Educational badges

Draft

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. For example, it could summarize achievements, opinions, interests, etc.

Badges can be physical, graphics within print text, elements of web pages, etc. Web backges can be machine readable, e.g. be designed for information harvesting. Others can include links (such as the MediaWiki page at the bottom of this page).

= Badges for achievements

“To date the open education movement has focused almost exclusively on the production and sharing of content. Significant opportunities exist to reform or reinvent other, non-content portions of the education ecosystem with the support of open content. One of the areas ripest for innovation is alternative certification of informal learning. Hence, the recent excitement about badges. Badges have incredible potential for providing a viable alternative to the traditional system of credits most universities are tied to by accreditors. It seems to me that there is a critical need for someone to demonstrate that badges are a viable alternative to the traditional accreditation process.” Or Equivalent, by David Wiley, 2011, retrieved 14:14, 14 March 2012 (CET).

• See also gamification (gamification usually does include batches)

Badges for skills

• See 'Badges' Earned Online Pose Challenge to Traditional College Diplomas

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 14:14, 14 March 2012 (CET)

Links

General

• Pedagogy Badges: disrupting how we teach March 5, 2012 by peps mccrea

As achievement indicator

• 'Badges' Earned Online Pose Challenge to Traditional College Diplomas

• Or Equivalent (2011) by David Wiley.

For qualifying artifacts

• Pedagogy badges by Peps Mccrea (2012)

Examples in education

Other examples

• Stackoverflow (E.g. search for badges