Every day we conduct conversations with folks new to the idea of Open Badges. Each of these conversations is steeped in inquisitiveness. Questions abound. Curiosity spills out. Thought waves feel palpable. Sometimes we’re lucky enough to share the moment when the light goes on. That time feels magical, full of promise. That moment illuminates the room with the thousand-watt possibilities of the Open Badge initiative. The “what if” moment is something that should be experienced by everyone.

In some ways, the Open Badges team is continually explaining what we do—and not only what we do but why we do the things the way we do them. This constant questioning could affect us in a few ways: we could hunker down and stick to our prepared statements, we could challenge the folks who question our work, or we could listen closely to these queries and try to parse the spaces between the words, the silent places where no content yet exists. These interregnums help us to interrogate our own understanding of Open Badges. It’s probably fair to say that we do all of these, yet we try to keep focused on the last of these techniques because they provide the greatest opportunity for growth—not only for us but for our conversationalists as well.

The question of validity is posed fairly commonly.* It goes something like this, “How can we ensure that the badges have a sense of validity?” or “Who will vet them?” or “How will we know that they’re worthwhile badges issued from reputable sources?”

There is a good deal of subtext embedded in these seemingly simple questions. And bound into that subtext is an unwitting/unacknowledged acceptance of the sociocultural status quo. That tacit acceptance should be unpacked and considered. How does any organization achieve validity? How do standards become standards? When the landscape is unknown, how do you learn to trust anything?

Validity
Validity addresses the question of representational accuracy: does something perfectly represent the thing it’s allegedly designed to represent? In the case of Open Badges, the question of validity quickly becomes multifaceted. Questions that have arisen include the following:

• Does a particular badge represent appropriate learning?
• To whom is the badge meaningful?
• Does the issuer have the authority to issue a particular badge?
• Does the earning of a badge indicate that the learner has learned?
• Does the earning of a badge indicate that the earner has been accurately assessed?

To bring a different perspective to these questions, let’s replace the word badge with the word class. This should provide some insight into how much our unquestioning acceptance of the status quo affects our acceptance of learning validity.

• Does the taking of a particular class represent appropriate learning?
• To whom is the completion of a class meaningful?
• Does anyone have the authority to teach a particular class?
• Does the completion of a class indicate that the learner has learned what they were supposed to?
• Does the completion of a class indicate that the learner has been accurately assessed?

This simple exercise exposes our somewhat complicated relationship with understandings of validity with regards to existing institutions. Taking this a step further, imagine if the rules in an educational system were entirely reconsidered, to wit:

To demonstrate the power of rules, I like to ask my students to imagine different ones for a college. Suppose the students graded the teachers, or each other. Suppose there were no degrees: you come to college when you want to learn something, and you leave when you have learned it. Suppose tenure were awarded to professors according to their ability to solve real-world problems, rather than publishing academic papers. Suppose a class was graded as a group, instead of as individuals. (Meadows, 1999, p. 14)

Did those questions shift your perspective? I know that they resonated deeply within my consciousness. They’re the equivalent of “what if everything you knew about education were turned on its head?” questions. They’re disorienting in the best possible way. And they lead me to humbly suggest that in place of questions about validity—or at least hand in hand with these sorts of questions—we might consider asking questions about credibility and reliability, too. These areas seem to be more readily delineated and a tad more easily unpacked.

Credibility 
Credibility inspires belief and is derived from perceptions of trustworthiness and expertise. These things can be assessed through personal means but quite often are accepted tacitly. How so? Through the cultural shorthand of pre-existing standards. We countenance many sociocultural values with little to no deep consideration, i.e., everyone was doing it, I just followed the crowd, etc. Let’s consider some ways that we might be able to classify what we mean when we talk about credibility.

Expanding the idea into a taxonomy, B.J. Fogg proposes the following four types of of credibility: proposed, surface, reputed, and earned (Fogg, 2003). Presumed credibility arises from “general assumptions in the mind of the perceiver,” Surface credibility from “simple inspection or initial firsthand experience,” Reputed credibility occurs through “third-party endorsements, reports or referrals,” and Earned credibility, perhaps the most important in a new system, stems from “firsthand experience that extends over time” (Fogg, 2003, p. 131).

While we can negotiate the definitions, this basic structure brings order to the chaos of credibility, and it helps to elucidate our complicated understanding of validity. This categorization also allows us to interrogate the credibility of existing systems, and in particular, the formal system of education currently found within the United States. Here’s where Open Badges provides us an opportunity to intervene in a significant system.

Reliability
Reliability might be considered the replicability quotient of an event, idea, performance, etc. Something that can be consistently measured is considered reliable. The Open Badge Infrastructure is most certainly a reliable tool: it will produce badges that hew to its standards. However, the badge systems that are produced with that tool or housed in that tool may prove to be reliable, but then again, they may not. And yet, this dichotomy is true of any tool. In the right hands, bad tools can produce good results and in the wrong hands good tools can produce bad results. Skill is necessary and happily, it can be learned. From a systems standpoint, the US education system is also just such a tool, producing “products” of varying completeness and quality. This perceptual double standard should inform our questioning of new systems, especially one as reconstructive as Open Badges might prove to be.

The known and the unknown
There are many questions that the Open Badges initiative seeks to answer and many more that its implementation raises. Right now, we’re completely comfortable operating in the liminal space between the known and the yet-to-be-discovered, the present and the future, the understood and the ambiguous. The design of the Open Badge Infrastructure offers solutions to a number of questions regarding validity. For other questions we should ask ourselves, what is the purpose of this query? Am I expecting an answer that will only serve to reinforce a complicated and difficult but familiar system? We do ourselves a disfavor if we accept the current state of affairs without asking ourselves the following: “What exists here now?”, “What is worth keeping?”, and “What can be improved?” Those are precisely the questions that Open Badges Issuers, Earners and Displayers seek to answer themselves.

- – -

More soon.

references
Fogg, B. J. (2003). Persuasive technology. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann.
Meadows, D. (2008). Thinking in systems. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing

* For now let’s skip the reasons as to why this question arises from some audiences more than it does others. Although I’m happy to discuss it if you would like—you simply have to ask and away we’ll go.

Badge system design can be considered in a variety of ways. I tried to come up with thirteen ways to discuss them  so I could write a poem riffing on one of my favorite poems, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Badge System) but I’ve had to settle for seven eight (see addendum below).

Below you’ll find the seven different possible categorizations listed with a few representations of each type of thinking. This is not an exhaustive list by any means: it’s simply an opportunity to unpack our influences and perceptions as we begin the process of designing badge systems.

The methods outlined below include philosophical, conceptual, pedagogical, visual (aesthetic), technical, categorical, and ownership. The last one, ownership, feels a bit odd because it’s not quite parallel to the rest of the bunch. I like a system that has a nice balance and this one has a slight imbalance. Happily, this slightly odd fit serves to emphasize the importance of allowing for an outlier. The outlier will cause you to reconsider your system every time—and that’s a good thing. The outlier is the thing that keeps your badge system honest, keeps it moving and evolving. Because if you’re designing a system so as to keep everyone within a certain range, you’re trying too hard. And you’re deep in the midst of a lush forest.

In any case, I’m curious to hear your reaction to these potential sorting efforts. No doubt these groupings can intermixed and most certainly they can be layered, possibly interleaved with one another.

philosophical

• representation: understood vs. hidden
• social acceptance vs. formal acceptance
• intellectual property vs. copyright free
• cognitive surplus vs. waste of time
• extrinsic vs. intrinsic
• carrot vs. stick
• top down vs. bottom up

conceptual

• possession
• systems design vs. emergence
• corporate vs. academic
• amateur vs. professional
• rhythmic vs. erratic

pedagogical

• education vs. learning
• assessment
• teaching vs. perceiving/absorbing/
• injection vs. osmosis
• project based vs standards based
• expert-taught vs. peer learned & assessed

visual/aesthetic

• representational vs. abstract
• categorical vs. individual

technical

• siloed vs. shared
• open vs. proprietary
• system vs. single

categorical

• formalized vs. free for all
• few categories vs. many

ownership

• organizational vs. personal
• owned vs. shared

Are there additional ways to consider the design of badge systems? Do any of these seem innate? Far-fetched? What do we gain by sorting through systems in this way? I continue working on questions like these and look for your feedback (which, according to Donella Meadows, is a good way to ensure that your system is running smoothly).

Still, I have to try it.
With apologies to Wallace Stevens

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the Open Badge is involved
In what I know.

- – -

More soon.

May 23, 2012 addendum: Recent thinking points to the fact that these categories exclude content. So now there are 8 ways to sort through badge system design. Some possible representations of that categorization include: language choice; content-driven vs. context-driven; formal vs. informal; system vs. one-off; single language vs. multiple languages; alliterative vs. rhyming vs. allusion-based, etc. 

