Group items tagged

EverFi, Inc. the leading education technology company for critical skills, today announced that it has built Sash, the first open-source badging platform that enables education companies to use badges to encourage and recognize student achievement. EverFi launched t open-source badging technology across its K-12 learning platform in the 2012-2013 academic year. The technology behind Sash allows organizations to integrate badge creation, management, and display into their own products. The badging platform follows the metadata format established by the Mozilla Open Badge Infrastructure.

"During the second half of the semester, student work outside the classroom is focused primarily on the completion of specialization badges. Students are encouraged to forge their own path through the course material by completing badges from the following categories: coding, industry analysis, graphic design, user experience, power user skills, and entrepreneurship. In order to earn an A grade on the badge component, students must master at least eight specialization badges. To ensure breadth, all students must complete at least one badge in each category in order to pass the course. (Note: Students were also allowed to pitch their own badges if they could make the case for the badge's connection to course themes.)"

"I'm delighted that there's some very smart and committed people working on the technical side of the Open Badges ecosystem. For example, yesterday's community call (which unfortunately I couldn't make) resurrected the 'tech panel'. One thing that's really important is to ensure that the *user experience* across the Open Badges ecosystem is unambiguous; people who have earned badges need to know where they're putting them and why. At the moment, we've got three services wrapped up together in badge issuing platforms such as Open Badge Academy:"

"Digital badges recognize a particular experience or signify accomplishments, such as completion of a project or mastery of a skill. In a professional context, a learner typically earns a badge by conducting presentations, attending institutes to develop a specific competency, or serving on advisory boards or committees. Digital badges enable professional communities to identify new competency areas and recognize mastery or demonstration of those competencies. Badges signal to colleagues and to current and prospective employers a professional life of active learning, engagement, and ongoing development."

One of the questions about badges that came up seems like a crucial issue as we grapple with different ways of characterizing and describing badges. This post aims to add the category of badge functions to other badge taxonomies like the one by Carla Casilli.

Digital badges are receiving a growing amount of attention and are beginning to disrupt the norms of what it means to earn credit or be credentialed. Badges allow the sharing of evidence of skills and knowledge acquired through a wide range of life activity, at a granular level, and at a pace that keeps up with individuals who are always learning-even outside the classroom. As such, entities not traditionally in the degree-granting realm-such as museums, associations, online communities, and even individual experts-are now issuing "credit" for achievement they can uniquely recognize. At the same time, higher education institutions are rethinking the type and size of activities worthy of official recognition. From massive open online courses (MOOCs), service learning, faculty development, and campus events to new ways of structuring academic programs and courses or acknowledging the granular or discrete skills that these programs explore, there's much for colleges and universities to consider in the wide open frontier called badging.

"Digital Badges in higher education also have an additional ability that is newly available - the ability to embed the badge into social platforms and have others "see into" the learning that has been accomplished via metadata that contains valuable information about the issuer, criteria, skills and evidence."

"Automation is a difference in determining whether or not institutions merely dabble with badging vs. truly invest in a sustainable badging program that benefits the students."

" after two years of development, Mozilla has released Open Badges 1.0, free software that allows for a new way to recognize learning: digital badges."

"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. But will the concept of organizations bestowing their own virtual endorsements for the mastery of skills hold up to critical examination from a world that, even in an information economy, demands most of its skilled workers hold a framed degree?"

Badges represent a way of acknowledging achievements or skill acquisition more granular than a college degree. The resources below provide an overview of the uses of badges and their implications for how individual accomplishments can be awarded, recognized, and shared.

"Open Badges enable you to connect different types of learning to each other. The whole point of connected learning by definition -- by the name itself -- is to find a way to connect things. To do that, we need something that will carry that information across sectors. In the connected learning vision, I see badges as the connectors between different spheres. Badges play the role of a currency where learning can be captured, recognized, and then communicated across those lines."

Jonathan is also the director of the BadgeStack Project, the first system designed for badge-empowered learning and community-building, and the first to issue Mozilla Open Badges. We'll talk about the changing nature of professional development (PD) in particular and learning in general with the rise of online meeting technology, and how informal and non-traditional learning environments are impacting how we think about education.

Higher education institutions and other organizations interested in supporting learning are experimenting with digital badges to guide, motivate, document, and validate formal and informal learning.

Jonathan Finkelstein, director of the BadgeStack Project, was recently featured in a video produced by the NYC Department of Education to help introduce educators to the impact of digital badges in K-12 classroom settings.

"What I am looking for is a stackable certification solution, which blockchain for learning or education can provide. This stackable way of organising or linking learning could enable a validated, personalized certification procedure covering both formal learning (e.g. certification, degrees, micro-credits) and informal learning (e.g. badges, skills, experiences). Practically: each learner has a learning wallet or portfolio, and you - as a learner - can add each learning step as you 'earn' it and you are issued a certificate/badge of what you learned by a learning authority/individual/group).  "

The suspended student, sophomore Andrea Hernandez, was notified by the Northside Independent School District in San Antonio that she won't be able to continue attending John Jay High School unless she wears the badge around her neck, which she has been refusing to do. The district said the girl, who objects on privacy and religious grounds, beginning Monday would have to attend another high school in the district that does not yet employ the RFID tags.

" Reward-motivated learning: Mesolimbic activation precedes memory formation provides easy to read findings to support the claim that rewards promote learning. The reward structure seems to have many positive effects not only on learning, but on the learner's personal development. Learners are able to gain confidence and develop openness to others through virtual games and the reward system."

Badges at Universities...

Open badges for lifelong learning