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From tuition fees to transfer credits, higher education issues provoke strong opinions and it’s rare to find an area of consensus. But one issue where there seems to be agreement is the need for students to acquire a diverse mix of skills and capabilities – not just academic training, but also a variety of interpersonal, professional and workplace skills – to prosper in a challenging labour market and contribute to Canada’s future. Unfortunately, even when students acquire such skills, it can prove difficult to turn them into credentials that are recognized in the job market.
A few weeks ago I posted this image and stated that I would be following up with several posts about badge pathways. In particular, how they fit into our work at Mozilla along several different lin...
Monday April 1st we travelled to the NSF headquarters in Arlington, VA. There, Michelle Riconscente and Margaret Honey from the New York Hall of Science hosted a meeting with an impressive list of attendees. STEM educators, members from after school programs, researchers, professors from all different disciplines (computer science, educational psychology, learning sciences) among others met to discuss the current and future research surrounding badges.Rebecca Itow, Cathy Tran, and I were invited to attend as members of the Badge Design Principles Documentation project and had been asked to serve as official note takers of the meeting. We ended up doing Dan Hickey’s presentation on the project and about digital badges research because Dan instead had to attend to a death in his family. Our presentation went over well and the audience was very interested in the initial set of design principles emerging across the 30 projects funded by the Gates/MacArthur Badges for Lifelong Learning initiativeAlong with discussions about the logistical concerns about the use badges such as how to manage these various systems (Erin Knight from Mozilla), on-the-ground depictions of badge systems (Alejandro Molina from the Providence After School Alliance, Marc Lesser from MOUSE, Inc, and Akili Lee from the DigitalYouth Network, just to name a few), and the potential for badges to optimize student learning (Barry Fishman). We candidly spoke about some concerns about badging such as “what is the life expectancy of a badge” (Avi Kaplan), and “what are some of the challenges and what are some of the insights as a result of this work?” (Michelle Riconscente).
Mozilla has released version 1.0 of its Open Badges standard, which offers digital badges in reward for verifiable achievements, skills and learning.
With Open Badges 1.0 software, developed through a partnership with the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Mozilla hopes to offer an open standard for using those kinds of badges to verify and recognize skills ...
Global Kids has experimented with digital badging in various contexts for the past few years. From badging an afterschool program four years ago at the New York Public Library, to badging the Urban Biodiversity Network program at the American Museum of Natural History, Global Kids has used digital assessment to support youth to recognize, talk about, and demonstrate essential digital literacy skills. Currently, we are consulting with three schools as they develop badging systems for their students, developing our own badging system for all Global Kids youth programs, and supporting Hive NYC and Hive Chicago to build their digital badging systems and infrastructures.
After 18 months in the darkness of beta world, Mozilla's Open Badges project stepped out into the light recently with the unveiling of Open Badges 1.0.
I’m at the DML Conference 2013 this week where, I’m delighted to say, Mozilla is launching version 1.0 of the Open Badges Infrastructure (OBI). Given how long I’ve been banging on about badges this may seem surprising, but it just goes to show the extent to which Mozilla works in the open with the community!
You should check out the newly-redesigned website and badge backpack (note new URL for latter now it’s out of beta!) I don’t usually do this, but I believe the text below put together by our new Communications Director Erica Sackin puts things way better than I could:
Get recognition for learning that happens anywhere. Share it on the places that matter.
Today we’re extremely proud to release Mozilla Open Badges 1.0, an exciting new online standard to recognize and...
Two members of our HASTAC/Connected Learning/Digital Media and Learning Competition team have done just that. They have done us all an enormous service by pausing to compile, curate, and even annotate the first bibliography on digital badges, a marvelously user-friendly bibliographic guide through the thicket of information and ideas in over 160 separate articles, papers, blogs, and other content types.
Sheryl Grant is Director of Social Networking for the HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition, and PhD student at the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Kristan E. Shawgo is HASTAC Special Projects Manager and Ci-BER Library Liaison, and recent MSLS graduate from SILS at UNC-Chapel Hill. They invite you to contribute your own additions—no bibliography is complete. But you can find here the best single compendium of scholarly and research articles as well as blogs, news stories, and opinion pieces on badges, categorized, curated, annotated with links.
We can learn a lot from the stealth badge system, because I think this is what games do exceptionally well, but educators have done relatively poorly. Leveling systems in games are almost always linked to unlocking features in a game. The newly unlocked features typically make you better at the game, which allow you to gain even more levels, which unlocks more stuff, which allows you to play the game better, which allows you to gain more levels, etc. It is a viciously addictive cycle that is highly motivating. If you haven't experienced it, pick up Pokemon or Harvest Moon and experience the psychological power of an intrinsic reward structure.
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Success and how it is measured continues to be one of the "known unknowns" for MOOCs. Debate (hype) on success is heightened by the now recognised and recorded high drop out rates. If "only" 3,000 registered users complete a MOOC then it must be failing, mustn't it? If you don't get the certificate/badge/whatever then you have failed. Well in one sense that might be true - if you take completion to equate with success. For a movement that is supposed to be revolutionising the (HE) system, the initial metrics some of the big xMOOCs are measuring and being measured by are pretty traditional. Some of the best known success of recent years have been college "drop outs', so why not embrace that difference and the flexibility that MOOCs offer learners?
