EMC links

Campus leaders and faculty governing bodies need to regularly re-examine institutional policies regarding faculty incentives, especially in this era of declining financial resources. Perhaps most importantly, campus leaders need to identify strategies to acknowledge and recognize the additional time and effort faculty invest in online as compared to face-to-face teaching and learning.

Making badges with Flickr

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.). In response to my first draft of this post, Greg summarized my point more succinctly and more generally: People have different philosophical models of education (whether they realized it or not) and that is why they talk across each other so often. Greg also inspired me to suggest the following contribution to Audry Watters top ten list of questions you can ask to find out if somebody really knows education, if you want to know if the now about educational assessment: Do you understand the difference between summative, formative, and transformative functions of assessment and how they interact? (A longer version of this post is available at Re-mediating Assessment)

Each of our 30 winning projects will be launching their badge systems on Mozilla's Open Badges Infrastructure in 2013 and presenting demos at the 2013 Digital Media and Learning Conference. 

Our systems of tracking learning don't hold up when we move to a more informal learning strategy. Our competency evaluation systems don't seem to be nuanced enough to be helpful, and they certainly aren't consistent across multiple raters. We all agree, I think, that what is really important is whether or not employees "know" something - and more to the point - whether or not they are capable of "doing" something (knowing at what level of proficiency would be a nice bonus). A badging strategy may get us there.

Three Generations of Distance Education Pedagogy