[Learning Area] Let's build a "Learning Area"

[Jeremie Patonnier]

Hi!

This e-mail is a formal kick-off for the "Learning Area" project.

The general goal of this project is to improve the MDN content for
beginners. MDN is a well known resource for average and advance users but
we are still failing to address beginners needs. W3School and other similar
web sites remain a place of choice for them, even if they are flawed. We
have some row material, so we need to turn it into something more appealing
for beginners.

This entire project will be tracked on WikiMo:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/MDN/Learning_Area

Everything regarding the project will be discuss publicly on the dev-mdc
mailing list (and a summary will be sent on a regular basis on the
mdn-drivers mailing list). I'll prefix my e-mail subject with the [Learning
Area] string. Feel free to do the same as it will help us all to filter
e-mails accordingly :) I'll be glad to answer any question or to help
anyone who wish to contribute to that project.

I suggest the following rough path to achieve that project (See the WikiMo
page for more details):

1. Identify what's missing to MDN to make it suitable for beginners
2. Inventory existing content available for beginners on MDN
3. Organize content
4. Write missing material and build missing features

As we are many to have opinions and ideas about that topic, the first thing
to do is to get as much input as possible about "Building a Learning Area
on MDN". In clear: Speak out loud now!

I have a few ideas of my own I share with you here, feel free to comment
and/or add your own ideas; I'll keep track of this on WikiMo:

- In a technical point of view
- It would be cool if we could add a "search per level" option on our
search engine. As a rough solution, relaying on tagging could
help at first.
- The Mozilla's slowparse
<https://github.com/mozilla/slowparse>project (from the WebMaker
project) would be an amazing base to build a
Dabblet/JSFiddle like feature to create live editable examples with error
warning abilities. Such live editable examples could allow us to create
some full interactive learning course.
- In a writing point of view
- I have the intuition that we need more "small and single topic"
contents logically gather all together. But we first need to
inventory what
we currently have. I also think we need to make a distinction between
theoretical content and practical content.
- It would be very helpful if we could maintain a list of
(commented/commentable) accurate third party resources well made for
beginners.
- In an organizational point of view:
- We need a formal zone for beginners where we can organize content
accordingly.

In order to reach a larger audience, I plan to create a survey to get as
much feedback as possible (more about this very soon) about the current
state of MDN for beginners and about the existing third party resources for
beginners (even the inaccurate ones). In the meantime, share your thought :)

I remain available for any question.
Best,
--
Jeremie
.............................
Web : http://jeremie.patonnier.net
Twitter : @JeremiePat <http://twitter.com/JeremiePat>

[Jeremie Patonnier]

Hi Nicole :)


2014/1/13 Nicole Graves <nicole...@gmail.com>

> Good morning Jeremie,
>
> Just a quick note: I am a bloody beginner (lurker on the lists for a little
> while now), and would like to contribute.
>

Awesome! The easiest way to contribute just right now is by providing us
any feedback about MDN with your beginner's eyes: What do you like? what do
you dislike? what do you miss? etc. The same about other web sites you are
using to learn the Web.

I'm in the process of writing a formal survey (more about this next week),
but do not wait for it to share any feedback you could have. we wish to
build something FOR beginner not something we think is good for them,
therefor we need feedback to better understand their needs and expectation
first.


> Maybe, that is considered a bonus, rather than a miss :)
>

Definitely a huge bonus :D

Best,
Jeremie


>
> Thanks,
> Nicole

> _______________________________________________
> dev-mdc mailing list
> dev...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-mdc

[James Oh]

Hello MDN,

I am a beginner but I want to start exploring the open source world for experience. I would like to know how to become a contributor. Thank you!

James Oh

[Chris Mills]

Great to see this getting moving Jeremie! I started thinking about beginner’s content for MDN a while ago, and wrote some thoughts here:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/MDN/Development/Beginners_MDN_material

Feel free to grab anything useful you find there.