Well possibly because doing really new things and introducing new educational metrics is hard and even harder to sell to venture capitalists, who don't really understand what is "broken" with education. Even for those who supposedly do understand education e.g. governments find any change to educational metrics (and in particular assessments) really hard to implement. In the UK we have recent examples of this with Michael Gove's proposed changes to GSCEs and in Scotland the introduction of the Curriculum for Excellence has been a pretty fraught affair over the last five years.
For quite some time now we have been talking about the idea of integrating some form of peer assessment and feedback into Webmaker, as a way to level up an individual user's craft and community. Today I want to share some ideas that Chloe Varelidi and I have been tinkering with and starting to actually prototype with Atul Varma. I am going to do a little walkthrough of a potential user experience. Keep in mind that some of this is probably wrong, but I want to put it out there so that we can work on polishing those bits.Imagine that you came to Webmaker and you were looking for a way to learn or gain specific skills. You click on the "Skills" tab (I'm sure there are tons of other names that could be more appropriate for this navigation item). On the skills page you see all of the possible badges that you can apply for - and these badges in the future will not just be individual small badges, but represent larger learning pathways.
As Senior Director of Learning and Badges at Mozilla Foundation, Erin Knight is leading the development of the organization's Open Badges Infrastructure in an effort to provide adults and youth ages 13-17 with an alternative accreditation and credentialing system for learning. Knight and her team announced the launch of Open Badges 1.0, a new online standard to recognize and verify learning, at last month’s 2013 Digital Media and Learning Conference in Chicago. Knight has also recently published a working paper in which she proposes an open, distributed system for badge validation. We spent a few moments with Knight to learn more about the platform’s potential to certify informal learning and what role badging can play in shaping the future of education.
As web-based learning platforms proliferate, and education increasingly happens in formal and informal settings and in both real and virtual classrooms, there is a growing need for a new form of credentialing that reflects these changes. Traditional, paper-based diplomas and certificates are no longer enough, but designing a meaningful, universal replacement for the old standard doesn’t happen over night. Luckily, Mozilla is on the case.
Almost a year ago I wrote a post about being a skeptical evangelist when it comes to the uses of badges in learning. This was spurred, in large part, by a workshop run by Mitch Resnick at DML2012 that was critical of the focus on badges. This year Resnick was back, as part of a panel, and the designated “chief worrier.” Then, as now, I find nothing to disagree with in his skepticism.
Digital badges appear to becoming the next, "new" thing in education. What follows is a description of digital badges as described by Digital Media and Learning: A digital badge is an online record...
I just earned some badges! Thanks to the Webdev Stewards and the Open Badges teams, Mozilla is now issuing badges to people who contribute to making our websites better. badges_webdev_profile. I've done some work ...
Mayor Emanuel, City officials and leaders from Chicago’s community and civic organizations today stood together in support of keeping Chicago’s children safe and engaged this summer through the administration’s Summer of Learning initiative, the largest coordinated summer learning effort in the country. In January, Mayor Emanuel issued a “call to action” for all organizations that run summer programs to join in the Summer of Learning effort and to date 143 organizations have answered the call, representing summer program opportunities for hundreds of thousands of children.
“From cradle to career, we are working to give our children the quality education they deserve, so they can thrive. Our summer programs help children stay safe and engaged during the summer, and are a robust opportunity to continue learning year-round,” said Mayor Emanuel. “I am incredibly proud to see Chicago’s organizations step up and join in this effort. We stand together and say to our children: this summer, the city is your classroom.”
In a unique public-private partnership, the City has teamed up with the MacArthur Foundation and Mozilla to allow youth to earn recognition for engaging in learning during the summer and help teachers track student learning next fall. Through Mozilla’s free Open Badges tools, each organization in the Summer of Learning will design their own creative digital “badges” for youth to earn and collect when they complete learning activities over the summer - from field trips to experiments to team projects.
The Open Badges team has been hard at work to release version 1.0 of our open source software. Changes you’ll see (drumroll please) starting this week include: • A new Backpack user experience....
Ann Pendleton-Jullian, the architect and educational redesigner, notes that: “Design has the capacity to shape contexts as frames for things to happen.” My excitement at being part of the connected learning movement and the...
Joining the ranks of “some of the world’s best and brightest leaders,” 44 international students from 45 countries received badges Dec. 13 for completing the Command and General Staff Officers Course at the Command and General Staff College.
Maj. Gen. Gordon B. Davis, Jr., deputy commandant of CGSC, used those words to praise the students in the International Graduate Badge Ceremony, noting that their participation in the college has strengthened mutual alliances, partnerships and professional developments. Since 1894, more than 7,500 international military students representing 160 nations have graduated from Fort Leavenworth.
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How to promote your "other" learning experiences.