{"id":2047,"date":"2014-11-14T14:00:39","date_gmt":"2014-11-14T14:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/community\/?p=2047"},"modified":"2014-11-17T19:20:25","modified_gmt":"2014-11-17T19:20:25","slug":"mdn-mozfest-outcomes-self-teaching","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/community\/2014\/11\/14\/mdn-mozfest-outcomes-self-teaching\/","title":{"rendered":"MDN MozFest outcomes: self-teaching"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A few weeks ago the <a href=\"http:\/\/2014.mozillafestival.org\/\">Mozilla Festival<\/a> took place in London. Members of the MDN team were there, and we ran several sessions. Chris Mills and I ran two instances of a session about self-teaching.<\/p>\n<div style=\"width: 810px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/farm8.staticflickr.com\/7490\/15474715447_f90aaa8a82_b.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"173\" \/><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">MozFest by Yuandra Ismiraldi<\/p><\/div>\n<p>The intent of those sessions was to share experience about self-teaching (as everybody teaches themselves one way or another) and to get some outcomes to improve the <a href=\"https:\/\/developer.mozilla.org\/en-US\/Learn\">MDN Learning Area<\/a>, which is intended to be used for self-teaching about the Web.<\/p>\n<p>We ran two 40-minute sessions, one on Saturday and one on Sunday. In order to make sure everybody had a chance to share their experience, we split the\u00a0session in two parts:<\/p>\n<p>For the first ten minutes of each session, we asked five questions to the participants, and gave them sticky notes to put their answer to the questions on a wall.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>What works well about self-teaching?<\/li>\n<li>What sucks about self-teaching?<\/li>\n<li>Do you prefer self-teaching or mentoring and why?<\/li>\n<li>What resources are good?<\/li>\n<li>What tools would you like to see\/use?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The remaining 30 minutes was dedicated to discussing the various answers,\u00a0making sure every body had a chance to share their experiences and opinions.<\/p>\n<p>So what did we get?<\/p>\n<h2>What works well about self-teaching?<\/h2>\n<p>The biggest outcome is the feeling of accomplishment of learning things by\u00a0ourselves. Fighting difficulties and being able to solve problems on our own\u00a0is a big part of the self-teaching experience.<\/p>\n<h2>What sucks about self-teaching?<\/h2>\n<p>On the other hand, feeling lonely appears to be the biggest issue with self-teaching. That sounds obvious but very concrete issues were raised:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>It can be difficult to keep motivation and focus.<\/li>\n<li>It&#8217;s hard to find answers when we are stuck with a problem and it feels sometimes like &#8220;begging&#8221; for help.<\/li>\n<li>It&#8217;s hard to find good self-teaching materials without any help or guidance.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>Do you prefer self-teaching or mentoring and why?<\/h3>\n<p>According to our participants, both self-teaching and mentoring have their pros and cons:<\/p>\n<p>Self-teaching is nice to be able to learn at our own speed and to choose what to learn. On the other hand, again, being lonely and alone when facing a hard problem can lead to a dead end.<\/p>\n<p>Mentoring definitely makes things easier when we need help or to reach a community of peers, especially to solve complex problems. But on the other hand, it requires to adjust ourselves to peers&#8217; and mentors&#8217; way of teaching\/learning which can be difficult to follow because it&#8217;s too fast or feeling like moving too slow if we are quick learners.<\/p>\n<h2>What resources are good?<\/h2>\n<p>Among the various resources that came out of the session, there are three which were pointed out quite often:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Online courses and tutorials (with Codecademy gaining mindshare\u00a0as usual) to learn the basics.<\/li>\n<li>Community tools (forums, mailing-lists, IRC, etc.) to share help and knowledge between peers.<\/li>\n<li>Books or offline resources as a source of reliable long standing knowledge.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>What tools would you like to see\/use?<\/h2>\n<p>Finally when it come to self-teaching, the most wanted tools are:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Interactive learning tools for code (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.codecademy.com\/\">Codecademy<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/webmaker.org\/\">Webmaker<\/a> are the most often names that show up).<\/li>\n<li>Tools to measure\/evaluate one&#8217;s level of knowledge.<\/li>\n<li>Some resources on &#8220;learning to learn&#8221; on their own, and on structuring their learning pathways.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Those session were very enlightening and will definitely help us in\u00a0shaping the MDN learning area.<\/p>\n<p>Thanks to all the attendees. I look forward to run some other sessions next year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A few weeks ago the Mozilla Festival took place in London. Members of the MDN team were there, and we ran several sessions. Chris Mills and I ran two instances &hellip; <a class=\"go\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/community\/2014\/11\/14\/mdn-mozfest-outcomes-self-teaching\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":719,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4364,39,23323],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2047"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/719"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2047"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2047\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2047"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=2047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}