Christie Koehler: Building a learning resource directory for Mozilla |
The Learning Resource Directory (LRD) is a project (overview here) I’m leading to help organize and make discoverable all the information for learning about Mozilla and how to participate in our many projects. This post introduces the project, explains the current working prototype and gives information about how to get involved.
Mozillians have created a sizeable knowledge base over the project’s 15+ year history. We have a significant number of resources documenting and teaching the tools, policies, processes and procedures necessary for contributing to Mozilla.
Unfortunately for contributors, new and experienced alike, these resources are spread across a multitude of sources. These sources include websites, mailing-list archives, forums, blogs, social media, source code repositories, videos, and more. Some of these properties are hosted by Mozilla, others are not. Some are publicly available, others restricted to volunteers who have signed an NDA or are otherwise vouched and some are reserved for Mozilla paid staff.
What these resources have in common is the absence of a central index or directory that links them all together and makes them easily discoverable. It’s this gap that we’re addressing with the LRD.
As such, the goal of the Learning Resource Directory project is to provide an inclusive directory of all learning resources across Mozilla. The complete project plan, including timeline and KPIs is available here.
In order for directories of this sort to be successful, the information they provide needs to be: complete, current, relevant and contextual.
In order to be complete and current, Mozillians not only need to have the ability to contribute freely to the directory, but they also need to feel a sense of ownership and empowerment to ensure they become an integral, active part of its curation.
In order to be relevant and contextual, the data in the directory needs to be structured such that multiple views into the data can be created easily. That is, different learner types need different views of the directory. A new contributor who first requires basic competence of our essential communication tools presents a very different use case than an active contributor looking to branch out and work with a different team.
Two related projects to the Learning Resource Directory are Webmaker’s Web Literacy Mapper and MDN’s Learning Area documentation plan.
How the LRD differs from these projects is that the LRD is specifically about learning resources related to contributing to Mozilla and as such serves a different, if at times overlapping audience. There will certainly be some overlap between what MDN covers as part of their Learning Area plan and what the web literacy mapper covers. However, there is a lot to learn with regard to web literacy skills that has nothing to do with contributing to Mozilla. The same applies to developing web apps and other knowledge areas that MDN covers.
Do you know of other related projects or efforts? Let me know!
Taking the requirements into consideration, MozillaWiki quickly came to mind as a possible platform for creating the index. Powered by Mediawiki, MozillaWiki is already set up in a way that anyone can participate in content generation and curation. This is demonstrated by a significant active contributor base (MozillaWiki has 600+ active daily users). And, the Semantic Mediawiki extension, already in use, provides a way to store and view data in a structured manner.
So, I set about designing and implementing a prototype of the Learning Resource Directory. It’s far enough long that it’s now ready for people to take a look, try it out and provide feedback: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Learning_Resources
Prototype of Learning Resource Directory homepage on MozillaWiki
Prototype of Learning Resource entry creation form.
Prototype of Learning Resource entry page/article. Wiki users can easily edit without needing to use wikitext by clicking ‘edit with form’ button.Each ‘learning resource’ has its own wiki page. Unlike regular wiki articles, these pages are created and edited in a guided way with a form. As such, any wiki user can create and edit learning resource pages without needing to know wikitext.
Each learning resource has:
Try editing an existing resource or creating a new one.
Storing learning resource data in this way allows us to create different views for the data. Rather than creating these views with a static list of links that needs to be manually updated, we can create them with semantic media queries.
Here’s the beginnings of the learning resource index home page where resources are grouped by their learning area: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Learning_Resource_Index
Prototype of learning resource index page.And here’s an example of how a team might use queries of the learning resource index to create topic and audience-specific information such as new webdev contributors: https://wiki.mozilla.org/User:Ckoehler/Demos/Webdev_Get_Involved.
Prototype of team page with resources selectively display for a specific audience (in this case new webdev contributors).These examples may not look like much, but keep in mind that they are dynamically created based on which resources have been entered that match the given criteria. This means that as new resources are added, or old ones updated, these pages will be updated as well.
The easiest way to get involved is to take a look at the learning resource index prototype, edit some entries, create some new ones and then leave feedback in one of these places:
Note: You’ll need to have a MozillaWiki account and be logged in to edit and create resources. You may request an account if you don’t have one already.
If you’re feeling adventures, try and create some views using semantic mediawiki queries. I’m in the process of documenting how to do this here, or you can take a look at one of the demos, copy its code and experiment with modifying it.
As you’re experimenting with the LRD and developing your feedback, please keep these questions in mind:
Additionally, I’m hosting a set of community calls to gather input and organize volunteers. Here are the dates of the calls:
Connection details for Vidyo meetings:
Connection details for IRC meetings:
Please join if you have comments, questions, general feedback or otherwise want to be involved!
http://subfictional.com/2014/11/11/building-a-learning-resource-directory-for-mozilla/
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