JetPack Learning: add-ons for better education

I am super excited to see Jet Pack for Learning launching today! It’s a mashup between two approaches: Mozilla Education (open source code as raw material for learning) and a Labs Design Challenge (open innovation to make the web better). The specific goal is to get people to write add-ons that demonstrate innovative ways to learn online.

You can find out how it all works on Frank Hecker’s blog and the Jetpack for Learning site. Here’s a quick overview:

We’re looking for designers, educators and software developers who want to turn their innovative ideas about learning online into working prototypes in the form of Firefox add-ons. We’ll help you refine your designs and teach you how to create Firefox add-ons using Jetpack and other Mozilla technologies. Participants creating the best prototypes will be invited to the Jetpack for Learning Design Camp and the SXSW Interactive conference in March 2010.

Part of my excitement about this is that it mixes something we’re already doing well with Mozilla Education (getting students involved in Mozilla) and something we’re just starting to think about with Drumbeat (engaging new kinds of people in the web innovation process). I suspect we will learn both learn a ton and produce some useful prototype online learning tools.

A big thanks goes out the MacArthur Foundation for backing this — they’ve been amazing in terms of sharing our vision of how the open web can become a rich learning environment. Also, hurrahs go out to Frank, Pascal and Phillip for getting J4L rolling and Sean for the amazing logo (above).

Mozilla @ Seneca: how it really works

I’ve written before about Dave Humphrey’s Mozilla course at Seneca. Why? Becuase it shows how a traditional college and an open source project can link up to create a killer immersive learning experience for students. It’s a model I’d love to see other colleges adopt.

Despite my past posts, I don’t think I’ve done a good enough job explaining the nuts and bolts of Mozilla @ Seneca. I asked Dave if I could share one of the great ‘how it all works’ email messages that he sends to other professors as a way to fix this. He said, ‘yes’. Here it is:

Didier Courtaud wrote:

> How may students per year are involved ?

It really depends. We typically have class sizes of ~40, but right now, for example, I have 12 doing the second Mozilla course. Over the past 3+ years we’ve had hundreds go through the courses.

> What is the level of these students ?

When I get them they are 3rd or 4th year undergrads. They have taken 3 courses on C/C++, Java, Web (client + server side), DB, etc. In other words, they are already as good at programming as one can be in 3 years of education, and are ready for some real work. As such I don’t teach them languages, but rather how to work within Mozilla, XPCOM, etc.

> What do they do ?

Many *different* things. One of my goals has been to try and match students with work that would really motivate them, since I push them very hard and expect a lot–never mind how hard Mozilla development is on its own.

I tell the students, “None of you is ready for this work yet, so don’t pick a project based on what you know, but rather on what you want to learn.” I help them see that learning, experimenting, not knowing how to do things, asking for help, relying on the community and each other, etc. — these are the normal way of working in a project like Mozilla.

I do not let students pick their own projects, but rather they must pick from a list of predetermined projects that I have found in consultation with the community. This way they are working on things that will have value, and therefore the community is more likely to help with things.

> … only contribute to the Mozilla code?

Yes. Some of my students are working directly on Firefox, Thunderbird, Fennec, the Mozilla build system, buildbot infrastructure, etc. I have students working in XUL/JS/CSS, others in C++ and Makefile, others in Python and JS, and everything else you can imagine.

> … the same + writing extensions?

Yes. I have students also writing extensions for Firefox, Thunderbird, and Songbird. As you know, many projects won’t get accepted as changes to the core code, and have to be done as extensions. I teach the students how to work both ways, for example:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Education/Learning/ModifyBrowser

vs.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Education/Learning/ModifyBrowserExtension

These labs help them learn the different approaches. You can see my week-by-week approach here:

http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/wiki/index.php/DPS909_and_OSD600_Fall_2008_Weekly_Schedule

> … or do they apply the Mozilla technologies to other applications?

Yes. I have some (fewest in this category, since I like to work within the mainline community) working on Prism, XULRunner apps and packaging, etc.

> Are there evaluations of their work at the University level?

