Group items tagged

Closing summary from author Cathy: "Obviously they don't in all situations. For over a hundred years grades have represented or summarized a teacher's estimation of the worth of a student as quantified by a series of tests, often of the item-response variety (invented in 1914). Badges are simply another way, a more flexible way, of certifying a range of skills that our machine-age multiple choice mode of testing doesn't fully comprehend but that are crucial to the ways we live, work, and learn."

Blog post from John Patten

Tufts RoundTable Commons blog post from Peter Levine arguing in favour of badge-based systems as a means to provide legitimate credentials for smaller chunks of learning and specific skills.

Thanks to @nancyrubin via @simfin for the pointer to this one

"I admit this title makes a pretty bold statement for a society that pretty much uses the first five letters of the alphabet to define every child from about age 5 until adulthood. But, I am hearing more and more about the use of badges in the classroom, especially in conversations about gamification and self motivation."

Different views of how badges might recognise progress, achievement or exploration/innovation

"...we've begun to develop and pilot internal badge systems within different areas of the organization. Not surprisingly, this growing group of Mozilla badge systems is revealing itself as fertile ground for investigating the development of a variety of badge systems." via Carla Casilli

"WPBadger is a simple WordPress plugin for issuing badges and adding them to a user's Open Badges backpack. "

"One thing that struck me in the conversation about Badges was the thought that they can operate on three levels."

"I've just started awarding the first badges from my graduate seminar, IPT 692R: Introduction to Open Education."

"Coming up with a way that allows people to display informal learning in a way that makes sense to people not actively involved in the communities where the learning occurred is critical to ensuring that, as learning and scholarship evolve, new means of acquiring and demonstrating knowledge are recognized as valid."

Grainne Hamilton @ JISC thinks "it could be time for the assessment infrastructure we have had in place for many years to be shaken up."

A thoughtful post which led to an passionate exchange in the comments between Doug & Dave Cormier on the philosophical underpinning of badges

Responses and thoughts on some of the posts arising from the DML 2012 conference & DML Badges for Lifelong Learning Competition

"A common question about Open Badges is 'what is their real value' this is obviously a much broader question than I am qualified to answer* but a key component of creating value in Open Badges is being able to share them with others and generally shout 'Go Me!"."

"Badges may turn out to be important decor for your personal web space house, but its on you to build and maintain the house. "

"Using achievement goal theory to predict the ways in which these divergent orientations towards learning might impact a learner's motivation within a badge system can be useful."

A helpfully intelligible introduction to Open Badges