Photos: 1. Opera in a former swimming pool. Kiez Oper im Stattbad Wedding, berlin. 2. Floraris Genérica sculpture in Buenos Aires. 3. Community screening of The Pirate Bay: Away From Keyboard at c-base. 4. Eyewriter at MoMa. 5. Toronto. 6. Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires. 7. Casa Rosada, Buenos Aires. 8. Niagara Falls. 9. FirefoxOS Apps Day, Buenos Aires. 10. Drink-up with Iron Blogger Berlin.
I’m participating in MIT’s “Learning Creative Learning”, a social, online exploration led by Mitch Resnick of Scratch fame, Philipp Schmidt from P2PU, and others.
After the obligatory admin of the first session, the class was asked to think about the “gears of their childhood”, based on a paper by Seymour Papert.
If I understand the reading correctly, Papert discovered mechanical gears as a small boy, which instilled in him a sense of wonder and possibility.
Importantly, the introduction to gears expanded his understanding of the world. It created a framework from which he could learn new, more complex things like mathematics. Papert stipulates, “Anything is easy if you can assimilate it to your collection of models.”
Therefore, a “gear of your childhood” is a learning tool that provided you a model of the world from which you assimilate new knowledge.
And Papert wants to identify the conditions that yield these “gears” for learners and by extension determine how to create the conditions by which these epistemological models can be acquired.
This brings me to my “gear.” As a kid, I often sat next to my dad playing computer games. Thanks to him, I watched and played classics like Civilization, Master of Orion, and most formative to me, Day of the Tentacle.
The reason this game was so important to me was that it:
Transformed cinematic scenes into interactivity. While rudimentary compared to games today, Tentacle has very funny, colorful scenes that you could click through. It alternated between a cinematic and interactive mode, sometimes very distinct, and other times quite seamlessly. Therefore, I started to imagine animations as possible triggers for other action and not just uninterrupted scripting. This of course is a great model for seeing digital media as pliable.
Object hacking and time-based consequences. A brilliant plot element of Tentacle is that its three main characters are spread across 400 years. Using time travel and other time-based solutions, you solve the game’s puzzles. For example, if you need vinegar in the “future” level, you have to find a bottle of wine in the “past” level and let it sit for 400 years. These hacks encouraged you to be creative with the game’s objects and to consider how these hacks evolve or affect action over time.
Social gaming and cheating. This was also the first game where I learned about cheats. Civilization and many of my dad’s other games no doubt had lively communities where people swapped cheat codes and solutions. But this was before I knew about the internet, and Tentacle was the first game where I a) met a friend who played it and b) learned about walkthroughs. One time, I got quite stuck in the game, and so I asked my friend what to do next. He gave me a walkthrough of the puzzle. It’s not cheating as much as it is social problem solving, but it felt to me like breaking the rules. But it also helped me see that working with others can be fruitful. Furthermore, social gaming revealed to me easter eggs and other hidden layers to the game, which taught me to explore the environments more deeply, to consider more playful solutions, and to ask others what they found.
So, if I were to zoom out, it was probably computer games as a whole that were “gears of my childhood”, but the most memorable of which was definitely Day of the Tentacle. Thrilled that its creator, Tim Schafer, is making a contemporary point-and-click so that the adventures can continue.
From Slate’s Lexicon Valley, an episode about a vocal affection in young, “upwardly mobile” American women. It’s called creaky voice, and it describes a speaker using staccato bursts in the back of the throat. It’s raspy, deep and quite familiar.
The “creaking” sound grates on the ears of NPR veteran, Bob Garfield. But when played to American college women, it conveys professionalism, urbanism and a woman whose career is on the rise.
Listen to this example from a Deutsche Bank interview series, especially the first speaker, a managing director named Jane. Nearly all the women in this video creak.
(via CNBC)
The explanation given in Lexicon Valley is that the creaky affection lowers the voice’s pitch, making it sound deeper. And a deeper voice can be beneficial, especially in the workplace.
