Mozilla has been developing a new browser-extension technology, called Jetpack, which makes it dramatically easier to modify your web browser. (Well, so long as your browser’s Firefox.) Last fall, they announced a Jetpack for Learning Design challenge, which solicited proposals for education-related Jetpacks. ProfHacker covered the announcement, and subsequently formed a team to build Rubrick, a browser-based way to quickly build, share, and use rubrics for grading online projects. (See an earlier update here.)
The Design Challenge is currently closed for judging, and so I wanted to draw people’s attention to two sites:
- The Rubrick project site, and
- The Rubrick page on the Jetpack wiki
Both give you a good sense of where the code is now, and where we’d like to go with it. I also want publicly to thank all the members of the design team, and particularly Patrick Murray-John (@patrickgmj on Twitter), whose coding skill made so many of our more speculative thoughts reality.
Over the next couple of weeks, Mozilla’s judges will select a few teams to bring to SXSW Interactive, both for an intensive coding camp and for a “Hello, World” moment.
We’re pretty excited about the possibilities of Rubrick: Being able to grade right in your browser, and to quickly see and borrow from other rubrics, would be a big step forward in pedagogy and productivity.
Image by Flickr user martinjetpack / Creative Commons licensed
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Comments
1. Steve Ehrmann - April 04, 2010 at 05:18 pm
Rubricks could be an interesting tool, and I like the emphasis on using existing tools to build it.
I thought you might want to know about another browser-based tool that already exists. Flashlight Online 2.0 is a survey tool that (among many other tasks) enables two, or ten, people to evaluate each of, say, a thirty projects. (Think about a capstone course in engineering. You can then analyze the critiques, project by project, or criterion by criterion. You can also summarize judgments by type of reviewer (e.g., how did peer critics rate projects on criterion 1, compared with the self-critique, the instructor's critique, and critiques by working professionals)? If your institution is already one of the seventy that has a site license for Flashlight Online, all this is free. It doesn't have the split screen capability, but you could open two windows.
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