For those who labor long and hard to craft good and just standards, as well as those who have suffered from their absence. On the one hand, the fight against the tyranny of structurelessness. On the other, the fallacy of one size fits all  (Lampland & Starr, 2009).

This book dedication found in Standards and Their Stories captures the inherent paradox of badge system design. By seeking to standardize the process we risk the introduction of systemic rigidity. And yet by developing badges without a plan we risk the possibility of ideological entropy. In my writing about this topic I’m attempting to walk the middle path: somewhere in between fanatical dictums and a mad free-for-all. I wish I could say that it was easier than this, but then I’d be lying.

The status quo
Even while we’re in the midst of talking about a potentially reconstructive idea like Mozilla Open Badges, I still rather rotely refer to my own typically conventional educational route with “my undergrad degree this” or “my grad degree that.” Perhaps this is to be expected. It certainly hearkens to one of the issues that the open badges in the wild will have to confront: the seeming intractability of the status quo. In the Open Badges world this desire for stability echoes within the repeated request for a standard method of validation; it’s mated to a deep concern about badge quality. In unfamiliar situations such as these we tend to rely on current cultural understandings and touchstones. In this case, degrees and certificates, accreditation systems and educational rankings.

The status quo of our formal academic system has transmogrified into a sort of binary approval system. You pass or you fail. You go to a respected school or you go to a second-tier school. You graduate or you don’t. It all seems pretty inexorable. We gravitate toward that which is customary. The familiar often appears to be less threatening than the entirely unknown. Indeed, there is a robust academic research field that studies this tendency, especially with regards to our proclivities toward risk and reward: behavioral economics. (For a deep and delightful dive on this read Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational.)

Resonance
I’m hoping that some day people will refer to not only their formal schooling but their non-traditional learned experiences as well (hopefully badged in the open way) without speaking of one of them as second-rate or less than the other. That noted, I’ll return to my rather classical undergraduate education to make a point. I double-majored in graphic design and writing. The classes I took in design inform a significant amount of the way that I think. This is not to say that every design class I took made sense or built on every preceding design class so that one day I had taken enough of them to—ta-dah!—be called a designer. On the contrary, I gleaned information from a variety of sources. My deep learning occurred in many different venues, a bit of it very much outside the realm of what typically would be called design. Nevertheless, some aspects of design that I learned in those college classes continue to reverberate within me.

One of the most resonant aspects of those years pertains to users and audiences and owners and consumers and interested parties and even uninterested parties. The idea of multiple audiences pulses within me at the root. Akin to that concept, another: juxtaposition. What is there versus what is not there; what has been asked versus what has not been asked; the solid versus the void. Good designers are problem solvers, not stylists or skinners. They interrogate situations and ask why? They poke around in seemingly unrelated categories. They consider the issue of temporality and end users while acknowledging that a problem owner need resolutions. They know that solutions can have many audiences and that things that seem straightforward can be damn complex. (Massimo Vignelli has spoken eloquently on this subject in “Massimo Vignelli on Rational Design.” Actually, read all the interviews on Steven Heller’s Design Dialogues site.)

Hard questions
Why do I mention all of this? Because as you begin the process of badge system design, you, too, will be delving into these areas. You, too, will be learning to be a designer. You’ll be gathering information from many sources—no doubt a few of them entirely unexpected. And most likely you’ll find yourself asking deep and sometimes existential questions. I encourage you to remain open to the idea that periodically, like the question, the answer will prove to be both complex and difficult and very much not binary. Sometimes you will have to try something to know if it works because there will be no answer until you do. Accept this. Your badge system will benefit from this sideways approach. That is, believe it or not, the middle path.

- – -

Much more soon.

references
Ariely, D. (2008). Predictably Irrational. New York, NY: Harper Collins.
Lampland, M. & Starr, S. L. (2009). Standards and their stories. (p. dedication). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Vignelli, M. (1998). Massimo Vignelli on Rational Design. In Heller, S. (Ed.), Design dialogues (pp. 3-8). New York, NY: Allworth Press.

We’ve been working on the Mozilla Webmaker badge system, or at least initial alpha badges for the Summer Campaign and it’s tough! We knew that going in - if it were too easy, then we probably wouldn’t end up with very valuable or robust badges - but that didn’t make it easier. There are many things to consider and it’s very easy to get caught up and stuck in the core question of what badges?  That’s a really loaded question because its not just about what to call the badges - which is a rabbit hole of itself altogether - but its also considerations around specific skills, levels and granularity (which is a huge/tough one), assessment, experience, etc. We spent days trying to answer the what badges question - should we have an HTML Level 1 and Level 2 badge, or just an HTML badge (and what do those mean?)?; should we call them Ninjas or Samurais (note: we decided on neither)?, is there a Webmaker badge that everything aggregates up to and if so what are the badges that make that up?; are all badges the same granularity?, etc. The decisions at this level are also things that more people care about and have to sign off on so that also slows down the process.

I’ve since stepped back and looked at the process and realized that there were a few considerations that actually helped us move forward - and that those considerations were one or more steps removed from the badges themselves. I’m now calling this my 3 T’s of badge system design, and so far its proving to be a helpful place to start or at least move back to when you feel you getting buried in badge level decisions. 

3 T’s of Badge System Design:

(1) Types - general categories of badges. Do you have skill badges or participation badges? Progress badges or achievement badges? To do this, you need a general understanding of the learning experiences, the community and most importantly, the goals of the badge system, but you don’t have to go super deep. You don’t, for example, need to know the exact set of skills that you want to badge. And you definitely don’t need to finalize the badge names ;). You just need to decide if you are badging skills or actions or achievements or progress, etc. Finalizing and putting some lightweight descriptions around your types of badges can really help you scope the system before diving into the questions around the specific badges that fall into each.   

Our alpha badge TYPES*:

Skill badges - I developed this skill

Participation badges - I attended or hosted this event

Achievement badges - I made this

(2) Touchpoints - next you do Touchpoints or general description of how someone will earn the TYPE of badge. This starts to pull in assessment and criteria but again, you don’t have to go super deep at first. 

Our alpha badge TOUCHPOINTS*:

Skill badges will be based on work that the learner submits, assessed by peers against a rubric. (note: this is probably even more specific than you need to go at first)

Participation badges will be based on registration for an event and proof of attendance.

Achievement badges will be based on work that the learner shares with the community.

It’s a good practice to think through if there are several possible touchpoints for each badge type (and the pros/cons of each approach). Thinking through this at the outset gives you more flexibility going into the technology considerations and helps you better work with any technology constraints you might have. For example, back up touchpoints for our badges might be:

Skill badges will be issued when the learner completes a learning challenge that cover the skills.

Participation badges will be issued by the host of an event directly to attendees.

Achievement badges will be based on completion of making exercises/projects.

(3) Technology - finally, you translate the touchpoints into high level technology requirements. 

For the first set of touchpoints, our TECHNOLOGY requirements might look something like the following:

Badges integrated into the learning tool environment and the events site

A Gallery component that learners can submit work to with a voting or rating capability for skill/achievement badges

These can be more granular but don’t have to be at this point. Just think through the basic requirements and see where you net out. It may immediately become clear that something won’t fly and you can start to work around it right away instead of way later in the process. Going back to our example, maybe we would find out that we weren’t able to have a gallery component and if this is the case, we could go back to our touchpoints and decide to use another option for those types of badges and tie those badges to the learning exercises, and thus the learning tool, instead. That decision would most likely change elements about the assessments and the specific badges we ended up defining as well, so the information flow works both ways.

What you end up with is a general map of your badge system and a basic roadmap for what needs to be built to support the badge issuing. It could also help you evaluate existing badge issuing platforms to see if they have the features that meet your needs. 

Next steps are to start to dive into each piece a bit more. Define a few of your skill badges and work through the work flow again - what is the specific touchpoint (rubric, rating required, etc.) and what are the specific features needed to support that. Press repeat, press repeat. 

Again, this is the model that we’ve accidentally started to use with our badge system design. It’s not rigorously tested by any means, just seemed to work well for our first few iterations. Would love to hear back from folks on if this is helpful, where it breaks down, etc.

-E

*Note: our alpha badges are still in alpha so are subject to change

After writing down a long list of resources to point folks who are interested in badges to, I realized it might be helpful to provide some level of directionality. So I created a decision map. This is my first attempt at it. 

What you see here is a framework upon which I can build in more readability, more fluidity, more interactivity. Right now, it’s a static decision map presenting all the resources that I’ve listed in my previous blog post in a non-linear way. It’s missing some content like pointers to our Planet Open Badges as well as our product roadmap which I will include in a subsequent iteration. 