Take for example Marget Thatcher. Her high notes were “dangerous to passing sparrows”. Upon the recommendation of her advisers, she lowered her pitch and moved up the ranks to eventually become prime minister.
Soooooo maaaaaybe there is something to aaaaaall this creaking?
We’re at an inflection point with learning and making. What was once simmering quietly in makerspaces and classrooms is now boiling. Makers and mentors, and all sorts of hackers and radical educators in between, are the key players.
The maker movement, iconized by MAKE: Magazine but is much deeper and broader than that, has hit mainstream. Hundreds of thousands of people show up at Maker Faires, and contributions to sites like Instructables and Youtube tutorial videos are innumerable. Toy stores sell kits, and anyone from a scout to a senior citizen can take a workshop at their skill level. Makers bootstrap, and they hack. These are people with a DIY ethic and an affinity to sharing what they made and how they made it.
There’s also another movement reaching critical mass: a learning movement. It’s teachers, educators, museum curators, after school coaches – in short, mentors who cop a DIY attitude towards learning. Similar to the maker movement, they care about tinkering and interest-driven projects. They care about making, not rote memorization or other staid pedagogies of the past. They blend online and offline experiences, they focus on peer learning, and they are challenging traditional educational institutions with new modes of assessment and accreditation.
These two groups, the makers and the mentors, are coming together. And they’re creating a smart grid for learning. If it all goes well, it will shake up education, it will shake up employment, and it will shake up the way we see and tinker with the world.
At Mozilla, we believe that people learn best with others and that mentoring is a powerful, distributed way to connect learners with instructors.
By social learning, we mean that learning happens effectively through social interaction among peers. It’s learning that has an impact beyond an individual and become part of the larger society or community, in response to interactions with the community.
By mentoring, we mean peer support and encouragement where someone helps another person learn or make something, and also to understand that effort in a larger context. Mentoring is social and open-ended, and it’s certainly not just a one-way transfer of knowledge. We think a focus on mentoring is important, as it provides ongoing relationships for learners and a way to foster not only “hard” web skills like learning code but also the social ones like collaboration or working in the open.
Mozilla is a community that practices learning by making. We’ve got an ethos of less yak, more hack, and of helping people hack on things they care about. We don’t believe in “one-size-fits-all” and instead encourage a playful approach to the web and the world. Peers are a critical part of the effort, and not only for Webmaker but across Mozilla in projects like Firefox and FirefoxOS. Merit and peer recognition mean more than titles.
We’re not doing this alone — it’s a huge, distributed collaboration across many organizations and individuals. A “big tent”, as we like to call it. From kitchen tables and small code clubs to edgy museums and international bodies, we see this as a group effort where many players have a role.
With experience in “big tent” models like the Hive Learning Networks (city labs where organizations cluster to share learning offerings and resources) and the Summer Code Party (a campaign to teach webmaking anywhere), we’re excited to take this ethos to the next level.
The mentoring team at Mozilla will megazord two existing teams and add some amazing new folks:
This group will operate like a skunkworks incubator for radical ideas about learning, webmaking and mentoring.
We’ll run webmaking campaigns, train the trainer workshops, and other activities that grow the mentor community. This includes launching an international campaign rallying around the theme “Making as learning”.
We’ll bring new Hive learning networks online. The goal is to mobilize local communities and network them globally.
These efforts will be powered by platforms and social protocols for people to gather and teach skills for a digital age. We aspire to build a Github for Learning Stuff, an open repository where mentors can rip, remix and repost materials.
We’re dedicated to documentation and on-boarding new mentors, so many processes will be easily replicable, remixable and teachable. We want to celebrate the community at Mozfest and set the stage for 2014.
These milestones come from conversations with community members (thank you!), and we tried to roll that input into an action plan and share it back with you.
Here are our 2013 goals:
What success looks like:
We warmly welcome your feedback on the Webmaking mailing list or in the comments to this post.