Yes, here is how I teach the first course:

http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/wiki/index.php/DPS909_Fall_2008

I expect them to release code just as all other Mozilla contributors. In the first course they must pick a project (e.g., bug) and work through 3 releases (0.1 – 0.3). We expect them to pick something large enough that they will not get finished, and have the next course for taking it from 0.4 to 1.0:

http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/wiki/index.php/DPS911

I have had good success with this approach. Here are some examples:

• Tony is rewriting the DOM code to allow script resizes/moves of the window to be controlled similar to how we do pop-ups. Here is his blog about the work: http://twlai1.blogspot.com/ and here is his bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=413792

• Sid is working to fix a whole bunch of bugs in the hgweb interface Mozilla uses to display check ins and repository history. See his blog here: http://blog.sidkalra.com/

• Anthony is writing a bittorrent extension for Songbird, wrapping an existing library (libtorrent) in XPCOM and adding UI to the application. See his blog here: http://ashughes.com/

There are lots more examples like this, but this gives you a sense.

> I will join you on IRC as soon as I can !

Great, I’m humph on irc. Let’s talk there when you have a chance.

My colleague, Chris Tyler, has written a paper describing our method that you can get here:

http://chris.tylers.info/ols2008/opensource-seneca-ols2008.pdf

I would also encourage you to join the growing community at http://teachingopensource.org, which is meant to supplement what we are doing at Mozilla Education and help us to connect with other similar efforts at other institutions/projects.

My hope in posting this is that both professors and Mozilla contributers will get a better sense of how the Seneca course works and why it is valuable.

Dave is putting a huge amount of his time these days into helping other colleges use this approach. If you’re interested in working with Mozilla to teach open source — or you are a Mozilla contributor who wants to mentor — you should get in touch with Dave.

Interview > Pascal Finette > MozLabs, Students and Open Innovation

In addition to working closely with colleges and universities, the current education pilot will also include a number online courses offered directly by Mozilla. Online courses give us a quick way to try out new ideas for learning content. They also offer an opportunity to reach out to anyone anywhere who wants to learn alongside Mozilla, college student or not.

The first online ‘course’ is the Mozilla Labs Concept Series Design Challenge. It mixes up webinars by people from the Mozilla community with a future browser design contest. It is targeted primarily at user interface design students, but others can participate as well.

I interviewed Labs’ Pascal Finette about this course and Mozilla Education in general:

The interview is about 13 minutes long. Well worth the listen. If you’re in a rush, here are some high points:

• Mozilla Education has the opportunity reach people from a real diversity of backgrounds, and to help them to understand the principles and values of open source software.
• We also have a chance to engage students and others in an open innovation process. This brings fresh blood and ideas into the community.
• In Mozilla Labs, the Concept Series Design Challenge will be aimed at students in human interface design. There are two parts:
  • Part one has students submitting their design ideas on what the browser would look like if it was the only application on your computer.
  • Part two mixes webinars and mentoring by leading Mozilla developers, with an aim to helping students prototype their design ideas.
• Of course, there will be a nice side effect — recordings of the webinars basically become courseware that other people will be able to download and use for their own purposes.
• Mozilla has the potential to help educators, students and other people who want to learn at a huge scale. The Lego Mindstorm education community is an example for us. They support classrooms in 30,000 schools around the world.
• Getting to this goal we need to build education materials that target specific disciplines. Seneca is already targeting engineering. Now Labs is moving to students in design. But this is just the beginning.

You can track or even get involved in the Mozilla Labs course. There is info on the Labs Concept Series page and in the Labs online forum.

Interview: Gregorio Robles from URJC in Madrid

Over the past few months, Pascal Chevrel has been introducing Gregorio Robles to the world of Mozilla. Gregorio is part of Libresoft.es — a unit of the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid that offers a masters degree in free and open source software development. After some discussions and small add ons workshop, Gregorio and Pascal have agreed to develop a Mozilla development course that will run this coming summer.

As a part of my interview series on Mozilla Education, I asked Gregorio to share his thoughts while he was at FOSDEM:

For the non-video-inclined, here is a quick summary of Gregorio’s comments:

• Mozilla is important for education. This is the first time in history where students can learn by working on real live code in an open project. But education is also important for Mozilla. Projects like Mozilla need people who know our technologies, and universities can help solve this problem.
• We already have a masters program on free and open source software, but it is mostly on general topics and technologies. We want to add courses on specific technologies so students can get involved with the community around that technology. Mozilla is a good place to start.
• Our specific plans for Mozilla are to have a face to face week in the summer followed by a longer online component. Students will take on projects where they get to really touch the code and know the Mozilla community.
• In terms of Mozilla’s broader educational effort, the priority should be to get materials done and then to re-use them. I am sure there will be lots of people wanting to use these materials. This will make life easier and make it easier to become a Mozilla contributor.

