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It’s not really fair to smoosh three big topics into a single heading. Beyond the words though, we don’t have a solid plan for any of the three features above. By the end of the second quarter, we want to have paper versions of all the above. They’re topics we’ve thrown around for a while now, if they’re not obvious, some definitions:
Endorsement is the ability for one badge issuing organization to endorse another organization’s badges. Endorsement is a significant step towards a badge ‘economy’, where badges have objective worth relative to one another. A badge with multiple endorsements will probably be ‘worth’ more than a badge without the endorsements.
Public key infrastructure will allow issuers to sign a badge cryptographically. Badge signing will allow the issuers an extra level of security, but will also give the earners truly portable badges, even if the issuer goes away, or stops hosting the badge’s assertion file.
As the competition unfolded, I followed the inevitable debate over the consequences of “extrinsic rewards” like badges on student motivation. Thanks in part to Daniel Pink’s widely read book Drive, many worried that badges would trivialize deep learning and leave learners with decreased intrinsic motivation to learn. The debate was played out nicely (and objectively) at the HASTAC blog via posts from Mitch Resnick and Cathy Davidson . I have been arguing in obscure academic journals for years that sociocultural views of learning call for an agnostic stance towards incentives. In particular I believe that the negative impact of rewards and competition says more about the lack of feedback and opportunity to improve in traditional classrooms. There is a brief summary of these issues in a chapter on sociocultural and situative theories of motivation that Education.com commissioned me to write a few years ago. One of the things I tried to do in that article and the other articles it references is show why rewards like badges are fundamentally problematic for constructionists like Mitch, and how newer situative theories of motivation promise to resolve that tension. One of the things that has been overlooked in the debate is that situative theories reveal the value of rewards without resorting to simplistic behaviorist theories of reinforcing and punishing desired behaviors. 
Earning badges for learning new things is a way to display knowledge and skills. At the moment we have released three light blue ‘CommunityBadges’. For more on the proposed Skill Badge for ‘Certified Networked Teacher’ at P2PU, check this out: http://edutoolkit.wordpress.com/2012/05/04/skill-badge-certified-networked-teacher-cnt12/, as well as the URL for the challenge associated with this badge 
Tuesday, May 1, 2012 from 9-10am PST, ConnectedLearning.tv will host an open chat with Mozilla's Erin Knight on the progress and application of Open Badges. Also joining the Google+ Hangout with Erin:
* Carla Casilli - @carlacasilli
Join Erin and everyone for a chat on Livestream (http://livestream.com/connectedlearningtv) or via Twitter (#connectedlearning). Pose your questions in real-time to Erin, and connect with the growing connected learning community.
Learn more about how you can participate at http://bit.ly/Ia535A: after the session, this same page will contain the session's video recording, a curation of the questions asked and resources mentioned, and an archive of the Livestream Chat. Integration with Mozilla Persona = adding skills and achievements to your online identity. The new Beta release includes integration with Mozilla Persona (formerly BrowserID). This opens the door for users to create a single user-centric identity across the web, with tools like Mozilla Open Badges adding a “reputation layer” that provides a complete story about what they know and have achieved. All through an open, standards-based infrastructure that puts user sovereignty, privacy and security first. As John Seely Brown pointed out in his keynote at DML 2012, the lifetime of skills is getting shorter all the time. Rather than just recognizing skills, digital badges create new opportunities to come up with creative ways to support learners in reflecting on their learning experiences and planning new ones. Skills will become obsolete, but learning experiences will continue to be valuable. Digital badges can provide an open resource for collecting and sharing authentic work samples that demonstrate to employers the experiences and qualities that make an applicant a great hire. An ePortfolio for an engineering job that includes a video of the applicant at 14 years old presenting their science fair project could say much more than 1,000 words. 
Professor Halavais has not intentionally integrated badges into his instructional strategy as a vehicle for extrinsic motivation. In fact, the connection that has been made between badges and gamification is a point of frustration for him.