Can’t wait to kick off this work with you!
– The Mentor Community team: Laura, Lainie, Leah, Kathryn, Michelle, Sayak, Chris
Localization is such an important factor in accessibility and inclusion. Thrilled by Atul’s leadership in making Thimble localization a reality!
Here’s how it works:
That’s it! Keen to hear what you think.
Peter & I landed in Buenos Aires, where we’ll spend the next month “travorking”, traveling and working. With the Bohemian neighborhood of San Telmo as our base, we’ll work regularly during the week and then head out to the Pampas and the beaches on the weekend. Not to mention testing local cuisine & red wine in the evenings. I’m excited to try out this kind arrangement — hopefully BA is the first of several travorking destinations. Let me know if you have any good tips. Cafes, books, excursions, meals, walking tours, and the like!
The Mozilla Festival (#mozfest) is an annual read/write event for anyone interested in learning about – and making – the future of the web.
It is an unique platform for bringing together key contributors to discuss, hack on and teach the open web using Mozilla tools and beyond. The goal is to celebrate the Webmaker community and jumpstart initiatives for the coming year.
The Mozilla Festival program is designed to reflect the values of Mozilla. Participants hack and learn in small, decentralized groups. Sessions focus on solving real problems and teaching applicable skills. The schedule is always evolving in response to participants’ interests. Everything is hands-on, hackable, and collaborative.
“The most inclusive, constructive geek event ever!”
— Tony Parkin, former head of ICT development at the Specialist Schools & Academies Trust
1. Make things with the tools Mozilla and others are creating. With 22 sessions dedicated to Mozilla tools, the Webmaker suite was introduced to and built-upon by Mozfest participants. Importantly, this year we introduced the “Webmaker Bar”, a dedicated playtesting zone for sharing our tools, inviting feedback and encouraging people to make new projects and features. Furthermore, we successfully explored how our tools can mash with others, such as the “Scratch Meets Thimble” prototype built by the MIT Media Lab.
2. Learn who is building what, how we can share and help each other. 187 facilitators shared their knowledge and toolsets in the sessions they ran. Coordination calls and a “facilitator bootcamp” before the festival improved session quality and also an understanding of what people are building and how we might work together. Also, the opening Science Fair exhibited 35 projects we curated for their notable contributions to making, freedom and the web. Promising collaborations await with organizations such as the MIT Media Lab, the National Writing Project, CERN, Internet Archive, Craftyy, GoCodery, and many more.
3. Design the things we want to build next, especially for mobile. Mozfest concluded with a demo party of over 30 prototypes hacked over the weekend. We made progress on two new verticals: mobile and games, and tested another key feature: Thimble with Javascript. For example, the games track helped the Game On Competition find local champions and jury members and produced a buzz around hackable games.
4. Fuel leaders who want to invent, teach and organize. The Hacktivate Learning track at Mozfest focused on fostering future leaders and co-designing teaching resources. Planning sessions were held with community members to design next year’s Summer Cody Party and the growth of the global Hive network.
5. Move the needle in the UK’s conversation about web literacy. Out of 295 press hits, 35 were strongly favorable articles (in comparison to 11 in 2011). 23 of the total hits were from the UK. We specifically set out to highlight our work in the UK and opportunities there, including announcing our web literacy campaign with NESTA, Nominet Trust and Telefonica. Hive London received a boost through further networking and a growing number of interested institutions, such as the Tate Collective, who also ran activities at Mozfest.
“[My professor] insisted that I attend the Mozilla Festival in London. This was probably the best advice I have ever received in my time at University & will likely impact my future greatly.”
— Finlay Craig, design student from Scotland
The motto was “Making, Freedom and the Web”. We curated 9 thematic tracks over 9 floors at Ravensbourne, a wired media and design college in London.
“Building Webmaker Together” not pictured.
“By the end of my first session, I was sold on MozFest’s participation approach and not nearly as nervous about my ability to contribute.”