Chris Mills
Senior tech writer || Mozilla
developer.mozilla.org || MDN
cmi...@mozilla.com || @chrisdavidmills

[viswaprasath]

Hi Contributors,

I looked at the link proved by Chris,
https://wiki.mozilla.org/MDN/Development/Beginners_MDN_material

It is really nice to see adding the HTML tags, CSS and JS and so on.

I would like to add a point. I have been learning web technologies for past
few days. And I used to read blogs daily.

What I feel to express is, we need to make gamification on MDN learning
tool. In general we can add pages for list of HTML tags. And it will be
referred by lot of students, developers.

But to engage them we have to make some list of tag together and have to
reward badges so that they will get more interest in learning ( as in
codeacademy).

Thank you.

--

*-----**-**-----**-**----------------------------**-----**-**-----**-*
*---------------------*

For more information feel free to contact:



*Viswaprasath*

*Contributor to Mozilla*


*Email: shihan...@gmail.com <shihan...@gmail.com>Ph: 9443942201*

*Technoruler <http://technoruler.blogspot.in/>*

[Chris Mills]

+1! good point well made.

I believe we are looking into badges for MDN too, in a different conversation. It is definitely part of this conversation too.

Chris Mills
Senior tech writer || Mozilla
developer.mozilla.org || MDN
cmi...@mozilla.com || @chrisdavidmills

[Saurabh Nair]

Very interesting and much needed project!

I think the comprehensive, reference material nature of MDN (despite being
a good thing) itself is what drives beginners away. Too many links, too
much text to read, lack of linearity at places etc might be contributing to
the tl;dr scene for beginners.

These are three things that I think might aid MDN become more beginner
friendly:-

*"Try this code yourself" widgets*
- like in w3schools and others. The users shoudn't have to open another
program or page to try out what they learn. Most of the popular beginner
resources have these - codecademy, w3schools etc. When I referred to
w3schools 4-5 years ago to start learning HTML, this is what I liked the
most about it.

*Linear flow of content*
I went to the docs/web/HTML<https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML>landing
page from MDN hope page. It seems to have a lot of things about
everything, and a beginner is too confused where to start. I've seen a few
UX studies saying that giving a consumer more choices will contribute to
decrease in sales, rather than in increase [1].

So may be a text-book type linear flow of content that a person can start
at one end and follow through and and finish at the other end would be
nice. A more or less linear index of content/chapters would also be nice,
because that would give the student an idea about how far he/she has
reached and how much more is there to go. This will help them visualize
finishing the tutorial/course in a finite amount of time. And the prospect
of finishing something in a foreseeable amount of time is a good motivating
factor, imho. (I liked how Codecademy did with linear content flow and
topic index - http://www.codecademy.com/tracks/web)

*Friendly air about the beginner pages*
This might be a little more subjective than the above two: I think neat
illustrations and other elements like that to give the pages a friendly air
would be nice. Like a colorful image of a fox wearing thick framed glasses
asking the learner "Ready to dive into html today" or something like that.
Such friendly elements *might* reassure a beginner that it's not all
serious business here.

[1] - http://blog.kissmetrics.com/too-many-choices/

- jsx

[James Oh]

Could I also get more information on how to officially become a contributor? Would also like me to just give feedback on the current MDN site?

James Oh

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>> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-mdc
>
>

> --
> Jeremie
> .............................
> Web : http://jeremie.patonnier.net
> Twitter : @JeremiePat <http://twitter.com/JeremiePat>

[Janet Swisher]

One thing that I want to throw into this conversation is the "Web
Literacy Standard" that has been developed by folks in the Mozilla
Foundation. I would encourage looking at this framework, and possibly
connecting the Learning area on MDN to what's being done with WebMaker.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Learning/WebLiteracyStandard

Janet Swisher <mailto:jREMOVE...@mozilla.com>
Mozilla Developer Network <https://developer.mozilla.org>
Developer Engagement Community Organizer

[Jeremie Patonnier]

Hi!

Thank you all for those inputs, I'll summarize this on WikiMo very soon
(and I'll make a longer answer to all of this thread latter this week :)

++
Jeremie


2014/1/14 Janet Swisher <jswi...@mozilla.com>