Historical reference: Fast Clip related to Older Project Idea “Expression Widgets” winner of MacArthur+Mozilla “Jetpack For Learning Challenge”

Expression Widgets was an idea of using the Web Browser as an annotation mechanism allowing multiple students (in a room) to collaboratively annotate a live lecture given by a professor.

Historical note about the presentation demo day in Austin

Probably around the first week of March 2010, in Austin Texas, was when I had the chance to present a demo of Expression Widgets, a project idea aimed to help learning. This idea and project was submitted as part of the Mozilla + McArthur “Jetpack For Learning Challenge” project — see Design Challenge to Expand Possibities for Learning Online.

I reached out up to the final phase, winning also the trip to Austin Tx, alongside other 6 teams. In addition, “Expression Widgets” received the prize entitled “Best Web Hack” by McArthur Foundation and Mozilla.

At the moment I recall some ex-Mozilla/Netscape friends there too since it was an event that happened in parallel with the SxSx 2010 conference. Some friends there included Arun Ranganathan, Jaime Rodrigues. From the Mozilla side, the inventor of JavaScript (Brendan Eich) attended the prize party. This event had also Mark Surman (was judge and he was at Mozilla Foundation at the time) and I recall that I received a 500$ gift card by Joi Ito (MIT Media Labs director and investor) probably a symbolic touch to the event.

The Presentation Act

At the presentation moment I was the last to present. One of the things I did decide to do there (the whole week) was not to change my submission in drastic ways. Therefore I only adapted it and listened to all feedback.

I knew it was good and had no idea about the others. Therefore I recall a clear goal to improve my chances of winning not by changing the project, simply by adapting it to feedback — probably only removing pieces or adapting the presentation or communication.

The whole week there was like that — almost no changes, only reducing things (almost nothing), and listening. And also being the last to present I recall that first I had a fear — wow the last? but someone said that the last had more chances they would be better remembered (or something like) I also trusted in that thought and decided to take advantage of the situation: I will listen to all the prior demos and will read the judges. Before it was my turn (the 6th demoer) I also had another challenge and opportunity — 2 presentation ideas before me had to do with annotation systems. This led me to change some of the communication lines at the last minute, therefore my opening came out like this

This is Expression Widgets — Yet another annotation system!

I focused in the difference and in the purpose and I had a feeling that my presentation was very good — of course backed by the idea and originality too but nevertheless I knew the communication component resonated with what was sort of “needed”.

A few days after the demo day I stumble in Mark Surman and Aza Raskin (two of the judges) and one of them asked me something like

Would you work [turn, make] on that as a business?

To which I replied that I was busy working in Tela Social (the presentation system for screens). At that moment I had another feeling I was one of the winners.

Annotating “the classroom” and establishing a sort of collaborative approach for a given lecture (recorded or live) was always something that kept in my radar from 2009 to 2018 — an open idea always “bothering me”.