— Ryan Graff, Knight News Innovation Lab
Each theme was curated by at least one Mozilla employee (“space wrangler”) to tie organizational objectives to session outcomes. Some themes had very specific goals (i.e. user-test Webmaker tools and build new learning projects with them), while others were more exploratory (i.e. paper prototype early-stage mobile webmaking experiences). The space wranglers were very effective and key to the success of the overall event.
The best prototypes were demoed at a closing party.
Fuller documentation is available for each session, including more prototypes and code.
The Mozilla Festival is an opportune moment to present strategic partnerships and launch milestone software. Videos.
This year we announced:
“Ultimately, I think [Mozfest] is about turning the people who have this year been the observers and learners into next year’s teachers and makers.”
— Joe Dytrych, CodeCards inventor
Participants at the Mozilla Festival hailed from over 48 countries. 52% of the participants came from the UK. 21% of the participants were 18 and under.
They represented a range of industries: education, gaming, journalism, filmmaking, technology, design, and more.
Content partners included: Nesta, Nominet Trust, MIT Media Lab, Telefonica, Knight Foundation, Sloan Foundation, Internet Archive, US Department of Energy, The Guardian, Chicago Tribune, La Nacion, New York Times, Boston Globe, BBC, Spiegel, ZEIT Online, NPR, WNYC, DIY.org, Goldsmiths University, Dundee University, Ravensbourne College, Imperial College, CDOT, Google, BlackGirlsCode, Mozilla Reps, WebFWD, Creative Commons, P2PU, Shuttleworth Foundation, CERN, National Writing Project, Hive NYC and Hive Chicago, CodeClub, GoCodery, Decoded, TinkerCAD, LA Makerspace, Open Knowledge Foundation, Craftyy, Mind Candy, Eyebeam, Tate, London Zoo, Web Foundation, Zeega.
Sessions are curated through i. an open submission process and ii. strategic planning with staff and partners. This year there were 120+ submissions through the open process. Notable drivers of submissions were: the Summer Code Party, program like OpenNews, MozPubs (community meet-ups in the London office), and new themes that caught people’s interest (hackable games, mobile webmaking, coding for teens and making the web physical).
Facilitators of these sessions prepared a lot with the festival team. Over 80 individual conversations were held in preparation for Mozfest, discussing the facilitators’ goals, interests and agendas. These calls certainly led to improved readiness, higher quality sessions and better relationships to Mozilla and other facilitators.
Equally important is the half-day “facilitator “boot camp” held on-site before the festival. This year over 130 facilitators attended the boot camp – our highest number yet.
The Space Wranglers, as mentioned earlier, curated each of the festival themes. They were Mozilla staff members who could tie organizational objectives to session outcomes, and they were also instrumental in the success of individual sessions and the larger festival narrative.
The core team:
A huge advantage to this year’s was working with a veteran team. Nearly all the core team members were involved in 2011, and learned how to work well together and how the festival ticks.
Volunteers also play a critical role on-site. We organized two volunteer briefings prior to Mozfest and recruited not only from the Mozilla community, but also local students studying event management, which worked out very well.
On-site we also benefited greatly from:
The event is hosted at Ravenbourne, a wired media and design college near the O2 in East London. Ravensbourne is a very fitting setting for Mozfest, both as an academic institution and as a collaborative space.
We partnered with the web media department to complete three levels of student projects: i. web magazine about Mozfest themes using WordPress; ii. coverage about Mozfest using web video; and iii. hackable learning games.
The space itself spans 9 floors, all laid out for real-time configuration. Almost all furniture is on wheels, so rooms are easy to adjust depending on the session and activity. There are open atria with a lot of daylight and nooks for conversations and hacking.
This year we also got clearance to allow children of any age in the building. Nevertheless, children under 15 had to be accompanied by a guardian, which limited some registrations and movement in the building. Our ”’day care services”’ were welcomed, although under utilized due to lack of advertising them.
