We talked about "digital badges" in class a few weeks ago. This article explains how a competition, "Badges for Lifelong Learning," could allow digital badges to become legitimate evidence of non-traditional, "DIY" learners' skills and knowledge. Digital badges come into the picture because these individuals won't have a degree to show for their work.
This is the hypertextual poem by Stephanie Strickland called "The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot," to which Hayles refers in her article "Electronic Literature: What Is It?" Hayles's idea that we must recognize "the specificity of new media without abandoning the rich resources of traditional modes of understanding language, signification, and embodied interactions with texts" is absolutely at work in this poem.