Tag: browser

Coming to Open Ed 2010? Join us for the Mozilla Drumbeat Festival

http://drumbeat.org/festival

November is turning out to be a pretty stellar month – not only do I have the privilege of attending Open Education 2010 in Barcelona, but by lucky coincidence (and partly by design), that same week the Mozilla foundation is hosting its Drumbeat Learning, Freedom and the Web Festival, also in Barcelona.If you are already attending Open Ed, I strongly urge you to consider extending your stay by a couple of days to participate. (it’s Barcelona for crying out loud – what hardship!) Open Ed attendees can get in for a greatly reduced fee ($65 using the coupon code which you’ll get mailed as an Open Ed attendee).

As much as I have a strong connection with the Open Ed conference, I must admit I’m pretty stoked about the prospects for the Drumbeat Festival, which promises to be a bit more hands-on and more focused on open *learning* – not just OER or Open Education as envisioned by formal institutions. The program already looks fantastic – I am hoping to add a bit about my own passion, using client side/browser-based techniques to augment web experiences with open educational resources, but even without that the program covers many of my interests and approaches to expanding the reach of open education.

One of Mozilla’s main goals: to connect the people on the cutting edge of open education with technologists who are building the open web. Why? Because the way the web evolves will shape the future of education, and the future of education will shape the web. Radical educators and technologists need each other to keep things going in the right direction. This festival, especially on the heels of Open Ed 2010, offers a huge chance to catalyze this movement and create even more connections. I hope we’ll see you there. – SWL

Sharing your PLE just got a little bit easier

Big hat tip to Gerry Paille for knowing me well enough to realize that the huge Firefox Add-On nut that I am would be extremely excited to learn about a new feature/service for Firefox called “Collections.”

Basically, the Collection part of the site (and the related Add-On Collector Add-On – ha!) allow people to create collections of add-ons, annotate each of the add-ons with commentary, share these with other users who can subscribe to these collections!

So, for instance, if you are interested in some of the key add-ons to help yourself become an Open Educational DJ (ahem) you may want to check out my “Open Educator as DJ” collection which I just published, and better yet, subscribe to it, so that as new tools get added they are pushed to you.

Clearly, the PLE is more than just one tool, more than just the browser, and definitely more than MY use of either of these. But for me, the browser, and the various ways I can pimp it out, are a big component of my workflow as both an educational DJ and network learner, but one which has always been really challenging to share with people. With Firefox Collections, that just got a lot easier. – SWL