that I struggle is that I am concerned that badges allow you to formalize something that is blissfully informal. One example of my fear around this was when I was in Barcelona at the Learning, Freedom and the Web festival. My colleague Jack Martin and I participated in this local learning incubator where we told a story with twitter. It was a fantastic and fun day and we loved what we made just as much as we did making it. However, after the activity was over, a learning assessment team came over during our presentation of our story and gave us badges for our story. It somehow cheapened the experience that Jack and I had and sort of reminded me that, yeah this was about learning and grading-not the fun experience.

Ok, now that I have that off my shoulders- I find the idea of using badges to assess web design skills intriguing. Many web designers and developers learned webmaking skills in informal settings- hanging out with friends, navigating the web on their own, tinkering with blog sites. However, theses skills equate to real life work competencies that often need to be proven in some form when you are applying for work (for example). What if there WAS a way to say, bring along some form of street cred and accreditation into your interviews along with your portfolio?

So with all of this enthusiasm, and mild trepidation- I started to look at the learning objectives for Hackasaurus and, with the help of Matt Thompson and Atul Varma, started to answer the question: if Hackasaurus had a system for badges what would the badges look like?

Essentially I came up with 5 core badges and then 3 "level up" badges. The level up badges are really geared towards refinement and mastery, whereas the core badges are a compilation of hard and soft webmaking skills. These badges can be mapped to a structured and scaffolded curriculum, or be achieved in a more organic (non-linear) way. What will be an interesting mechanic for the project is the dissemination of the badges. Right now, we are thinking that a learner can acquire a badge physically in a design jam or online through some sort of self guided experience

The badges I came up with are described here. It's just a barely baked idea, and Atul, Matt and I are really just starting to tinker with how badges could support the learning experience. We won't be actually implementing this online for a little bit, however, I would love to hear your thoughts on how this maps to the learning outcomes and if you have any other ideas. The Tuesday Hackasaurus community call will focus on badges. Join us if you have the time.

Learning Objectives for Hackasaurus

While many people speak about how Hackasaurus is an open source development project, I think that it is important to note that this is an open educational resource project (OER) as well. What is particularly challenging and stimulating about the work that I do is that I am integrating ideas and creative thinking of both technologists and educators on a daily basis.

The project was birthed out of conversations between Mozilla and The Hive Learning Networks in New York and Chicago. Some of the initial test beds for the project were the New York Pubic Library, The Chicago Public Library YouMedia and the New York Hall of Science. The Hive involvement in the project is still strong and we have more contributors including the Digital Youth Network, Eyebeam, The National Writing Project, the Institute of Play and Mouse, as well as many international contributors, including Brussels, Barcelona, the United Kingdom and Nigeria. The strong involvement of these organizations as well as individual educators who have volunteered their time and energy towards Hackasaurus helps to strengthen the design of the tools as well as the curricular aspects of the project.

The development team of the project and the learning experience team worked together to iterate on defining the learning objectives for the project. I am sharing with you a bit of our thinking around this because I feel that it is truly interesting to see how our project has evolved over the past year as well as where we believe that we are headed.

We initially came up with a set of learning objectives that we know we are currently satisfying with our tools and design jams. The objectives sketched out here more or less fit into three categories: browser basics, web making basics and tool basics.


We then started to develop out what our aspirational learning objectives are for the project. This included everything from being able to code websites to understanding what ethical web making means. One area of particular interest was defining what we mean when we talk to teens and tweens about the open web, which one participant on our open web etherpad described as:

"It's better to teach kids how to tie their shoelaces (an "open" skill needed for making knots, useful for many other purposes) vs just making them use shoes with easy Velcro fasteners (which is also much less challenging for developing fine motor skills)."

This process was really interesting because it was a mix of the technical side of building for the web with the emotional side of creating- that is, acknowledging that humans are crafting the web and thus, have a responsibility to themselves and others to understand the power of their medium. Finally, and this was probably the most difficult part for us, we started to list what are NOT our learning objectives. Yeah, this list is probably too short, but I think that it is a good place for us to begin. Ultimately the learning experience that we are interested in supporting is that of a web maker, someone who is thinking of the web as a place for designing, crafting, challenging and coding, which allowed us to remove some of the other areas that are tangentially associated with the work we do, but are not our direct focus.