But take a look. This was meant to be a little whimsical and to present an alternate way to tackle the different resources we provide for n00bs and interested folks. Let me know if you see something missing here or have any feedback!

We’ve leapt into Badge System Design in some earlier posts (1, 2, 3) and we’ll be returning to it shortly, In the interim, I’d like to step back to consider a small number of basic Open Badges tenets. In this edition, we’ll address our evolving lexicon and in particular the nomenclature of Earners and Issuers.

A common language
In addition to their ability to transcend physical boundaries, badges introduce many potential languages, e.g., visual, verbal, cultural, pedagogical, etc. Badges will activate these languages, sometimes one at a time, sometimes all at once. Each of these languages may speak to different audiences, and often to many audiences at once. As simple as we try to make our badges, they will be deeply influenced by our worldviews: imbued with our community’s understandings, desires, and values—and those will be intertwined with the earner’s understandings, desires, and values. In turn, those perceptual strands will be woven through the general public’s social assumptions and cultural fibers. Teasing out a strand (or badge) will not reveal the germ of the process but it may help point toward some of what has influenced it. In short, badges can stand alone, but will remain bound into a complex sociocultural system.

Consequently, flexibility in our system design is key. As we attempt to build and rationalize an open badges lexicon, we recognize that a need for individuation, modification, or personalization will always exist. This is built into the OBI system. By designing an extremely flexible product, we’ve accommodated many different potentials.

What does all of this flexibility get us? For one thing, it opens the door to cultural interoperability. The ability to have the Open Badges system accommodate many different cultures, communities, and values. Given that badges exist as forms of cultural representation that interoperability is essential to a robust system. (We will, no doubt, revisit this concept in a later post.)

Along these lines, we began a document for people to share their ideas about Open Badges definitions of terms. In a nice turn of events, this open approach has lead to some fascinating questions about intent and prescriptiveness. Some questions raised in that document have yet to be answered: it’s an ongoing discussion, one that requires back and forth, give and take. We anticipate that it will continue to raise questions, too. And we’re excited about these provocations because they’ll help us to better understand the ecosystem and improve upon our Open Badges system.

Earner vs. holder vs. owner
One question in that open google document queried our choice of the word, “earner.” As with all things Open Badges, we arrived here after considerable thought—along with the aid of some legal help. (You can read more about our legal considerations here.)

A bit of background: we started with “learner” and ended up at “earner.” Believe it or not, dropping the initial consonant involved quite a bit of in-depth thought. We wended our way around to that term after close consideration of the people who might come into possession of a badge. Even the term “earner” presents some weaknesses. Badges can be used to show affiliation, skills, competencies, associations, etc. Some of the folks we’ve spoken with have suggested that badges can and should be earned by organizations themselves. In point of fact, we don’t know all the ways badges can be used, yet. That’s the beauty of a flexible system.

Earner
We chose earner for fairly prescriptive reasons: because we’d like to suggest that badges must be earned, not simply received. However, as badge meaning is initially defined by the issuer, this moniker may change. The earner can be referred to in the way that makes sense to your group. It’s worth remembering, though, that your earner/holder/recipient/whatever will be interacting in a broad ecosystem along with many Issuers, Displayers & other earner/holder/recipient/whatevers. They’ll have an opportunity to speak for and about themselves and may choose their own sobriquet.

Because the earner exists as the hub of their own personal Open Badge ecosystem they wield quite a bit of power: power of self-representation, power of social contracts with Issuers, power of control with Displayers. Earners define their association with the entire ecosystem: what to earn, where to earn it and with whom, and then, ultimately, how to display what they’ve earned. As Erin Knight has said so eloquently about a personal collection of badges housed in a badge backpack, they can act as “a living transcript.”

Issuer
This one is pretty obvious as to why we chose it: these groups, organizations, individuals, institutions, corporations, etc., do the hard work of issuing badges. Not only do they create badges and badge system designs that transmit their values to badge earners, and a variety of additional publics (cf., Michael Warner’s Publics and Counterpublics, much more on this in later posts)—they also build the criteria for those badges, develop badge progressions, create scaffolding opportunities, and undertake the difficult problem of assessment. Plus, they make the commitment to civic participation in the broader Open Badge ecosystem.

- – -

In a future post I’ll address Mozilla’s approach to privacy, as well as explain our rationale for naming Displayers and Endorsers. Much more soon.

references
Warner, M. (2005). Publics and Counterpublics. Boston, MA: MIT Press

I engage with many people interested in badges on a weekly basis. The organizations, companies, individuals expressing interest come from varied practices, disciplines, and sectors. 

But frequently I end up pointing them to a similar list of resources to get them acquainted with high level background and goals related to the Mozilla Open Badge Infrastructure as well as information on how to get started on playing with or integrating with the OBI. 

I thought it might be useful to list them out in a blog post to help orient anyone with a general interest in badges and the Mozilla Open Badge Infrastructure.

Here they are:

1. Our website: openbadges.org

A great first step would be to check out our website. We wanted to achieve two goals here; 1) help visitors of the site wrap their head around badges in general and 2) get visitors started on earning badges right away. 

Here, you can earn your first badge and push it into your backpack. We hope that by providing a path for the visitors of our website to earn and push their badges into their backpack, we can better illustrate the open badges story and what we are building.

2. Our wiki: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Badges

The wiki is the documentation repository. It has all the framing and background information, FAQs, white papers, onboarding documentations, communication channels etc. The wiki provides a lot of information that it may require some level of orientation to dive deeper. 

From a general interest perspective, the following pieces of information may be of most interest:

• a. White paper: This will help you understand some of our initial thinking and framing around badges. It also provides great learning scenarios that enables readers to understand the impact badges can have on different kinds of learners. 

• b. DML Competition: The 4th annual Digital Media for Learning Competition was focused on soliciting and supporting the development of high quality badge systems for lifelong learning. The idea behind the competition was to seed the badges ecosystem with quality badges and meaningful pathways for learners. Funded winners of the competition have a year to build out their badge systems which will integrate into the OBI. 
   
• c. User Stories:  We provide everyday examples of how badges can be utilized in the real world. 

• d. FAQ: Still have more questions? Check out our FAQ and see if we have addressed some of them already. 

• e. Onboarding documentation: If you’ve read all of the above and are eager to get started, next step would be to check out our on boarding documentation. We’ve streamlined this based on audience; issuer, earner, displayer. 

3. Our github: https://github.com/mozilla/openbadges/

This is our code repository. We develop in the clear. You can poke around and fork our code. Within the github, below are some additional useful links:

• a. Badge metadata fields: If you scroll down towards the bottom of the page, we outline the required and optional metadata fields that comprise a badge. This is how the OBI has defined the Open Badge “standard”. 

• b. Issuer API: If you’ve read the Issuer onboarding docs and are ready to plug in, here we provide instructions on how to do so. 

• c. I also recommend taking read of our product lead, Chris McAvoy’s blog post about earning and issuing badges: He breaks things down, step by step on what the requirements are from the issuer in order to push a badge into the Mozilla backpack using the Issuer API.

• d. Displayer API: For those interested in pulling badges from an earner’s backpack onto your site, this page provides you with the information you need. 

4. Our google group mailing list: If there are any questions that we haven’t answered through the FAQ or if you would like to meet others comprising the badges community, please join our google group. You’ll find a lively discussion that covers a spectrum from, technical implementation details all the way to philosophical discussions around badges. 

5. Our weekly community call: Every Wednesday at 9 am PT/12 pm ET, we hold a weekly community call open to the public. This is where we provide updates on our development efforts and invite the community to join in on the conversation. You can tap into the knowledge and experience of many of our community members who have gone through or are going through the process of designing meaningful badges systems in their respective communities of practice.

This is a brain dump. Having pointed to this laundry list of resources, I’m now envisioning a map or a chart that provides some directionality or guidance for those interested in learning more. I’ll get working on that!

As the Open Badges team starts thinking about growth and education around badges, partnerships and community development are key. 

Developing, fostering, growing and sustaining a community is an important initiative for us. From the DML competition itself we have a community of ~30 funded winners and ~60 unfunded winners, not to mention current partners already plugging into the infrastructure. As part of the MacArthur grant, the funded winners are required to integrate their badge systems into the Mozilla Open Badge Infrastructure. In addition, many among the unfunded winners have displayed strong interest in continuing their efforts to develop a badge system and Mozilla is committed to supporting both funded and unfunded winners throughout this process.

In addition to issuer, displayer and potential endorser partner engagement, in parallel we are reaching out for developer engagement and contributions. This is an outreach effort that Chris McAvoy, our product lead is heading up.  

So there’s a ton of stuff happening on the community front and I thought I’d distill some of my thoughts into a list of actionable tasks. 

