Ahh yes, the monthly Mentor Community Call. What can I say? This is already my favorite call of the month, despite the fact that yesterday was only our second call. Read about our first Mentor Community call here!
A group of Webmaker Mentors from all over the world call in on the 4th Thursday of each month to spend 30 minutes updating one another on projects, events, ideas, and frustrations. We then spend another 30 minutes just hanging out and being goofy.
Yesterday, we had a tight agenda where we did some silent etherpad hacking and then some quick updates on the Mozilla Festival, surfacing annoying bugs, and the new teaching kit and activity templates.
During the silent etherpad hacking, a few minutes on the call when we give a prompt and then invite people to type their thought into the pad, we found out that:
- Diwanshi organized a makerparty at her college and “learned a lot by teaching my college mates what Webmaker and open web is all about.” Mentors nodded and pointed out that the best way to learn is to teach.
- Michelle is doing self-directed learning and leveling up in CSS and Javascript. She’s also cataloging her learning in a way that is inspiring and helpful for others who might want to follow her learning path. Soon, I’ll convince her to write her first Teaching Kit ;)
- Tom has been reading a lot and thinking about learning, and he recently discovered Mozillian Groups and is learning how to use GitHub.
Those are just three examples, but what’s common throughout the thread of “things we’re excited by” is that Webmaker Mentors are excited to learn. This is inspiring to me because I think wanting to learn new things helps you be a better mentor. The love of learning is contagious, and I know that people in the Webmaker Mentor Community make lasting impacts in their learners’ lives.
Our next prompt was about frustrations, and Mentors reiterated how annoying a couple of bugs that we’ve been working on are. Surfacing bugs that we should prioritize is hugely helpful, so please take a few minutes every once in a while, and tell us what’s been annoying you!
The final “silent Etherpad hacking” prompt was “What are you most excited about?” People are excited about the Mentor Community call in general and some events coming up, including Mozfest, the Open Knowledge Festival, Baby Maker Party and the Global STEMx Conference. True to form, the Mentors also expressed excitement about teaching and learning together.
After zipping through a recap of the Day of Remix we held for India’s Independence Day, Amira talked about the Battle of the Mixes, launching in a month. We’ll be issuing a challenge, and inviting people to make something in response using the Webmaker tools. You share your work, tagging everything with #makerparty, and then we pick winners to be shown on the homepage at webmaker.org. Winners get a tee shirt too!
She introduced the first battle, creating a motion picture show using animated gifs, and Jeannie jumped right in and shared this great make minutes after the call ended:
After the Battle of the Mixes call to action, we hung out for about thirty minutes and just enjoyed ourselves. Amira shared a Mozilla appropriate Buzzfeed with us, we giggled at the Popcorn Memes tumblr, we filed a bug and we took another silly picture.
Join us next month, September 26th for another epic installment of a truly wonderful community call and THANK YOU to all the inspiring Webmaker Mentors.
Related articles
- The new Webmaker Mentor Call(zythepsary.com)
- Webmaker Mentor Badges(explorecreateshare.org)
I am a happy happy hippo now :) :) :)