Gregorio will be working with Pascal, Frank as well as Dave at Seneca to prepare his course over the coming months.

Brussels EduCamp debrief

Last week in Europe was a wonderful whirlwind. One of the highlights was EduCamp — a small, pre-FOSDEM unconference about the link between open source and higher education. It was a bunch of people I knew (eg. Greg DeKoenigsberg from Red Hat, Leslie Hawthorne from Summer of Code), and a bunch I hadn’t met yet (eg. Ross Gardler from Oxford and Gregorio Robles from Universidad Rey Juan Carlos). Plus a bunch of Mozilla people working on education. All great, and all passionate about the learning potential inherent in the open source development process.

Much of the day was spent sharing info about the projects that people are working on or developing. Some things that struck me as interesting:

1. Folks at Oxford are planning to develop simple training for open source contributors to help them become more effective student mentors. The ideas is to help people know what they’re getting into, and what to expect in return, when they take on a student.
2. In addition to planning a Mozilla course as part of it’s current programs, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos is also working with a number of universities to develop a Europe-wide masters program in free and open source software development. This would mean standard accreditation and significant numbers of students across the continent.
3. There is a group at the UN University in Maastricht doing research on how learning happens in open source projects, and how best to link university students into the process.

I knew about the people behind all of these efforts and vaguely understood what they were up to. But getting together face-to-face always brings things to life more. I was impressed by the things people are working on.

The last bit of the day was brainstorming simple actions that might keep the energy around teaching open source going. Top ideas from the flip chart included:

• Plant a flag in the ground, and come up with a name for what we’re all working on (‘teaching open source’ and ‘open source education’ don’t really to work).
• Figure out how to tell the story of why open source projects are such great learning environments, and about efforts to make the link to formal education. (Chris Blizzard claims ‘tell the story’ is his answer to everything)
• Develop a simple way to map what people are doing in the open source education space. Maybe this is an online survey?
• Write compelling (and critical) case studies of people teaching open source in colleges and universities. Maybe this is an O’Reilly book?
• Create a blog planet of everyone who attended, and others working on open source and education.
• Develop a monster.com-style site for open source interns.

Truly a brainstorm. But some good ideas here. And some similarities to ideas that came out of the Teaching Open Source track that happened at FSOSS back in October. There is another meeting of people working on open source education happening in Chattanooga next month. It feels like there is momentum building around this whole idea. Hopefully that means some of the ideas above can turned into something real.

Interview: Dave Humphrey on Mozilla Education

In addition to blogging about the plans and rationale for Mozilla Education, I’ve also been wanting to describe the actual courses and content we want to pilot this year. As I noodled this, I realized: I’m the wrong person to describe these things. Better to have the educators and contributors who we’re working with talk about how they want to make Mozilla Education real. So, I’ve decided to do a series of interviews.

My first interview is with Dave Humphrey from Seneca College. Dave has been offering a Mozilla-based course for a number of years. Now he wants to open up the materials, community and mentorship system he’s been using to students and professors all over the world. Here’s the interview:

For people who are more text oriented, some of the things that Dave touches on in the interview include:

• Mozilla is a great place for students to learn because both the community and the technology are open. Students can do real work with Mozilla technology.
• On top of the technical skills, students also learn what it’s like to work in a global community, collaborating across timezones and languages. This ability to work in an open source way is a benefit to students even if they don’t continue to work with Mozilla.
• The opportunity for Mozilla in 2009 is to move beyond Seneca, collaborating across institutions. This sounds easy from a Mozilla perspective, but it’s radical in education.
• Succeeding requires people in Mozilla who are willing to support and work with students. Seneca has been able to find mentors because their students are contributors from the beginning. We need to see if this can scale.
• We need a site like education.mozilla.org to manage the the signal to noise ratio, creating a place that mirrors how Mozilla works but that is also a sandbox for students. This new site should also have Mozilla educational content and courseware.