1) Engage the community

• Engage members of the community by responding to their requests and needs through private (email, conference calls) or public (forums, twitter conversations, blog comments, google group threads, community calls, webinars) channels

• Embody community members’ messages and needs by being where the community is (monitoring forums, twitter feeds, blog posts, facebook page, google group, etc.)

• Represent the OBI partners and community members to the product team

2) Represent and evangelize the product and cause

• Represent the product and cause to OBI partners and community members

• Promote events, product updates, anything newsy using established and new communication channels

• Get more folks interested in the product and the cause through outreach efforts

3) Shape message/editorial

• Understand and start to embody the language used in the communities we are reaching out to.

• Mediate disputes within community, lean on advocates, embrace detractors. 

• Own editorial strategy: work with OBI team members to identify content, plan, publish and followup

4) Gather community input for future product and services 

• Gather the requirements of the community and present it back to product team.

5) Build and grow the community

• Build strategic alliances with advocates in the community, scaffold their efforts and let them stand on their own

• Teach how to fish so the community can be servicing itself to a degree

• Through these efforts grow and scale the community

6) Automate parts of the engagement process

• Develop or find existing tools to automate parts of the community engagement and management process

• Develop and foster growth of key contributing community members, keep them engaged and incentivized

7) Provide support and guidance for DML funded and unfunded winners

• Reach out to DML competition funded and unfunded winners

• Brainstorm support and engagement structure for this community

• Think about ways in which DML funded and unfunded community engagement/management is similar/different from other aspects of community engagement/management. No need to duplicate efforts. 

If you think I’ve missed anything here, please let me know. As with everything we do, we iterate in the open and value your comments and feedback!

Before we return to our regularly scheduled program tracking the protean components of badge system design, just a quick post about the simple beauty and unexpected delight found in a child’s approach to games and reward systems. Recently an email went round Mozilla about http://diy.org. The site is fascinating from a variety of standpoints, e.g.,  it’s nicely designed; their privacy policy is clearly written and straightforward; their login process appears to be COPPA-compliant; they celebrate a certain type of maker culture, etc. Check it out, it’s worth a look.

However, I’m writing this post because of the gem found in an email about the diy.org site that came through from the lovely and talented Jess Klein (she of the Open Badges website design, amongst other things). The excerpt she provided below:

According to this article: http://www.betabeat.com/2012/04/27/zach-klein-new-startup-diy-diy-org-app-kids-who-make-04272012/

DIY lets kids create portfolios of the stuff they make through a public web page. Friends and family members can encourage their work through stickers and parents can monitor their activity from a dashboard. “We’ve all seen how kids can be like little MacGyvers,” the company writes in an introductory blogpost. “They’re able to take anything apart, recycle what you’ve thrown away – or if they’re Caine, build their own cardboard arcade. This is play, but it’s also creativity and it’s a valuable skill.

The part that caught my eye was about Caine: you’ll find a video in the last link in the paragraph above. You should watch it. I spent 10 minutes of my time on it and I admit it made me happy I did so. (And let’s face it 10 minutes is a loooong time on the Internet.)

Caine is an inventive 9 year old who made himself an arcade. An arcade made out of taped together cardboard boxes. A functioning arcade with tokens, tickets, and prizes for winners (he reuses his old toys). Well, functioning in that he devised ways to make things work with a little help from him, as opposed to purely mechanical means. But the real beauty of his work is found in his systems thinking. Caine wanted someone to play at his arcade; he even went so far as to develop a cost structure. Very MBA of him. But seriously? Smarter.

Here’s the cost breakdown: $1 for 4 turns. Or for $2 you can get a Fun Pass. How many turns do you get with a Fun Pass? 500. That’s right $2 gets you 500 turns. Now that is a good pricing strategy, and it’s a pretty stellar participation strategy, too. Oh, and he’s also figured out a way to reduce gaming of his Fun Pass system by using old calculators and the square roots of pin numbers. Amazing. It’s mostly all sunk costs for Caine—who by the way, is using primarily found materials—but money is not the motivating factor for Caine. He just wants you in the game.

What if we approached badging like that? What if we asked ourselves, what’s the real goal we’re aiming for here? How can we transmit the magic we feel to others? How can we create a system that works to keep people in the game? And what are ways we can do it so that our participants feel rewarded in both mind and spirit?

Caine accomplished this—most likely without being fully cognizant of it. Sure, on some level it’s silly. But so what? Because on another level, it’s lovely and transcendent. Caine revealed to us what’s possible when you forge ahead to create something out of joy and then work to share it with the world. For that I admire and respect him.

I share this small but inspirational story with you because I dream (and I think it’s a big dream) that Mozilla Open Badges may prove to be someone’s arcade. The tool that allows them to beam out to the public the excitement and joy they feel when they share what they’ve created. I’m hoping Open Badges helps more people get in the game.

More soon.

This post continues the conversation about Open Badges, the Open Badge Infrastructure and badge system design. It’s one post in a series of thoughts-in-process that will culminate in a white paper about badge system design. Your thoughts and comments are welcomed: not only do they help mold the conversation but they help to shape its arc as well. Jump in!

“How do I create a badge system?”
I’ve felt some conflict about codifying badge system design due to the oft repeated desire I hear for a simple formula. A formula sounds like it ought to be the most appropriate approach. Yet this seemingly rational desire is precisely the point where most design systems go wrong.

Standardization & formalization
A formula seems to point toward having a complete understanding that the parts of the system are standard and that the variables are unchanging. This is not the case with digital badges or really anything involving human assessment. (Keep in mind Donella Meadow’s paradigm about paradigms.) Therefore as we progress through some basics precepts of badge system design, note that these comments are suggestions, pointers, and recommendations. They do not represent the sole badge system design methodology nor do they indicate a complete taxonomy. There are many pathways on the journey, many Yogi Berra-esque forks in the road to designing a useful or valuable or successful badge system. (And yes, I think it might be important to distinguish between usefulness, value and success—but that’s for another post.)

How badges relate to badge system design
Badges exist as visual representations—distillations if you will—of meaning. They’re a sort of shorthand for content. They can act as formalized recognitions of associations, achievements, skills and competencies, endeavors, values, etc. And on the other hand they can act as fun, playful reminders of past experiences, in-jokes, and community membership. An organization’s values help to determine its badge system goals—goals that can be inherent to the organization, can arise from its instantiation, or that can be co-created with it—occasionally with all of these things occurring at once. Consequently, badge system design can branch off in many directions. So, where to start?

A system of turtles
Your early choices will help to define the evolution of your badge system. Start at any point—a single badge, a group of twenty-one, or right at the system level—but recognize that starting at the badge level may affect your ability to grow your system categorically. Regardless of where you start, it’s more than likely you’ll end up somewhere other than your intended destination. That’s okay. Systems are living things, and your badge system by needs must be flexible. You must embrace a bit of chaos in its design.

That chaos stems from its genesis: an Open Badge system is more than a series of simple documents indicating learning. Instead it’s a rich and varied representation of journeys, experiences and learned processes. It’s a series of verbs encased in an active noun. The badges that constitute your system are living things, too. In the best sense, it’s turtles all the way down.

This sense of dynamic infinite regression resident within an Open Badge system provides many varied opportunities for representation, not the least of which is uniqueness. Let me counterbalance that assertion by noting that perception of uniqueness depends at the very least upon comparativity, and distance from the perceived object plays no small part. In other words, the roots of context are based in perception. Charles and Ray Eames‘ short film, “Powers of Ten,” places context, well, in context. If you’re unfamiliar with its message take a minute or two to watch it. This should help to orient you to the potential inherent in context. Distance is one type of context, time another, ideology yet another: in other words, more turtles standing on other turtles. Aside from these few, there are many more contextual variables. If you have a moment, start a list. No doubt you’ll find quite a few not listed here. There are hundreds, possibly thousands. All of them feed into context and so into perception.

When context disappears
Surprisingly enough, we also become inured to noticing when things actually are unique. If we are exposed repeatedly to something within a certain context our ability to distinguish it as unusual diminishes. So, we’re blind to some of the complexities of our own surroundings.

Anthropologists call this the naturalization of categories or objects. The more at home you are in a community of practice, the more you forget the strange and contingent nature of its categories seen from the outside (Bowker & Star, 1999, pp. 294-295).

So, as they say, there’s that. So much to consider and we’ve barely scratched the surface.

- – -

I’ll stop here for now. Much more soon.

references:
Bowker, G., & Star, S. (1999). Sorting things out: classification and its consequences. Boston, MA: MIT Press.
Meadows, D. (1999). Leverage points: places to intervene in a system. World, 91(7), 21. POINT. Retrieved from http://www.sustainer.org/pubs/Leverage_Points.pdf 

Quick update: Last week I designed a graphic for this post that underscores the relative insignificance of the legal considerations of COPPA and FERPA when compared to the lifelong learning impact that we’ve designed Open Badges to accommodate. I forgot to put it into the original post but now here it is! 

