Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

3.26.10 | Winners of the Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge were announced at the South by Southwest festival last week. 

The competition, with support from the MacArthur Foundation, sought to tap into the spirit of Mozilla’s open-source community to spark innovations in learning-oriented add-ons for the Firefox internet browser. The winning add-ons are available for free download.

The contest asked designers, educators and software developers to turn their ideas about learning online into working prototypes that could be used with Firefox.

Contest submissions had to be created using Jetpack, a standard development kit (SDK) described by Mozilla here:

The Jetpack SDK is a set of tools from Mozilla Labs that enables anyone who knows HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to create powerful Firefox add-ons. Our goal is to allow anyone who can build a Web site to participate in making the Web a better place to work, communicate and play.

The contest resulted in a slew of interesting ideas and three winning add-ons:

Winner ClozeFox designed an add-on for language learners. The tool will allow language teachers to create interactive fill-ins and multiple choice exercises on-the-fly from their selected pages and texts on the web.

MUPPLE, short for “mash-up personal learning environment,” helps learners map a path through online content by recording web activity and sharing it with peers online. By allowing users to give usage strategies to peers guiding them through the web, this tool may be particularly useful for collaborative writing online.

Expression Widgets introduces several widget modules for collaborative student work that allow students to create, capture and share web content like text and images. Teams can take advantage of simple wiki pages to organize and record their work.

Read full coverage of the winners on the Mozilla Blog. You can find more information and download all Jetpacks-based add-ons from the Design Challenge wiki.