Category Archives: open badges

Digital badges – the display problem

For all the promise of digital badges, the fact that they still can’t easily be displayed and shared is a significant failing.

If we look at three of the four main types of digital badges that I have discussed recently – accredited, work skills and community – it seems reasonable to assume that a key function of these badges is a visual representation of a badge earner’s skills, achievements and participation in their field of interest.

While there is going to be a measure of personal satisfaction for the badge earner in simply having any of these badges, the ability to share these badges and let the world know who you are and what you can do seems like a vital feature.

Following from this, you would reasonably assume that sharing these badges in your online footprint would be a matter of a couple of clicks. Given the ubiquity of options to easily share every other aspect of our lives online, from where we are to how quickly we ran to get there, it doesn’t strike me that this is a technological issue.

Obviously some aspects of this are outside the control of badge systems such as Mozilla Open Badges, Credly and the like. Ideally – and this is something that I have been telling my teachers for some time now in the process of trying to sell them on badges – platforms like LinkedIn will add fields that make adding badges to your profile simple. At the very least however, it should be a simple thing to get html embed code from the Open Badges backpack that allows us to add our badges directly to any website or service that supports this function.

As it stands, the best we can do currently is add a link to a badge collection – like cavemen from 2009 had to do. Until adding a badge to your digital profile becomes as simple as tweeting or adding something to Tumblr, breaking through with badges is going to be a struggle.

But maybe I’ve missed something – is there an easier or better way?

A hierarchy of digital badges – level 4 Classroom

The final level of digital badges (in education at least) is Classroom badges. Now in keeping with the let’s-not-get-caught-up-on-semantics theme of this series of posts, it applies equally to the training room, the tutorial group and so on – the name ultimately doesn’t matter, it’s the function that counts.

Classroom badges I would consider to be the most informal of all badges, used primarily to add fun to learning and to give recognition to learn progress through a subject as well as to acknowledge notable contributions to class. This might be in an online forum or class discussion, for punctuality or courtesy or in dozens of other intangible ways.

These aren’t generally going to be badges that learners would attach to their e-portfolios or online presence but they can still be valuable tools to enhance motivation and engagement.

Classroom badges are closely tied to gamification, which is simply about taking game mechanics (e.g. instant feedback, competition/leader boards, collection quests, unlocking levels) and applying them to new contexts. Gamification is facing a not-unjustified backlash because it is possible to doing it quite badly and many gamification evangelists take an oversimplistic approach that involves copy-pasting concepts that work in advertising.

Used in education, gamification can drive intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivators take the form of external rewards – physical prizes obviously but also unlocking access to new content and particularly peer respect. This can be incredibly effective in the short term but you run a serious risk that learners engage more with the rewards than the learning and when the rewards dry up, motivation plummets. Intrinsic motivators tap into a learner’s own desires and their reasons for undertaking the study. These often focus on recognition of progress and achievement, curiousity and personal interests. These can be more difficult to design but are far more valuable in sustained engagement.

It’s certainly possible to find the right balance of both extrinsic and intrinsic motivators in a gamified approach using classroom badges, it just requires a little more consideration.

I’m currently working with the head of our Year 12 program (final year of secondary education) on a badge based approach to encouraging at-risk youth to complete their studies. It is currently largely driven by extrinsic motivators – get enough badges during the year and we will put on an end-of-year BBQ that you can come to – but we will also include some subtler drivers.

Lee Sheldon, in his fantastic “The Multiplayer Classroom” book notes some examples of teachers that also got learners to design and issue classroom badges (a limited amount to increase their value) to their peers for certain achievements such as explaining a concept in class in such a way that they were able to understand something for the first time. Peer based badging opens a whole new door to this approach that is well worth taking further.

So this is what I consider to be the four levels of digital badging in education. Maybe I’ve missed some, maybe the terminology needs some work and maybe creating a hierarchy is redundant (as different people have different needs of badges) but I think this is a decent start.

I’d really quite like to hear your thoughts on this – and particularly where we go next.

 

A hierarchy of digital badges – level 3 Community

In addition to accredited study and work skills, digital badges can provide rich insights into a person’s wider interests and their engagement with their professional community.

While this doesn’t seem to be happening widely yet, I can see value in digital badges for attending and particularly presenting at conferences and workshops, membership of professional organisations or communities of practice and other activities which showcase someone’s interests and experiences.

I have to admit that even my badge backpack is pretty bare but one badge that I’m happy to display is one that marks me as a signatory of the Serious e-Learning Manifesto (because who doesn’t like a good manifesto after all). It’s really just a statement of principles around good eLearning design but as I scan the web, I sometimes get a little solidarity jolt when I see someone else with this badge and maybe I pay just a little more attention to what they have to say.

serious eLearning manifesto signatory badge(I’m just going to put aside for now the fact that I’ve just spent an hour trying to figure out how to embed this badge from my Mozilla Backpack into this blog post and save that for a greater discussion on displaying badges)

Anyway, digital badges can provide badge readers with an opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of a badge holder and their interests and passions beyond the acquisition of work skills and knowledge.

Have you come across digital badges being used in this way? What else might we be able to do with them? I quite like the idea of being able to click on a badge to find a list of all the other people that hold that badge.

A hierarchy of digital badges – Level 2 Work skills

In my last post on this topic, I discussed why I think it helps to identify different types of digital badges and looked at more formal badges that are linked directly to accredited qualifications.

The next level of badges I’d say would be those that denote particular skills or knowledge in the badge-holder without necessarily having the same degree of accountability or rigour in the evidence gathering process.

These badges should certainly still be designed around specific, well defined capabilities/competencies that a badge issuer needs to evaluate but by disconnecting this level of badges from formal institutional systems and processes, we can support a wider range of badge issuers and support more flexible and responsive badge programs operating in much shorter time-frames.

Two particular examples of these kinds of badges spring to mind.

The Insignia Project at the Australian National University (ANU), driven by Dr Inger Mewburn, Dr Kim Blackmore, Dr Katie Freund and Emily Rutherford (all people I know and respect) was created last year to explore the use of Open Badges in Research Education. It ties to ANU’s “compulsory, yet non credit bearing, research integrity course.”

So here we have a training program that is designed to equip students with vital skills that should serve them throughout their studies and into careers in academia but which isn’t considered a part of formal study. The skills addressed by these badges include Research Integrity, Library Searching and the use of Endnote, valuable additions to a CV but not necessarily something that you would receive a qualification for.

Similarly, the Mozilla Foundation has a huge open access education program designed to teach people web development skills. The Webmaker project covers skills including html, javascript, web development and digital literacy and offers badges both to people developing these skills and to those teaching them.

The conditions for these badges are fairly clearly set out and they would certainly enhance the online presence of someone that you might be looking for with these skills – whether for work or collaboration.

Neither of these projects tie to formal qualifications but depending on the provider / badge issuer, it’s easy to see that these may hold more value to badge readers that accredited ones.  This is clearly a question of validity and credibility, which is one of the greatest issues with digital badges and one deserving its own discussion.