The Open Badge Infrastructure (OBI) is based on a simple concept: make it easy for people to issue, earn and display digital badges across the open web. Sometimes the things that sound simple prove to be fairly complicated in implementation. Open Badges is no exception.

Consider that personal privacy stands as one of the primary tenets of the OBI: the individual earner resides at the center of the Open Badge ecosystem. Earners consciously choose which badges they want to earn from a variety of issuers, and they can also choose which badges they’d like to share whether through their own website or through a variety of displayers. Earners are the central axis point of the system; they are the essential social hub. We think that that delicate social hub—the badge earner—needs someone to watch out for their privacy. Consequently, we’re working to ensure that a minimum standard of identity protection is built into the Open Badge Infrastructure.

We’ve spent about the last 1.5 years working on the Open Badge Infrastructure and the last 6 months focusing on the legal and privacy questions this new project has surfaced. We’ve had some great advisors helping us to get this right: many thanks to Mozilla’s Data and Product Counsel, Jishnu Menon, as well as Karen Neuman and Ari Moskowitz of St. Ledger-Roty Neuman & Olson, LLP. You can read some of their fine work addressing legal and privacy questions on our Legal FAQs page.  You can find other aspects illustrated in the Mozilla Badge Backpack’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. They’re all worth a read. We’re proud that they’re written in Plain English and not legalese. We want earners, issuers and displayers to understand their rights and understand how Mozilla approaches those rights.

Because our goals for Open Badges include global deployment, the future will find the Open Badges team considering EU legal and privacy laws as well as UK concerns. And as the OBI ecosystem begins to populate across the world, individual earner’s privacy considerations will continue to motivate our work.

For those of you who are not entirely familiar with some of the major issues we’ve been wrangling, read on below to learn a bit more about two of the heavy hitters, COPPA and FERPA.

COPPA
What is COPPA? COPPA is the acronym for the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act and it’s a US federal law designed to govern and protect children’s online privacy and safety. The Federal Trade Commission administers this regulation addressing data collection and marketing to children under the age of 13. You can read more about it directly from the source: http://www.coppa.org/coppa.htm. COPPA complicates most efforts aimed at children under 13, but there are COPPA-compliant organizations whose primary communications successfully address that audience.

Current predictions seem to point toward COPPA becoming even more restrictive rather than less. Depending on an earner’s personal sharing decisions, the Mozilla Badge Backpack can be a potentially broadly public space. Consequently, at this time, the Mozilla OBI does not permit children under 13 to push their badges into the Mozilla-hosted Badge Backpack. However, it is possible to create and host a siloed Badge Backpack.

Worth noting: we have significant hopes for some external Mozilla efforts along the lines of streamlined identity protection and will keep you abreast of any new developments.

FERPA
FERPA, also an acronym and also a US federal law, stands for the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. It’s aimed at providing parents with the right to protect the privacy of children’s education records. Those rights transfer to the student at the age of 18 or whenever they attend a school beyond the high school level. You can read more about it at the government’s website: http://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/ferpa/index.html. FERPA can introduce a level of complexity for badges emanating from academic institutions. You’ll find some potential best practices about FERPA on our site in the legal FAQs.

- – -
Now you know a bit more about how we designed the Mozilla Open Badge Infrastructure with built in identity and privacy considerations. As always, we welcome your thoughts, suggestions, and assistance in our ongoing endeavor.

More soon.

Over the last few months I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about Open Badges and badge system design. During that time I’ve found myself weighing the idea of the Open Badges Infrastructure against the idea of Open Badges. I’ve come around to this thinking: one is a subset of the other. Open Badges is an umbrella concept about perception, achievement, learning, representation, assessment, and value that has produced the tool that is the OBI. Perhaps the OBI is an epiphenomenon of the conceptual work of Open Badges. OBI is to tool as Open Badges is to process. It’s a bit chicken/egg but as we progress the temporal distinction seems to matter less and less.

OBI the tool is designed to be agnostic, but Open Badges the concept presents opportunities for transmission of deeply held beliefs, strong opinions and decisive values about learning, education, agency, creativity, dynamism, change, and evolution. I’m racing through these important and defining ideas right now because I want to start sharing some initial thoughts about badge system design. But I’m happy to have this discussion in greater detail with you on this blog, on twitter, through emails, during calls, and if we’re lucky, in person. You have helped us and continue to help us build this amazing tool; now let’s talk about what we can do with it as well as what we want to do with it.

Serendipitously today after I had already written the few intro-type paragraphs below, I saw a tweet that lead me to download and read a highly influential systems design paper Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System. As I read this inspirational document by Donella Meadows I grew increasingly excited: on my own I had arrived at similar realizations and had used nearly the exact terminology as she had in her paper. Those clues indicate to me that I’m on the right track. To that end, I’m dispensing with the many revisions I usually go through for a blog post and instead dropping in my initial rough draft to share it with you while the ideas are still messy and fresh. I don’t want to overthink them—at least not right now. Let’s begin our conversation now before the ideological badge cement has hardened.

Open Badges offers thousands of possibilities to those who choose to participate. I want to help you see what those amazing opportunities might be. Here’s my humble request: be my reader and my co-author on this journey.

- – -

Badge system design presents a variety of exciting challenges and opportunities. In some ways, it’s similar to designing the perfect society, one in which important things are recognized, feedback is welcomed and used, individuality is respected, people are encouraged to express themselves freely and creatively, expand their potential, attempt difficult but rewarding experiences, interact with and aid others, seek and find opportunities, learn, experience, make, scaffold, share and grow. Perhaps a little thinking is in order, huh?

Humility plays a key role in the design of any system, including badge system design. Your badge system design, no matter how brilliant, most likely will not end global hunger, solve the debt crisis, or fix a broken educational system. However, if created with intelligence, finesse and empathy, it may have the capacity to change someone’s life. Indeed, it may possibly help to alleviate some of those other, larger concerns.

Currently, the entire ecosystem remains an unknown quantity: how many badges will flicker on in the badge system galaxy? What will happen as it knits together? It’s quite possible that your simple designs may take on a far more complex role than you can imagine. So a few suggestions, notes, and recommendations are in order.

History is littered with lessons and examples of great ideas that went bad or never got off the ground. The human equation always introduces an element of chance. While that tendency certainly presents a massive complicating variable, ultimately that’s where the ground might be most fertile. Be fearless, investigate it.

And yet note that it might be best to start with a simple idea and let organic evolutionary properties run their natural course. Because unexpected emergent properties will occur even if you think you’ve planned for everything. Eventually Taleb’s black swan will fly overhead. Perhaps its shadow will pass by, perhaps it will skim the waters for a while and move on, or perhaps it will land and begin swimming in your happy little pre-planned badge ecosystem. Who knows?

Okay. Taking a somewhat more clinical view, some psychological research indicates that resilience contributes greatly to long term happiness. Resilience is important to a robust system. How can you build in resilience? What do we mean by resilience? Your badge system design will play some role in an earner’s sense of self. And so, like the person earning the badges you’re designing, if it’s to have a long and happy life, your badge system must have its own source of resilience. Whether that arises from the community, the planners, or the larger ecosystem does not matter.

- – -

Those are some initial thoughts. Much, much, much more to come.

Last week, Chris McAvoy, our product lead, and I attended the ACT Workforce 2012 conference in Chicago, IL. 

I was familiar with the ACT as the SAT counterpart standardized test, used primarily for college admissions but I wasn’t very familiar with their workforce division and their major product, namely WorkKeys, which is a job skill assessment system used by various businesses and state and local governments to measure workplace skills. Based on the WorkKeys assessment system, the ACT issues National Career Readiness Credentials (NCRC) which is utilized to help place jobs. 

It felt natural that these credentials being awarded currently in paper form, be digitized so that they become more portable and displayable across different venues and sites. This thinking was what sparked our initial engagement and led to the kind invitation by the folks at ACT to present Open Badges to their workforce community. 

We were received by a generous and engaged audience. Many got the idea right away and felt like it was a step in the right direction. They responded to the informal and lifelong learning credence we uphold. They also understood how this could lead to new jobs and opportunities which is one of the main goals the workforce community members are setting out to achieve. 

Many folks I met at the ACT workforce conference, including those that attended our session, were from state and local workforce and economic development agencies, or community colleges that facilitate the objectives of their local and state workforce development initiatives by helping to assess the potential workforce candidates, figure out what skills they’ll need to attain a certain job, or match jobs according to existing skills, etc. I also met folks from organizations such as the Manufacturing Institute, affiliated with the National Association of Manufacturing and the National Center for Construction Education and Research. These organizations provide accreditation in their respective industries of manufacturing and construction, and these accreditations are industry standards for hiring. 

