3 things I saw at the Mozilla Summit that blew my mind

Open Thinkering Mozilla, AppMaker, Brussels, learning, Shumway, teaching, Together.js

At the Mozilla Summit in Brussels this weekend I saw three technologies in particular that could revolutionise the (learning and teaching) world I inhabit. I’d include Open Badges, Webmaker and the Web Literacy Standard in there, but I blog enough about those. 🙂

There were awesome ideas at the summit as well – most notably around User Personalization (UP). But for this post I want to focus on things you can play with right now. I’ve written more generally about the Summit on my conference blog and you can see some photos I took in this Flickr set.

  1. Together.js

Together.js is two lines of JavaScript you can add to a website to enable realtime collaboration. Check out the video above to see some scenarios in which it could be useful. For online teaching and learning I think this is awesome.

  1. AppMaker

While Mozilla AppMaker is still in ‘pre-alpha’ it can be used now and has an exciting future ahead of it. AppMaker is a really easy and straightforward way to create HTML5 cross-platform apps that can be used on FirefoxOS and, indeed, on any device that supports the Web.

Read more about AppMaker on the Mozilla Labs blog.

  1. Shumway

Flash on the Web is past its best. It was a dying, proprietary platform even before Steve Jobs hammered the nails in the coffin. However, there’s still some decent Flash-based stuff out there, so how can we make it accessible in a secure and HTML5-friendly way?

Enter Shumway. It’s currently in Firefox Nightly and should work its way onto the main release channel in a few months.

Were you at the Mozilla Summit? What did you see that was awesome?