“It was as if one of our finest school architects had thought, ‘I have a great idea for a festival venue which we could use as a school between festivals.’”
— Tony Parkin, former head of ICT development at the Specialist Schools & Academies Trust
The technology at Ravensbourne is state-of-the-art and the staff has been a great ally of the event.
The Mozfest website was simple but effective. The website used a customized them of WordPress, which worked well for the team to edit. However, we’ve push its features to the limit, especially regarding importing session data. Next year we should investigate whether WordPress fully meets our needs or whether we need to rethink the data import.
The schedule and documentation ran on Lanyrd. It’s the first time we’ve used it at this scale, and in general, it seems to have worked okay. Lots of assets have been added to Lanyrd pages and the microformats make for easy data clean-up.
During the festival, people seemed to navigate the Lanyrd schedule adequately, but two things to improve: i. set up an automatic refreshes of the schedule page rather than doing it manually and ii. improve the process for hacking the schedule. While several participants proposed new sessions and otherwise edited the schedule, the process for doing so was not clearly communicated nor supported fully on the scheduling site.
All in all, the energy and feedback from the event indicates that it was a success. Of course there are many adjustments to make, but wrapping up our third festival, it feels like we’re hitting a stride.
It will be interesting to explore how the model evolves in the coming year. Some recommendations:
1. Release cycles. Many releases and announcements were tied to the Mozfest milestone (i.e. Popcorn Maker 1.0, Webmaker badges in Thimble, etc.). In the lead-up to Mozfest, there a lot of pressure on the staff to finish their releases. One way to mitigate the stress and fatigue would be to release further in advance of Mozfest. We should still announce major offerings at Mozfest, as it’s a great publicity platform, but the additional time buffer between release and event would allow for more testing and calmer nerves.
2. Length. It should also be discussed whether 2.5 days is the right amount of time for Mozfest. It’s worked well so far, but numerous participants said they wished they had had more time. Other agendas could be considered to lengthen the event, which might lead to closer connections among participants and more prototypes.
3. Logistics. The current festival team handled 1000 participants this year, but if our intention is to grow the size of Mozfest, we must look into new ways of running event logistics. We’ll have to beef up the festival team to manage more people and all that goes with it: venue, travel, catering, setup, AV support, and more.
4. Regional activities. As the global Webmaker community grows, it’s increasingly costly to bring all of our key contributors to one place. Also, focusing on one city means missing opportunities in others. A possible avenue to explore is to continue hosting the large Mozfest in London in 2013 but explore smaller Mini Mozfests in other regions. These would be smaller in size and budget, and if timed before Mozfest 2013, they can work as feeder events for local talent to bring to London. Particularly we can tie these into the Summer Code Party.
5. Community space wranglers. Another way to boost local talent is to scout for and foster community space wranglers. In a similar way that space wranglers at Mozfest 2012 curated tracks, we should explicitly support local leaders to not only run sessions but curate a range of activities. After a few rounds of input and local testing, these community space wranglers could bring their teams to Mozfest 2013 for an even bigger impact and a global celebration.
Read the lovely antischokke’s post about Iron Blogger Berlin.
With ca. 20 bloggers, 900EUR collected, and just as much consumed in beer, it’ll be fun to keep on writing into 2013, even if sometimes slacking gets the best of me.
FWIW, some thoughts from the latest batch of reading:
Set in a decaying Californian wasteland, PKD dedicates his novel to friends lost to “slow death”, fictionalized as the narcotic Substance D.
An undercover cop Fred poses as small-time dealer and burnout, Bob Arctor. The cop/Bob’s personality cracks after the police task Fred with surveilling himself. Fred must bug his house and analyze recordings of himself/Bob through “a scanner darkly.”
His schizophrenia is intensified by wearing a scramble suit, an outfit that loops “a million and a half physiognomic fraction-representations of various people” and projects all the variations of eye color, hair, facial structure, etc. so that “the wearer of a scramble suit was Everyman.”
