Creating a catalog of curriculum & educational programming for a project as diverse as Mozilla isn’t exactly easy. We use a variety of pedagogies, we have different target audiences, we are starting from different places. There are semantics, politics, and relationships we have to consider when organizing learning materials and programming. And, a little secret, everyone organizes information a little differently, which can make it hard to see the relationships, understand the politics or even just agree on semantics.
But we have to organize information in a variety of ways because we have a variety of learners. The best way to serve our learners is to utilize each other’s work, and the best way to do that is by making mash-ups and remixes from one another’s work.
I’m quite pleased to see the vision of modular curriculum taking hold, and quite proud that we are creating an ecosystem of building blocks that will allow us to remix.
I’m remixing my heart out, so here’s what I’ve been working on and notes on stuff I’m planning to steal:
Teach Like Mozilla
We’ve built loads of curriculum to help other people #TeachTheWeb as has our community. Using the Web Literacy Map as the raw material that focuses this work, our team has coordinated and produced hundreds of pieces and parts.
We’re working on a new site that will include best of materials, which we’re remixing and collecting here. On top of curating and iterating on curriculum we built last year, we’ve now created, tested and iterated the first module for Clubs, which will launch with the new site.
I’ve been working on remixing our Training program, as well as stuff from the other projects listed below, to create curriculum for Teach Like Mozilla – a series of pathways to cultivate leadership within the project.
I have plenty to pull from including online learning modules for a bunch of the cognitive stuff behind our work (like group dynamics, facilitation and open participation), as well as practical things like “how to build an online presence”. Hive Learning Networks also have a wide range of professional development content to pull from.
Check out this issue and included links.
Stuff I want to use:
Policy and Advocacy
Melissa Romaine is thinking about teaching and learning modules that people especially interested in specific policy or advocacy topics can utilize to spread the word about important web issues and how to address them. She’s looking to build teaching kits and engagement activities to help people teach and train others in topics like Security, Privacy, Surveillance, Covalense and Suvaillence.
Andre Garzia is beginning to think about Advocacy as well, and is looking to continue testing curriculum in LAN Houses – a huge value add to what we’re doing with Club Curriculum because we can see what works and iterate on the fly.
Mozilla Science
The open science team was awarded a grant to level up their own professional development programming, and begin creating curriculum for the open science community. Bill Mills, Abby Cabunoc and Arliss Collins are also building out a fellowships program, complete with professional development and curriculum for train the trainers. They are focusing on technical skills for science, but also open source attitude and participation. I’m already pulling some of Mozilla Science’s stuff into Teach Like Mozilla, but plan on stealing more (often :)
Community Education
Emma Irwin wrote a great post about building curriculum & training opportunities as a way to better empower contributor success on project goals. The potential for volunteers is the opportunity for professional development and a new realization of contribution as a singular learning opportunity. The opportunity for functional areas (and all of Mozilla) is to reach goals with higher quality contributions, and greater impact. Things like conflict resolution and facilitation modules to help events and communities be more empathetic, supportive and participatory by nature are core to this team’s learning objectives.
We’re talking regularly, and using and remixing things Emma has been working on is going to make the Teach Like Mozilla content top notch. We’re also trying to set ourselves up so that in the future we can easily pull all this great content together under a Mozilla Learning banner.
Ascend
Lukas Blakk has an entire program, complete with 6 weeks of curriculum, that aims to help marginalized communities learn to contribute to open source. This curriculum pulls personal development into professional development and has weeks and weeks of agendas – I want to make sure Teach Like Mozilla does personal development and reflection too.
MDN
Chris Mills also has an entire program, complete with curriculum, that teaches the basic technologies of the web, and that is the fodder for MDN’s new “Content Kits”. Also at the MDN, Jeremie Patonnier, Justin Crawford and Diane Tate are a: friendly and 2: figuring out how the MDN can better support their communities with the Learning Zone, experiments and a fellowship program for developers in which fellows will develop teaching kits while contributing to Mozilla projects. I’m keeping my eye on the MDN work :)
Next Steps
For me, the next step is to develop a solid organizing structure for Teach Like Mozilla content. I’ve had conversations about the overarching structure and it’s time to get into the dirty details – which, as you might have guessed, I have several ideas for. The meta bit is 3-fold:
- Meta-cognitive: Theories and Pedagogies (for learning) conceptually and in practice
- Logistical: Practicalities of working openly. Building systems and processes to support collaborative work.
- Social: Networking local activity with global communities (and vice versa)
The devil is in the details – the organizing structure will help me figure out how to take all of this amazing work and crochet it into a usable set of modules that is cohesive in style and voice. I love your feedback and comments, and I’m always happy for help. Please do reach out!