March 14th 2010 saw the Mozilla Foundation’s “Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge” awards presented at the international South by South West interactive technology festival in Austin, Texas, USA. The international community of web learning project teams started work on Firefox prototypes in December 2009. The Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge sought international project ideas that could turn the open web into a rich social learning environment. The Jetpack SDK aims to help designers to build powerful Firefox add-ons and is part of Mozilla’s new Drumbeat initiative. In February, Mozilla announced that ten projects were selected as Design Challenge winners and invited to participate in a Mozilla Jetpack design camp. KMi was already a double winner in this work, as two of this international top ten were KMi Projects: MUPPLE-II and COHERE.

Three of the top ten winning projects were also chosen for special awards: ClozeFox was selected as “best use case”; Expression Widgets was chosen as the “best web hack” and our own ROLE Mupple-II web recorder received the prize for “sharing knowledge with others”.

The MUPPLE II system, which is now part of the EU ROLE project, implements an end-user friendly toolkit for learning environment design and best practice sharing. MUPPLE-II helps to record activities such as ‘getting to know each other’, share, and replay them. It combines the latest Web 2.0 semantic web technologies to enable personal and collaborative learning on the Web.

Accepting the award on behalf of the KMi team in Texas, was Laurian Gridinoc. “Winning this Jetpack for Learning award is only the first of our of MUPPLE II milestones”, he joked. The MUPPLE-II implementation will be further developed as part of the Responsive and open learning environments ROLE, research work. In this EU FP7 funded research, ROLE will offer adaptivity and personalization in terms of content and navigation and the entire learning environment.

Related Links:

• Join ROLE today
  
• Mupple II for Mozilla
  
• Wired Magazine coverage of SXSW and awards
  
• Mozilla announcement
  
• The pofHacker Story