Suffering from the psychological demands of auto-surveillance and the physical pains of Substance D withdrawal, the police ask Fred/Bob why he does this line of work. To which he responds, perhaps channeling PKD on why he wrote this novel, “On a horrible positive reason: to have watched a human being you loved deeply, that you had gotten real close to, head and slept with and kissed and worried about and befriended and most of all admired–to see that warm living person burn out from the inside, burnt from the heart outward. Until it clicked and clacked like an insect, repeating one sentence again and again. A recording. A closed loop of tape.”
Definitely a good read, albeit with some disturbing misogynistic undertones.
Crime novels are difficult to describe without giving away too much, but this book earns its praise as a page-turner even if it won’t win a spot on literature lists.
A not-so-newly-wed couple move from NYC to the husband’s hometown in Missouri in search of brighter job prospects. Matrimonial disharmony ensues. Each chapters reveals more knotted coils in the relationship and all the ways the couple will try to sever/untangle/tighten the knot.
It’s a crime novel that manages to be fun to attempt solving while also capturing the little moments between people in love, and in hate, with one another: “Maybe he understands that you’ve made a witty remark, but, unsure of what to do with it, he holds it in his hand like some bit of conversational phlegm he will wipe away later.”
Could be a fitting way to describe finishing this book, too.
Zadie Smith takes us through a concatenation of events in NW, the North West of London, a neighborhood years ago could be described as “well-appointed country living for those tired of the city.” Now “Fast forward. Disappointed city living for those tired of their countries.”
The novel is anchored by two NW childhood friends, Leah and Natalie, who now struggle with adulthood. “Overnight everyone has grown up. While she was becoming, everyone grew up and became.”
Not knowing much about the real NW, I can’t attest to the novel’s verisimilitude, but little descriptive bits color it well. (The local accent “drops their aitches”, for example.) By trying to compare descriptions of NW with other neighborhoods, one realizes how comparison itself is a central theme of the novel. Leah vs. Natalie, Natalie vs. her husband, haves vs. have-nots, happy vs. sad.
The characters are always measuring themselves against one another, deciding that, for example, “marriage is the art of invidious comparison” or more tellingly, that “happiness is not an absolute value. It is a state of comparison.”
One can’t help compare NW with other Smith novels, and while this one was a good read, I prefer The Book of Other People and have heard White Teeth is probably her best.
This story follows Loeser, a set designer/dilettante, who in 1931 leaves the wild warehouse parties of Berlin for Hollywood in pursuit of the seductive Adele Hitler (no relation).
Loeser is enamored not only by Adele but by a legendary Venetian tinkerer, Lavincini, who built beautiful stage sets and a teleportation device, which “magically” delivered actors from one part of the stage to another. The device was used once, in Paris, in front of Louis XIV.
With the device, Beauman draws an arc from Venice to Paris, to Berlin and Hollywood. And with it follows the debate about special effects: “Enlightened critics [in Venice] complained that genuine dramatic values had been surrendered to this obsession with ‘the marvelous’, continuing a debate about the overuse of special effects that had begun with the Reformation and would presumably last until Hollywood fell into the San Andreas fault.”
In a novel about theater, the theme of masks can’t be far. The main character Loeser is fascinated by Carnival in Venice during which everyone wears a mask so one doesn’t know a prince from a pauper. To Loeser, “the glamour and intrigue of the old Carnival were nothing compared to its unacknowledged political radicalism.” Although he remains pathetically apolitical throughout the novel.
All in all, the book was enjoyable and not a typical of stories set in Germany in the 1930′s. Even now it’s hard to decipher what, if anything, Beauman is saying about that period and just used it as a backdrop.
Any good reading recommendations?
Larry: Nice piece. Thanks for posting!
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Galaxy Kadiyala: Awesome! :)
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Ioana Chiorean: Let's get the party started!
Awesoem post!
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Parker Higgins: "Travorking"?
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Asheesh Laroia: I find that quote terrifying.
But I hope you're doing well!...
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