In addition to extending the Seneca program for students and profs everywhere, Dave has agreed to help lead the process of thinking through and rolling out Mozilla Education. Frank Hecker and Dave will be hosting weekly Mozilla Education calls on Monday’s at 11am eastern time. Like other Mozilla calls, these are open to anyone who is interested.

Upcoming interviews: Gregorio Robles from Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid and Pascal Finette from Mozilla Labs.

Why Mozilla Education?

As we scribble and plan for for Mozilla Education, a question sometimes comes up: why? Why is this interesting to Mozilla? Why not just leave educating to the educators? There are at least two different answers to this question.

The first is straightforward: providing people with high quality, easy to access learning opportunities helps with Mozilla’s goal of promoting openness and participation as a part of Internet life. We can offer courses about things like open source work methods and open web technology. People in Mozilla know these things inside out. By sharing what we know, we increase the number of people skilled in these areas, and we probably pick up new contributors along the way. This is pretty simple, and is reason enough to experiment seriously with education programs.

The other answer to ‘why?’ lays in the fact that well run open source source communities are inherently engines of learning.  People can show up to a project like Mozilla with basic skills and a willingness to contribute. From there, they can: study the code and the project; get feedback on their contributions;  work with more more experienced contributors to create things and solve problems. If all goes well, they leave (or move on to help others in the project) not only with better coding skills, but also with a deep understanding of how to work in a global collaborative community environment. While it’s more like apprenticeship than a PhD, there is no question that this is a process of learning.

Of course, this alone isn’t reason to create something called Mozilla Education. In fact, some might see it as an anti-reason: people are already learning, so why do anything different?

The answer is: we may be able to amplify and broaden the learning opportunities that flow from Mozilla by looking more systematically at the education side of things. Take the upcoming Labs Design Challenge as an example.  It will use a course-like approach (interactive online lectures, competitive assignments, access to mentors) as a way to engage with human computer interaction design students. By doing this, the Labs people are opening up Mozilla participation and learning opportunities to a group of people that have been traditionally hard to engage through the regular open software development process. They are using education to expand our community and the number of people we reach deeply with Mozilla’s approach to open innovation.

The hope is that Mozilla Education can have this sort of broadening effect writ large: giving more people a chance to learn with and get involved in Mozilla. And not just technical students. Also students from disciplines like design, marketing and business.

On related question that a few people asked in response to my last post: why just focus on Mozilla, as opposed to looking at open source and education more broadly? The reasoning here is that you need real and concrete problems to learn around. In a traditional classroom, students work on ‘exercises’ — problems that someone else has already solved or that won’t actually get used in the real world. Whether its fixing a bug or developing marketing materials or coming up with design ideas, open source projects offer learning opportunities that are built around real world problems. By extension, these are learning opportunities that have potential for significant real world impact. The solution you come up with might just end up in a product like Firefox.

While Mozilla may eventually choose to champion the idea of open source as learning environment in a broader arena, the starting point has to be with the assets we have on hand: real problems in Mozilla projects, and mentors who can help people solve those problems. Eventually, we may learn enough about how open source and education  work that we could do something broader than just Mozilla. But we’ve got to start somewhere more concrete than that if we want to have an impact.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t evangelize and connect with others who share our vision about teaching open source. We have alot to learn from initiatives like Summer of Code that are already making the education + open source link. Mozilla is hosting a small EduCamp event on the day before FOSDEM with this in mind. If you are going to be in Brussels, please consider dropping in. It’ll be a great place to share your ideas and learn about this whole space.

Upcoming posts: explaining education ideas we have on the table by interviewing some of the people who are making them happen.

Mozilla Education, a scribble

As I mentioned earlier in the week, education is one of the first program areas where Mozilla Foundation wants to experiment in 2009. I spent some time this afternoon scribbling out an overview the ideas we’re bouncing around. This is what I came up with (bigger version on Flicker):

Frank and I have also updated the Mozilla Education planning wiki with explanations of the ideas in this scribble, and detailed info on each of the activities we’re considering. The high level summary at the top of the wiki page says:

During 2009, we want to experiment with Mozilla Education — helping people learn about Mozilla through an open, participatory and distributed approach to education.

