The puzzle now is to figure out how to tell which of many plug-ins I’m using gather tracking data and which ones don’t …without having to read reams of PHP. It would be helpful if the folks at WordPress could add a field for DNT:1-aware metadata on their plug-ins site. Over time that would give non-programmer bloggers at least a fighting chance of figuring out whether or not their blogs are DNT:1 compliant.

Thanks to Sean for the inspiring design!

Now if we can just get Mozilla Marketing to make Jetpacks like these available in the real world Mozilla Store!

The open web is a difficult concept to convey to the average browser user. As both the user interface designers and the support team at Mozilla will tell you, the average Firefox user has trouble distinguishing where the browser stops and the web begins. “Openness” is an even more abstract concept for most web users.

This leads me to believe that giving the user a good WIFM (“what’s in it for me”), argument is the best way to illustrate the advantages of the open web. The recent Internet Health Check initiative that accompanied the Firefox 3.5 release is an example of what’s in it for the average user. But, internet security is an issue fraught with technical complexities that make the eyes of even advanced browser jockeys glaze over.

I’m beginning to think that the easiest way to illustrate the advantages of the open web to the largest number of users is to take up the banner of the open data movement. It’s pretty easy to show how the availability of public data for remix can enable great things on the web, and the lack of it can stifle innovation on the web.

The Open Data Foundation, the Open Knowledge Foundation, and OpenGovData.org all have definitions of what constitutes “open” data. But, David Eaves said it best in his Three Laws of Open Government Data:

1. If it can’t be spidered or indexed, it doesn’t exist
2. If it isn’t available in open and machine readable format, it can’t engage
3. If a legal framework doesn’t allow it to be repurposed, it doesn’t empower

Eaves calls these “Find, Play and Share”. It’s a simple concept that anyone can comprehend. If we can show people how being able to find, play with, and share more data can make it possible for them to do more things on the web, we will make more non-technical users allies in the open web movement.

And the open data movement needs all the help it can get right now. Even in free countries there are pressures coming from government institutions to lock up data collected, cataloged, and stored using public funds.

In the UK last week, the Royal Mail used the threat of legal action to shut down EarnestMarples.com a website named for the British Postmaster General who created the postal code. The site had a postal code lookup API that was freely available. Fortunately, at least one major UK newspaper, The Guardian, is championing the open data cause. I believe we should take advantage of the media focus in the UK and lend Mozilla’s voice to the chorus in favor of open data.

In the US, the mainstream media is less aware of the open data issue. As a consequence we have also been losing battles for free data. Zip code data, including both post office geolocation data and zip code boundary data is available for a fee from private sources, but does not appear to be available on data.gov or the US Postal Service web site.

Post 9/11 there have been actions such as the U.S. Department of Defense withdrawing the Defense Aviation Flight Information File (DAFIF) from public access. The DAFIF is a database of airports around the world with runway and radio frequency information of critical value to aviation safety. While there was a comment period preceding the withdrawal of the DAFIF, there was no media coverage, and too few people commented to persuade the government to leave this critical resource openly available as it had been for more than a quarter of a century. The open data movement in the U.S. was neither large enough, nor organized enough, to affect the outcome.

More awareness of the value of open data on the part of both the public and lawmakers might have prevented these examples of data being locked up by government. Mozilla can help by becoming a focal point for those interested in opening the web by opening data.

It’s encouraging to see that the Australian Government 2.0 Taskforce, runs data.australia.gov.au a government website serving government created data sets offered under Creative Commons licenses. They are currently sponsoring Mashup Australia, a contest offering more than $20,000 in prizes for data mashups using data sets hosted on the site.

The Australian experience provides a model that we could use to point out the advantages of open data to media and lawmakers worldwide. Sadly, airport information is notably missing from the Aussie data sets. Australian government pressure to remove public access to Australian airport data was believed to be one of the reasons for the DAFIF withdrawal in the U.S.

In conclusion, the open data issue is one that provides easy-to-understand examples of how a more open web is more useful to everyone. I believe it offers one of the best places to focus Drumbeat efforts to open the web. As a suggestion for a first step, how about putting up a page structured like Planet Mozilla that combines feeds from open data organizations and bloggers around the world?

Mozilla takes openness one step further. Unlike data collected by that other browser company, the data collected by all of the Test Pilot plug-ins on the planet is freely available for download. This means that if you’re a Math or Statistics teacher, you can build lessons around Test Pilot data-sets from the real world that your students helped create by having installed the plug-in. …or you can just look at the interesting ways that others interpret the data-sets.

