Mozilla Thimble Project with #TeachtheWeb

I spent my Saturday afternoon in front of the PC (again) because my husband was watching the footy on TV.  When the game is on, I clear out because it means obscenities being hurled at the umpires whenever any ball play goes against his football team.

During these times, I see an opportunity to surf the internet and see what else I could learn.

I’m in Week 2 of the We Teach Me cMOOC and this week, it’s Connected Learning in Practice.  We had to use Mozilla Webmaker Thimble to remix a project and I decided  to create a 6 word story using the tool to change some HTML and CSS script.

I’m no developer or coder but this tool is actually quite nifty.  It’s an online tutorial where you follow the prompts on the left hand side and preview your image on the right like that below.

Being a neat freak, I have deleted the helpful comments which were bolded in black and like to keep the code ‘clean’.

(Eye roll: look at me being a total geek! *tsk)

Inside Mozilla Thimble – I cleaned out the helpful text because I thought it was ‘visually unappealing’

Why did I decide to do this particular 6 word story?

Some time ago, on #etmooc we were asked to do the same activity and I had a Twitter conversation about what these six word stories could be around our workplace.  Jokingly I decided on, “You Do Not Need a Course” as a play on the continual requests from internal clients that they need a training course developed and facilitated to close some perceived knowledge, skill or performance gap in their business.

Of course, I put Obi Wan Kenobi in it because sometimes I wish I had his powers with my clients.

“You do not need a course”

“Assessment is not the only solution”

“It is within your training budget”

“Training is not the only solution”

and so on, you get my drift.

Mozilla Webmaker wants to help you make something amazing on the web and learn webmaking skills in the process and I would encourage anyone who wanted to learn more on basic skills to do some of the many projects on this site.  They’re actually a lot of fun.

Here’s the final website:

You Do Not Need a Course

(In case you asked, I wasn’t proficient enough to turn him up the wrong way and for the life of me, I couldn’t change the font size of some of the words.  After half and hour trying to figure it out, I decided to give up deciding on that’s what I would pay someone to do). 

Popcorn Maker Introduction

Last week’s activity was to use the Popcorn Maker tool and this was something I will be coming back to because not only is it easy to use, but you can attach a whole lot of different online photos, videos, music etc to create something.

Here was my introduction:

http://popcorn.webmadecontent.org/zxe

As you play with the Mozilla tools, you acquire badges that go into your ‘Backpack’.  With each project you work on, you open the badges which you collect and store into your backpack so in a way, it’s a bit of motivation for you to keep doing more projects and adding to your backpack.  Here’s what I’ve accrued so far – although they are not my main driver. I’m really just mucking about and killing time and hopefully picking up some code here and there…dabbling.

My Mozilla Badge Backpack

My badges to date

There was some reading to undertake about connected learning and they showed us this.

Isn’t this such a beautiful infographic?

It’s from MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Initiative which proposes a framework for organisations and individuals to collaborate in an openly networked way and to take advantage of changes in technology and connectivity called the Connected Learning Principles.

There’s something so very appealing with these Connected Learning values:

It just brings to light how ‘bigger’ learning is – that we’re doing it all the time, it is part of our daily life, it is our existence.  It is something that doesn’t stop, it’s evolving, it’s ever changing – it’s just part of life.