Statistics have shown that college graduates continually out-earn workers with only a high school diploma. In an article by the Brookings Institution, this fact holds true even in our current economic recession. The question remains, what weight will employers give these virtual badges, and will they come to pose a significant challenge to traditional diplomas? 
We recently produced this one-page recent history of badges for learning, to support our efforts to develop a badging system for the Hive Learning Network. We thought it might be of interest to others as well. With a badging system, we may be able to evaluate separately different aspects of needs assessment: for example: assessment planning, job analysis, focus group facilitation, qualitative data analysis, quantitative data analysis, survey construction, performance analysis – the list of specific skills goes on. And there’s a possibility of creating meta-badges that roll up a longer list of skills, as well as a possibility of “leveling up” which would document increasing levels of skill. With a badging system, our learning records could be more nuanced, but the system of documenting learning would be more complex. 
What’s that badge, really? Badges can represent all kinds of things, completing trivial quizzes, or months of study, regardless of what you had to do to earn them, the actual guts of a OBI compliant badge (a badge that you can push into your Backpack) is three things:
A badge graphic 
How can badges play an effective role inside an organization? In summary, I’m not tying academic credentials to badges inside the organization; rather, I’m linking the concepts of work-based knowledge, experience, recognition and career development as ways in which to enhance the employee experience. I’m also not at the stage where external badges may find a home inside the organization. 
The badge is not imagined as yet another kind of grading, but instead it is recognition of certain skills and competences that we bring to and build in classrooms with our peers. A badge allows the students to recognise their own investment in the learning process, enabling them to realise their particular skills on the way to learning. In any learning environment, students play many roles. Some are good as connectors, some serve as conduits of information, some are good in specific areas and need help with others, some are mentors, some are translators of knowledge, some help in creating new forms of knowledge. Unfortunately, most of our grading patterns refuse to acknowledge and credit these skills which are crucial for surviving the academic world. The ability of the students to badge themselves, and others in their peer groups, acknowledging their contributions to their collective learning, might be the motivation and encouragement that we are looking for. |
The parade of directors and department heads from DOE, NASA, Veterans Affairs, and elsewhere at the September 2011 launch event suggested that this initiative was going to have some impact. Given that other education funding agencies routinely spend far more on a single project, this level of attention for a $2M competition must have raised some eyebrows in DC (more at http://bit.ly/w3Jxc0).
On one hand, it is simple to add open badges to an existing educational ecosystem. With the Open Badges Interface (OBI) being developed by Stage 3 awardee Philipp Schmidt and Peer 2 Peer University, virtually anybody should be able to easily offer digital badges for accomplishments. By structuring and simplifying the peer reviewing process, communities will be able to negotiate criteria and establish validity and value.
But there is more to it. Barry Joseph of Global Kids put it perfectly at the end of the meeting: "Introducing badges into an educational ecosystem is like developing a new website within a company or an organization.” Barry explained how the seemly simple process of creating a website often reveals unexamined sources of power and information, and forces communities to explicate reams of previously tacit information. Introducing badges forces learning organizations to do the same thing. SUNY Empire State College’s Virtual Teacher Incubator in the School for Graduate Studies hopes to implement a series of digital badges during the next year to increase the recognition of quality teacher practices, projects, skills, and experiences. Traditional assessments of teacher development, .i.e. the Danielson model (The Danielson Group, 2011), may miss specific teacher successes as it focuses on a closed-rubric of unsatisfactory, basic, proficient, and distinguished categorical distinctions (Danielson, 2011). As a non-traditional assessment that focuses on individualized achievements, badges in the Virtual Teacher Incubator create another level of accredited validation of teaching abilities that have been demonstrated inside or outside of the classroom environment. The digital badging ecosystem not only provides authentic recognition of accomplishments for performance evaluations and professional development, but also creates a motivating learning community of shared and evaluated teaching practices across New York State. 