Take a minute to visit the Test Pilot web page and download the plug-in. Encourage your students and colleagues to do the same. You’ll be helping to make future versions of Firefox work better for you and your students, as well as making the open web a better place for all of us.

If you’re a Math teacher who has built a lesson plan around Test Pilot data, please post the lesson plan on Curriki.org, the open curriculum wiki, and leave a comment here so we can spread the word to other teachers.

• JetPack is a set of tools for extending the browser using open, standards-based technologies like CSS, HTML, and Javascript.
• Prism is another labs project that lets you wrap a website into a bundle that looks, feels and works more like an application than a web resource.
• Weave, also from Mozilla Labs, will synchronize browser content across multiple machines, so you can start a project on a machine at school, and continue it on a mobile device or your computer at home.

So here’s how we could use these technologies to make Firefox the next K-12 “killer-app”:

The ultimate ne plus ultra K12 killer app has lots of different features, and lives in a moderately complex environment. But I believe it can be implemented incrementally as a series of small open source projects using Jetpack and Prism. Schools and even individual teachers could then select which extensions fit their needs. With luck, they will even be able to choose between competing extensions created by developers with different viewpoints about how to approach these problems.

Schools today make heavy use of curriculum materials that are “aligned” to state curriculum standards. Teachers want to use materials, including web resources, that directly address the curriculum standards they need to cover in class. As I lament in a previous post, the current state of these standards is a problem, with only three states offering their curriculum standards in XML, and the lack of a set of national standards. Many districts also modify the state standards by extending or sub-setting them.

There are proprietary search engines such as netTrekker that correlate some of the web to curriculum standards. But these are, for the most part, closed, proprietary solutions. We need to encourage the creation of open, shared curriculum alignment data. Certainly Wikipedia is an existence proof for large collective efforts of this kind. But the creation mechanism is slightly different.

Imagine a Jetpack Firefox extension that lets teachers collect, and correlate web resources to the curriculum standards in use in their districts, as well as rating them for quality with only a few additional clicks in the course of their normal lesson planning. Teachers could optionally submit those correlations to a central database to share with the education community. As the dataset matures it also becomes a driver for teacher lesson preparation, think of somthing akin to StumbleUpon that knows the curriculum requirements.

This data set can be integrated into student mentoring Jetpacks as well. When a student has difficulty with a particular concept in a homework assignment, a student Jetpack could recommend alternate presentations of material correlated to the same standard.

Another useful tool would be a Jetpack that takes a list of urls aligned with curriculum standards and tracks time-on-task for each standard. This should provide persistence across browser sessions, and the ability to track results for individual students in shared computer environments.

There should also be support for curriculum alignment meta tags that would allow web content creators to provide both direct correlations to various curriculum standards and “hints” to appropriate alignment of the content as well as the range of grade level for which the material is intended. Organizations like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, National Public Radio, NASA, and many corporations currently offer on-line lesson plans to teachers, but there is no standardized way for them to supply curriculum alignment information in a machine readable manner.

Because the system will, of necessity, transparently support more than one correlation standard, it will also allow the use of “synthetic” correlation standards derived from the combination of all of the various individual state and district standards. This will provide a platform for discussion of possible national and international curriculum standards in a far more rational manner than is possible today.

First steps toward this ambitious project would provide real benefits for teachers and students even before the creation of a large database of correlated web content. Consider the following (more modest) possiblites:

• A Lesson-Plan Assembly Jetpack that lets teachers fill-in lesson plan templates in a point and click fashion while browsing for educational resources.
• A “compound URL” packaging Jetpack that enables teachers to bundle an assignment with supporting bookmarks, and documents (PDFs, image files, text files, etc.) into a single file that can be either emailed or posted on a web page for download.
• A companion Jetpack for students that can open these bundles and present them to the students in an encapsulated assignment workspace (color-coded tabs for the the assignment text, links, documents, and perhaps text editing tab). Include a way for students to add student-generated content to the bundle, save and reload the workspace after doing work, and turn-in work by sending the bundle (or just the student additions) back to the teacher (http upload or email).
• A Jetpack that lets a student do research on an arbitrary (Jetpack equipped) computer, and save results (and browser state) to a thumb drive (or synced to Weave) so that when work resumes on another machine the student can pick up where he or she left off.

What I’ve presented here is really just the beginning of what could be done to turn Firefox into the ultimate “killer-app” for K-12 education. Not everything presented here can be implemented quickly, but all this and more is possible with using the projects currently being worked on in Mozilla Labs. The sooner we start the sooner we can make a difference in educational outcomes. Use the comment form below to contribute your ideas to the discussion.