What became sort of apparent to me during the conference with regards to our partner engagement efforts, is that we’ve had a gaping hole. Admittedly, we’ve had our plates full simply trying to fulfill inbound interest in badges. Most of that inbound interest came from after school learning and extracurricular activity driven programs in which a lot of informal learning takes place. 

These partners are incredibly valuable and this is precisely the kind of learning that we want to represent and empower through the Open Badge ecosystem. However, it is also important to service the workforce credentialing world in which receiving the right kind of credentials directly impacts the kind of jobs one gains access to.  

I have a lot to digest from the conference. The extent of the pie comprised of all the sectors that would benefit from an open ecosystem of microcredentials in the form of badges has yet to be fully explored. But I have had the great opportunity to meet an important one this past week. If we want to make badges successful, this workforce development community cannot be neglected. 

I hope to continue to reach out and learn more from folks engaged in workforce development efforts to see how Open Badges can aid in their efforts to empower the worker community. 

As is frequently the case, more to come….

Mozilla is setting out to build the next generation of webmakers and we’re pushing forward with this effort in a big way this year. 

Critical to this is to empower folks to learn webmaking skills and then in turn teach what they’ve learned to others. We’re providing support to anyone interested with a series of tools including event platforms. 

The idea is to provide how-to guidelines on hosting events, big and small, around webmaking. 

We started with the most intimate event, the kitchen table, intended to be a smallish gathering of friends and family around your kitchen table, hanging out, learning how to hack and making cool things on the web. 

In the past couple weeks, I’ve conducted 2 of these largely out of the same demographic and with similar webmaking skills. 

Here’s the summary of session 1:

Participants:

• 2 close friends from college
• Very active consumers of the web
• One has an active social media presence from Fb, twitter, pinterest, foursquare, tumblr, you name it, the other Fb primarily. 
• No tangible knowledge of coding, it’s all a black box for both

Setting:

• Marriott hotel lobby in San Francisco

Background:

• I sort of crashed this party. We had planned Easter Sunday brunch weeks in advance. Day prior to brunch, I realized I could test out the kitchen table beta with these two and asked if I could. Friends were totally supportive. 

Takeaways:

• Keep it casual: When I first mentioned it, both friends were concerned that this will be didactic and homework-y. I said there was little required of them other than a laptop and an open attitude. Both got the bigger vision of Mozilla Foundation and completely agreed that curiosity to look under the hood needs to be fostered among web consumers. They lamented that they don’t know more themselves. 
• Ok to crash the party: I totally crashed this party with the kitchen table beta testing. I was initially concerned my friends would be a little reluctant but they really were open to it and engaged during the event. I think it’s important to read the crowd and room first. If you think they’re a receptive group, feel free to crash the party. I think the goal is to make learning as accessible, easy, spontaneous and flexible as possible. If there’s a window, then these tools should be flexible enough to allow you to seize that moment. 
• Have a set of easy and hackable websites queued up: To get the exercise started, it was helpful to have several, pretty simple websites to flex the utility of the goggles. If you are so inclined, you can gauge the interests of your learners beforehand and queue up sites accordingly. 

Feedback: Overall feedback was very positive. We used the goggles currently available on hackasaurus site rather than the work-in-progress labs one Atul has been working on. The main feedback was that they would appreciate a dictionary to parse all the elements. They figured img was image, but didn’t know src was source, etc. They wanted the elements to be parsed into human readable and comprehensible text. 

Here’s the summary of session 2:

Participants:

• 2 close friends from college
• For all intents and purposes level of engagement and consumption of web is similar to that of participants from session 1

Setting:

• Friend’s living room

Background:

• I was in Portland, Oregon for my friend, Sophie’s baby shower. I thought it would be fun to utilize Jess’ Kitchen Party invite template to create baby shower invitations, a relevant and simple task and ask. 

Takeaways:

• I found my friends caught in a copy paste auto pilot state. They were simply taking the image elements and replacing them with something found on the web. In the process, similar to what Lainie encountered, my friends had trouble with image placement and I couldn’t figure out how to help them. 
• Be flexible: Once I noticed they were simply taking out Jess’ default images and replacing them, without looking at the code around the image url or absorbing the bigger picture, I figured there wasn’t much learning happening. I suggested they take a look at a site they frequent and utilize the goggles to change things out. This led to more active feedback and commentary.
• Don’t interrupt if they’re concentrating but ask questions to get their thoughts while they are remixing: I discreetly asked them to tell me what they were doing, what they thought the goggles were presenting, etc. This was helpful for me to gauge their level of interest and comprehension. 
• In both instances I accidentally ended up sitting between the 2 learners but I think it might have been better for the learners to have been positioned next to each other. This is speculation but I think having the learners look over each other’s shoulders, see what the other is doing and talking amongst themselves could have been useful. 

Feedback: Similar to session 1, my friends got the idea of the goggles and the intent of promoting curiosity for webmaking and web literacy. But they too said they would appreciate a dictionary to parse the different html tags into human comprehensible format. They also wondered what else could they have done besides switch out images and text. The wondered how they could remix a website by adding or changing colors, changing font size, etc. They felt limited in their remixing abilities from the goggles tool.

In summary, I felt all my friends learned a little something and we all ended up having fun. My friends from session 1 said they’ll definitely hit the goggles from the bookmark bar from time to time to check out what lies underneath. Everyone agreed on the importance of looking under the hood and web literacy. 

On a personal level, it was exciting to be a part of this mini test bed for the maker movement we are initiating at Mozilla. It was fun to look at the blog posts coming through about the kitchen table beta testing. I’m looking forward to all the events planned for the summer and beyond. 

Today we launched the public beta of the Open Badge Infrastructure. This proclamation represents a huge accomplishment and is one that we are exceedingly pleased to announce. A few months ago, the OBI was a bit more concept than reality. No longer. Now you can visit http://openbadges.org and earn your first badge. Now you can push that badge to your Mozilla Badge Backpack. Now you can go to Open Badges on github to see our code. Now you can see our technical wiki. Now you can read our documentation.

There are many questions yet to be answered, many opportunities yet to be seized. But for right now we’ll stop to celebrate this momentous achievement today. A respectful and heartfelt thank you to the MacArthur Foundation for their fierce and courageous commitment to supporting learning wherever it occurs. Connie, An-Me, and Jen, we hope our efforts do you proud.

Many thanks to the indefatigable Open Badges group, too. Specifically, I’d like to acknowledge the fundamental work of the early Open Badges team: Erin Knight and Brian Brennan. Their profound efforts constitute the core of the Open Badge Infrastructure. Kudos and deep bows in their general directions. Additional thanks go to Chris McAvoy, Sunny Lee, and Mike Larsson who have continually strived to produce a quality experience and superior product. And while  Jess Klein and Atul Varma are not formal members of the team, they have worked alongside us to help us get to where we are today. And so we award them the honorific title Valued Friends of Open Badges. This brings me to the not insignificant effort put into the OBI by our community. Through a variety of different venues, you’ve built and shared widgets, declared your thoughts, begun thinking about the beginnings of a Wikipedia article, expressed feedback on weekly calls and just generally impressed the hell out of us. Our small team has worked hand-in-hand with you, our terrific volunteer open source community, to achieve something quite extraordinary in not very much time. Many thanks and congratulations go out to you, as well.

Today we celebrate. Tomorrow we begin our journey toward release 1.0. Yes, we continue on with our work—fully cognizant that there has been and will continue to be a good deal of discussion around the idea of Open Badges. To this we say, “Bully!” You may have guessed that we’re excited by the prospect of digital badges and we expect to remain so. Our heart is in the work.

In the coming days I’ll be following up this post with some history of how we got here, some decisions we made along the way, as well as some considerations for our future. Of course, you’re all invited.

Thanks for everything so far. More to come.

Cross-posted from the Mozilla Blog.

Adding skills and achievements to your online identity

When Mozilla’s Open Badges project began in late 2010, it was little more than a demo and an audaciously big idea: what if we could use the web to create whole new ways to “show what you know?”

Today, that big idea is becoming reality, with impressive partners and new Mozilla Open Badges Beta software coming together to test how digital badges can supercharge learning and identity.

Collaborators building badges on Mozilla software

Mozilla’s Open Badges project now includes leading partners like the MacArthur Foundation, impressive collaborators (including NASA, Intel, Disney-Pixar, 4H and dozens of others now building badge programs using Mozilla tools) and — thanks to today’s new Beta release of Mozilla’s Open Badges Infrastructure — publicly available software for badge issuers and developers to get on board and build with.