According to some, there's a "badging movement" underway that has the potential to change the landscape of education. Learners will be accumulating "digital badges" that are not just icons representing something they have learned or mastered, but active links back to the criteria for earning the badge and perhaps the tool used to make the assessment and the work, project, or performance submitted as evidence.
Will established institutions of higher learning be willing and able to compete with other providers who are showing how solid their assessments are and providing evidence that their badge earners can perform? Will established reputations for quality crumble when criteria and assessments are public? How might this affect accreditation? Will there be standard badges representing important skills and people or organizations accredited to assess and award each? Who knows? The future seems hard to predict, but we should have a lively conversation about the possibilities.
Humility plays a key role in the design of any system, including badge system design. 
I won't delve into the intricacies of the thoughtful perspectives put forth by folks like Audrey Watters, Alex Halavais, Cathy Davidson, Mitch Resnick, David Goldberg, Dan Hickey and Henry Jenkins, among many others. I'm not an assessment expert, a motivation expert, or immersed in the badges work. I do have a few opinions on badges though that come from my perspective on innovation, experimentation, and networked models of change.
Badges aren’t just simple pictures, the idea is to build a system that builds badges with meaning. Meaning in this case is a set of metadata that can be verified and attributed, both to a particular recipient (the learner) as well as the institution (the issuer). Both sides of that transaction should have control of their choices, a learner should be able to take their badges wherever they go, and the issuer should be able to issue whatever badges they see fit. 
Who needs a university anymore?” asked David Wiley, a Brigham Young University professor who is an expert on the new courses, known as MOOCs. “Employers look at degrees because it’s a quick way to evaluate all 300 people who apply for a job. But as soon as there’s some other mechanism that can play that role as well as a degree, the jig is up on the monopoly of degrees.”
By the end of this year, Mr. Wiley predicted, it will become familiar to hear of people who earned alternative credentials online and got high-paying jobs at Google or other high-visibility companies. 
Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be reviewing the resource available to developers, looking to contribute to the ease-of-use and accessibility of the materials. The folks at Mozilla have put a great deal of time into their work, and my goal is to simply help developers and other interested participants find the information they need. I’ll have a follow-up post about my progress shortly. 
One thing I’ve always been interested in is how to shift the power dynamic within classrooms towards learners in a positive way. Changing (or at least providing additional) ways for students to demonstrate their knowledge, skills and understanding is one way to do that.
The trouble is that people fall into the trap of becoming either advocates or naysayers from a very early point. We all like to have a ‘position’ on major developments in our field, so it’s a brave soul who is willing to suspend judgement 
...Having multiple goals for a single set of badges, or having different goals for different badges, in a single system can get exceedingly complicated. My point here is that badge developers should consider the various goals for their badges, and the assumptions behind those goals. Failing to do so can create “wicked” tensions that are impossible to resolve. This can be toxic to educational systems because stakeholders ascribe those tensions to other things (politics, laziness, culture, faddism, etc.). 
Experiment with badges but really experiment -- that is, try to figure out if these mechanisms really do what you hope they will do and be particularly attentive to the ways that they have unintentional consequences and damage the very activities you are seeking to recognize.
Also seed other kinds of research and experimentation which looks more closely at other mechanisms for promoting and appraising participation, including those which may already be in place within such communities of practice.
Be aware that the process of badging is going to make things more comfortable to those who are comfortable with getting recognition from adults and may make things less comfortable for those who have not yet fully bought into the values of the current educational system.
And above all, if you are embracing badges, make sure you are doing so because you agree with the core premises, because it's the right thing to do for your group, and not because someone is offering a bucket of money to those who are willing to "give it a try." 
Say you're an employer considering a job candidate. Under "systems thinking," the applicant's badge portfolio would include some of the UC-Davis courses he's passed, along with grades. But it would also include evidence of the applicant's specific skills, like "integrated pest management," which he might have learned working on a farm. Other badges would describe workshops attended, awards won, and specific projects completed. Each badge would allow the employer to click through to more detailed levels of evidence and explanation—documents, assessment results, hyperlinks, video, and more. |
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