Building on Mozilla’s 2010 goals, our big picture aim is to:

Make openness, participation and distributed decision-making more common experiences in Internet life

We think that education can help us reach this goal by helping more people to:

1. Understand and use (Mozilla’s?) open source work methods
2. Learn about and build with open web and Mozilla technologies
3. Participate in Mozilla and other open source projects

In 2009, we’ll test out a number of small programs aimed at reaching these objectives. They include:

1. Seneca Expansion / Virtual Seneca offering Mozilla learning resources and support to students everywhere.
2. Madrid Summer Course at URJC, establishing the first formal Mozilla course beyond Seneca and establishing an educational foundation in Europe.
3. Online Mozilla Courses that provide learning and engagement opportunities directly to potential Mozilla contributors.
4. education.mozilla.org where all Mozilla courseware and learning information can be found.

Over time, we hope these programs will also make a broader contribute to creating a new participatory learning model based around open source contribution … and to work with others who share this vision. However, for now, we want to start with something doable: making a formal link between education, learning and the Mozilla community.

I am posting this in the hope that people will offer initial reactions. While we plan to act quickly on some of this (especially Virtual Seneca), the overall plan is still very much in flux. It’s evolving pretty much daily as we figure out how to put things into action. So, slings, arrows and offers of help very welcome in the form of blog comments (we’ve already got a good list of Mozilla people who want to help). Also, feel free to dig into the wiki. Much more detail there.

Next week, I’ll post more thoughts on why this approach to education is interesting for Mozilla and what sorts of things we might be able to achieve in 2009. This should give people even more to work with and respond to.

Open. Community. T-shirts. Very cool!

I’m super happy to see the Mozilla Community Store go live today. It’s one more step in open sourcing Mozilla’s story. People in the community can create and upload their own shirt designs. Any then others can customize and print around the designs they like. Here’s what it looks like:

Right now, all the designs come from the Firefox 3 t-shirt contest that happened earlier this year (some amazing stuff). Hopefully, we’ll see more and more designs up there in the near future. And, if I’m guessing right, we won’t just see Firefox shirts: people can also post designs for Thunderbird, Bugzilla, SeaMonkey and other Mozilla projects. Shirt hackers, here’s your chance.

Long term, I hope this store can become even more. A way to promote and connect people doing design for Mozilla cause. A way to swap ideas amongst designers. A part of telling the Mozilla story better, and constantly evolving it. I know Tara and John are thinking about stuff like this. Happy to pitch in to make it happen. It’s cool, and it’s important.

PS. to all my friends: I guess you know what you’re getting for Christmas, huh?

A whole day on teaching open source

Before jumping into MozCamp here in Barcelona, I wanted to hammer out a few reflections on the Teaching Open Source track at Seneca’s FSOSS conference. So, here it is:

What happened: Humph and Chris carved out a whole day of FSOSS to talk about open source education. We had panels with students, professors, college admins and open source community reps. All were talking about their experience with open source in the classroom and how to make it better. I am pretty sure there has ever been a gathering like this before.

Big personal learning: Riffing on a comment Shaver made on yesterday’s post, Humph and I got into a discussion about what’s made him successful, which then rolled into the discussion with the whole group. The nugget of truth: “I wanted to play developer. And Shaver wanted to play professor. It took both of us to make this happen.” Most of my past conversations about replicating Seneca have been about finding the ‘right professor’. The last two days have made be think we also need to be looking for the right Mozilla contributors to help out on the education front.

A little success story: While we have yet to see more Mozilla courses, Seneca has replicated the open source course model locally by adding courses with Fedora, Eclipse and Open Office. People from all these projects were there yesterday. And, like Mozilla, all would be happy to see open source courses at more colleges and universities around the world. I already knew this was the case through Dave and Chris, but it was a different thing to meet all these folks. Nice.

Some follow up stuff: There was general consensus amongst the 40 people in the teaching open source sessions that we need to see more cooperation in this space. As a starting point, people agreed that we should do a survey of who’s teaching open source well and write up some simple case studies. Zak’s already working on something like this. We could use it as the foundaiton of a broader community effort. There is also a loose interest amongst people like Red Hat and SFU of working on spreading the open source course model. Seneca is hosting a wiki for people who want to collaborate further and possibly build a coalition of folks working on open source education.