Integration with Mozilla Persona = adding skills and achievements to your online identity

The new Beta release includes integration with Mozilla Persona (formerly BrowserID). This opens the door for users to create a single user-centric identity across the web, with tools like Mozilla Open Badges adding a “reputation layer” that provides a complete story about what they know and have achieved. All through an open, standards-based infrastructure that puts user sovereignty, privacy and security first.

Open Badges Beta: what’s new?

Today’s Beta release includes:

• New tools for badge issuers. A new and improved badge issuer API makes it easier for any organization to award their own digital badges for learning, skills or achievements.
• New ways for users to manage their badges. Improvements to Mozilla’s “Badge Backpack” make it easier for users to store, manage, import and group badges earned from multiple sites through a single location.
• New tools for badge displayers. A new displayer API will make it easier to display digital badges across the web, from personal web sites to social networking platforms.
• New documentation and privacy features. Including an updated privacy policy, terms of use and FAQs for developers.

Learn more and get involved:

• Learn more about Mozilla Open Badges — and earn your first badge
• Learn more about becoming a badge issuer or displayer
• Read more about the Beta release from Mozilla’s Senior Director of Learning, Erin Knight
• Developers: access the source code and technical documentation
• Join Mozilla Open Badges community calls

We are announcing today that we launched the Public Beta of the Open Badge Infrastructure. Huge milestone and huge kudos to the team for making it happen. 

What’s the OBI?

The OBI is the ‘plumbing’ of the badge ecosystem. It is a specification for badges, set of repositories (“Backpacks”) for storing badges and APIs for pushing badges in and pulling badges out. It’s an important piece of this badge experiment because it moves us beyond more silo’d systems, allows the learner to collect badges from lots of different learning experiences and provides the structural components to enable badges to be transferred and leveraged across the ecosystem for real results like jobs or credits.

What’s Public Beta?

With this Public Beta launch, the OBI is now publicly available for use. Badges can be pushed in and pulled out and earners can store badges in the middle in their Backpacks. And more! Specifically, Public Beta includes:

• New and improved issuer API
• Backpack feature upgrades:
• Store badges
• Manage badges
• Import badges
• Group badges
• Publish groups to a unique URL and add narrations/notes around each badge to share
• New displayer API
• New documentation
• Legal docs! Privacy policy, terms of use and FAQs specifically for the Backpacks.

Wait, weren’t you already in beta?

Yes and no. We were calling it ‘beta1’ which was a made up word to mean that it was a step up from alpha but not quite all the way to beta. It was essentially the initial issuer API and Backpacks, but was available basically by invite only. We should have called it a ‘developer preview’ but hindsight, something something. This Public Beta (capital B!) is a proper Mozilla beta (security review, user data committee review, on Mozilla servers, etc.) and its publicly available! Woo!

What does it look like?

Technically like this…

But really like this…

(Sample Badge Backpack)

And this….

(Published group of badges)

How can I get involved?

• Be a badge issuer or a badge displayer
• Earn badges and push to your Backpack - in fact, you can earn your first badges at openbadges.org
• Check out the code. Fork it. Get Technical Documentation. https://github.com/mozilla/openbadges
• Join our community calls: https://openbadges.etherpad.mozilla.org/openbadges-community

What’s Next?

We are moving to a much shorter release cycle - releasing things at least every two weeks, but possibly more quickly as we go. But we are aiming to move from Beta to 1.0 by the end of the year. In addition that work, plus bug fixes along the way, we are also working on some lightweight tools that make creating and issuing badges easier, and eventually will most likely do the same for displaying badges. 

Who should we congratulate?

The team for being some of the smartest, hardest working game changers I’ve known, as well as our community who have been advising us every step of the way. Thanks to you all - congratulations!

-E

Flourish 2012 Talk photo by @pdp7

The Flourish talk went well, at least that’s the what the feedback was.  It felt rambly to me, probably because I was having a hard time pinning down what I wanted to talk about.  Badges is a big topic, it’s a not-trivial technical implementation, and it’s a big fat topic in education circles.  I tried smooshing the two things together, a bit about badges role in education (which I’m totally unqualified to do, but I’ve never let that stop me in the past), a bit about where I thought people could fit badges into their own projects, and finally an overview of how to actually issue and earn an OBI compliant badge.

This was the first time I’d talked publicly about OpenBadges, and one of the first times anyone from the OpenBadges team has presented to a technical audience and not an education audience.  It was a good trial of the material.  Luckily, despite my jumbled thoughts, the core of the OpenBadges resonated with people, so that’s positive.  I’m going to have a second chance to present to a technical audience this Tuesday (4/10/12) at Groupon for GeekFest.  Be sure to RSVP if you’re interested in the talk.  I’m going to edit my talk based on stuff I learned at Flourish, a rough idea of the changes are here in convenient bullet form

• The technical material should go up front, I’m going to drop the speculative section to the tail of the talk, if not drop it entirely.  It didn’t work the way I thought it would.
• Define “digital” badges right away, they’re not as obvious as I thought they were.
• The crowd anticipated the roadmap, including cryptographically signed badges, issuer endorsement of other issuer badges (creating a web of trust), lots of stuff. Which means we’re on the right track.  I should put in a slide of the total planned functionality relatively early in the talk, and then check things off that are complete.
• Not be surprised by education questions, I think I mentally prepared for lots of implementation questions, but it turns out that a technical crowd still has opinions on badges as learning motivator.
• Stop trying to be funny – I violated an old improv rule, I tried to be funny in a talk.  It totally failed.  I’m funny when I try not to be funny…when I try to be funny…it fails.  It’s a paradox.

If you were at the talk, and have any other feedback, I’d love to hear it.  Also, if you’re interested in diving deeper into the theory of badges, Erin Knight, the director of learning at the Mozilla Foundation, wrote a great blog post that acts as a reasonable primer on the space.  She answers a lot of the questions that came up on Saturday, without hearing any of them, she’s clearly psychic.

There have been a bunch of posts from really smart people reflecting on badges over the past month, leading up to and following the DML Competition culmination and DML Conference. There is certainly a dose of skepticism across some of the posts (like here and here), mostly coming back to the question around motivation and rewards. In fact, Mitch Resnick held a session about his motivation-related issues with badges at the DML Conference, but unfortunately the room was so small, that most of us weren’t able to squeeze in, so we formed an Occupy Badges makeshift session to talk about badges ourselves. 

After getting an update on Mitch’s session and catching up on some of the posts, the common concern is around introducing badges as extrinsic rewards into learning experiences where intrinsic motivations may be at play, and potentially disrupting a delicate balance of motivations or existing interest-driven learning. (It should be note that this is a generalization and there is more nuance to their claims - definitely worth a read).

I’ve been wanting to add some of my reflections on these reflections (get all meta) for awhile now and finally scheduled some time - a meeting for myself - to dive in so here it is: 

On intrinsic vs extrinsic motivations:

There is a classic scenario referenced a lot: kid gets good grades in school because he wants to do well and then his grandparents start giving him money for every A. When the grandparents stop paying the kid later on, the kid suddenly isn’t motivated to get good grades anymore. It’s called ‘crowding out’ - the intrinsic motivations get crowded out by the extrinsic motivators. That’s the core of the argument against badges - that badges will be yet another extrinsic motivator that will squelch any existing intrinsic motivations.

This binary view of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation is too simplistic. Dan Hickey, an assessment and motivation guru out of Indiana University, has a nice summary for those of us with less expertise on different theories of motivation and learning, and points out:

One of the things that has been overlooked in the debate is that situative theories reveal the value of rewards without resorting to simplistic behaviorist theories of reinforcing and punishing desired behaviors.

The ‘crowding out’ concern is real (and should be considered with grades as well!) but too simplistic for learning and these complex social environments. We all agree on the issues, and we run the risk of doing nothing about them if we cling to overly simplistic interpretations of theory or research studies. It’s also worth noting that badges do not have to just be a carrot, but can be built as tools for formative assessment, empowerment, roles/identities, etc. This means we need to put some thought into the badge system design, but that’s exactly what the competition and other parallel work right now is focused on. 

Don’t muck up interest-driven learning

There is another set of related concerns that go something like this: there is a lot of youth interest-driven learning already happening and its awesome because it is separate and pure and we aren’t mucking it up with adult-imposed rules or rankings, etc. Badges are just another top-down adult-driven system of rules that will just interfere with the learning. 

There are some HUGE assumptions in here. The first is that all youth have opportunities for interest-driven learning and the second is that those that do understand that this is valuable and legitimate learning. I don’t think these are true. I don’t think most kids have opportunities to explore their own interests - instead are forced down the pathways we prescribe for them in school. And if they aren’t inspired by the topics or projects at school, then they are labeled as bad students and that’s not something kids can rise above very easily, or in most cases at all. Most don’t understand that there are other avenues. For those kids that are lucky enough to have some opportunities to explore interest-based stuff, usually in afterschool programs, I doubt that many understand that this learning at all, and that its legitimate and important and could lead to a lot of opportunities for them. They aren’t as empowered by these experiences as they could and should be. These are the gaps that this badge work is looking to fill - to recognize learning and help learners use it for real results like jobs or credits, as well as to help learners find other learning opportunities.

