Educational badges

Introduction

Educational badges allow to "tag" all sorts of elements of a learning environment, e.g. learners, teachers, pedagogy. A batch can represent all sorts of information. In education, it can summarize achievements, opinions, interests, etc.

Machine readable badges also can be harvested by search engines.

See also:

• gamification (gamification usually does include batches)

McCrea's Pedagogy badges

Peps Mccrea (University of Brighton) and Jeremy Burton, in the 2012 JISC JISC elevator contest, proposed pedagogy badges. Their purpose are:

• Become more aware of their current e-learning and blended practice
• Become more aware of their desired practice, and how this differs from the above

E Become more aware of the pedagogical affordances of technology for teaching and learning

• Have better discussions about how we teach
• Change the way we teach

(retrieved March 14, 2012)

The initial proposal (to be refined) was made through a video of which we should a screen capture below. To the right is the initial sketch of a palette allowing to describe a pedagogy and to the left, an example activity tagged with some of these badges.

Screen shot of the initial 2012 JISC promotion

Comment

I like the idea of creating a simple palette of icons for describing pedagogical scenarios, i.e. some compromise between over-simplistic big categories and complex learning taxonomies à la DialogPlus. Of course, this idea must be tested first (1) with respect to its expressiveness, (2) whether normal teachers can use it and (3) and whether others could read the icons. After usability is ok, it's in the open whether it could be adopted or not. - Daniel K. Schneider 13:36, 14 March 2012 (CET)