There are some smaller assumptions like badges are only for youth, which they aren’t and that badges are only created and issued top-down and they don’t have to be. But the big assumptions are the dangerous ones.

Badges as a silver bullet:

There were some concerns around badges being positioned or thought of as THE solution. It might have seemed that way at the DML Conference because there was so much attention paid to them. But badges are not THE solution. In fact, badges themselves are not even A solution, but part of a toolkit and common approach of redefining learning to be something that occurs beyond classroom, beyond age 22, etc., recognizing and legitimizing more types of learning and helping the learner have more choice and control about pathways and interests. Badges are the representation, the gateway, the conversation starter, but its really about this new way of thinking and approaching learning that is the powerful part.

I’ve also heard things like “why are you focusing on only one approach” or “one form of assessment”. It’s worth reiterating that badge itself only represents the learning, assessment, experiences and evidence behind it. There aren’t any constraints on the learning or the assessment behind the badge - and that’s by design at this point. If you stop and look at the badge systems people are developing, you will see that there is a lot of thought going into how to utilize badges for specific learning experiences and how to be innovative about assessment, etc. Badges don’t limit this at all.

Another flavor of the silver bullet concern is that we are moving too fast and have one standard too soon. But again, the standardization is only at the level of what information is included with the badge - there are no constraints on the learning and assessment part, at least not from Mozilla or the badges themselves. If there is still concern about the standardization at the level of the badge -  I’m not sure how we would really truly give this a solid try if we weren’t working together. A bunch of siloed systems are not going to help empower the learner or help them create their own pathways. We need some way for the badges to work together - for the learner - and be tapped into a larger ecosystem of opportunity and access. That’s what the Mozilla Open Badge Infrastructure is supporting.

A few last small(ish) reflections:

Education vs Learning: I think its worth making a distinction between ‘learning’ and ‘education’. Education is a set of policies, content, structures and expectations that we define and force youth through. That sounds negative and its not meant to be, education systems are important for many reasons. But learning is so much more than that - it’s any experience where people learn something and that can happen inside a classroom but can also happen in a seemingly limitless amount of ways outside of classroom, and across lifetimes. It’s all that other learning that isn’t currently consistently recognized or valued. That’s where badges can fit in, or at least that’s the current hypothesis we are working under. That’s not to say that badges don’t or won’t have some value in formal education, but there are some bigger questions to think through there - it won’t work if we just overlay badges on the existing system or trying to force the existing system on top of badges.

Badges are not a Mozilla solution - this experiment, and its success, is not dependent solely on Mozilla. We are building the infrastructure to support the badges, but its on everyone else - the learning providers - involved. It’s on them to continue to offer awesome learning experiences, be innovative and authentic about assessment, design badges that amplify that learning and empower learners, etc. But again, if you look at the types of badge systems proposed for the competition, this is exactly what people are doing. 

More to come I’m sure.

-E

More reading:

Mimi Ito: Reflections on DML2012 and Visions of Educational Change

Alex Halavais Badges: The Skeptical Evangelist

David Theo Goldberg: Badges for Learning: Threading the Needle Between Skepticism and Evangelism 

Dan Hickey Open Badges and the Future of Assessment

Audrey Watters (who I finally met in person at DML!) Thinking (Strategically) About Badges

Cathy Davidson Can Badging Be the Zipcar of Testing and Assessment?

Philipp Schmidt Let’s Make Badges Not Stink

This post is the basis for a talk I’ll be giving at the 2012 Flourish conference on March 31st

I’ve covered a bit of what a OBI compliant badge is, technically, but wanted to speculate a bit on where badges could start appearing. There’s a lot of theorization on badges in higher education, and badges for learning, but I want to propose something else entirely, something more geek-centric.

The Problem

I’ve spent a significant amount of my life in user group meetings, open source conferences, and more recently – playing Pathfinder (an OGL D&D 3.5 edition variant). In each of those three places, you spend some percentage of your interaction time explaining who you are, and trying to figure out where you fit in with the overall ecosystem, or team dynamic.

We do it for a few reasons, the above board – store this information away so I know who to talk to in the future when I have a particular problem, or do I want to be pals with this person, and the less-above-board – is this other person more awesome than me? It’s not all warm and fuzzy either, in a hack-sprint situation at a conference, you have to figure out who’s going to work on what, and at what level. In a dungeon raid, you need to know who can pick pockets, and who can heal you when you get a sword boo boo.

Yack Yack Yack

All this takes time, it’s a lot of yacking, not a lot of hacking. Pathfinder speeds it up a bit. At table games, each player brings a table “tent” (a placard?) that gives their character name, level and class. So, at a glance, you know the player is a Dwarf fighter, and is good to get behind in a fight. The tents aren’t the end of the discussion by any means, they’re just short hand so we can quickly get to the meat of the team. There’s usually some tongue in cheek RPG backstory stuff, maybe some general strategizing, whatever – the point is, we didn’t have to waste 10 minutes going in a circle explaining the basics, it’s right there in front of everyone. Now we can get to the (sword) hacking faster.

The Open Badges spec provides a few things,

1) Criteria – what the badge means
2) Attribution – who earned the badge, who awarded the badge
3) Verifiability – is all this for real?

Pathfinder does all this too, including verifiability. All players are given a character id, so that anyone can look up a given character and verify they’ve earned their rank, including a papertrail. It’s pretty neat, here’s one of mine. Because my character’s background is verifiable, the folks at my table don’t need to spend a bunch of thought cycles trying to figure out if I know what I’m doing. They can see it right there, I’ve been in the shit man! I’m a Dwarf that knows what’s what!

Table Tents, anonymity provided by the pink unicorn.

Towards Hack

There are companies forming around something I think of as resumes+. LinkedIn is an obvious first example, their additions of skills to online resumes makes sense. The reverse search ability of them is cool too, so if you’re looking to fill a job, it makes it pretty easy to find someone who knows “Python”.

What about levels into Python though, what about fine-grained stuff like, “knows the guts of the Django ORM?” That’s a real skill, but not what LinkedIn wants to know. There’s also the continuing problem of verifiability. There’s some alternatives, like CoderWall that pull directly from your Github account to decide the kinds of stuff you’ve done. It leans towards the show-off side of things, but could easily remove friction to putting together a team.

If you extend the CoderWall example to physical hardware hacking, you could build a site that certifies competency on a bunch of different tools. That way, if you’re certified on a laser cutter in Chicago, you can use the same machine in Milwaukee and San Francisco. At some high level of achievement with the cutter, you could certify other folks. Reverse lookup of the certification could make it easy to figure out who could help set up a newly purchased cutter. All of this can be done with emails and phone calls and tweets, but it takes time. Time that could be spent using the cutter, not verifying your ability to use the cutter.

Why OBI?

Like I’ve said before, figuring out what to badge is the hard part. Determining if someone is actually able to use a laser cutter is serious. All of that sort of stuff is best left to those that know, and best initiated by trusted organizations. The Open Badge Infrastructure doesn’t solve the problem of creating badges, it solves the problems of multiple badges living together.

Let’s say you’re a certified laser cutter user, but you’re also a Django ORM expert, and maybe even a 5th level dwarf. Three separate silos are badging you, Pumping Station One, CoderWall, and Paizo (objection – speculation, these badges don’t exist, don’t get sad, give it time…they’ll come around). Each badge lives in its respective silo, and you’ll need to direct someone to all three places to land that amazing laser cutting / orm hacking / dwarf fighter gig you’ve dreamed of.

That’s the guts of the OBI, make each badge portable, and push them all into a backpack that you have complete control of. You’re also able to set the privacy settings, so if you’re not comfortable letting your boss know what a kick-ass axe wielding dwarf you are, you don’t need to. That’s your business.

Furthermore

The unofficial tagline for Open Badges is, “enabling lifelong learning.” I love that mission, but think it itself sounds too formal. The unofficial mission statement of the Mozilla Foundation (undocumented) is “less yack, more hack.” If you see badges as a way to promote hacking, rather than constantly having to prove and reprove yourself with the repetitive yackery, then that’s right too.

Further Furthermore

There’s two counter arguments here, things that people say, that I agree with, and am actively trying to work around.

1) People are unique snowflakes, badges pigeon hole them – yeah, totally, people are unique snowflakes, and you should take the time necessary to explore a person’s unique crystalline structure. In the meantime, there’s a castle to storm, and we need a good necromancer…let’s save the getting to know you for later.

2) Certifications suck – yeah, totally. There’s a whole market of semi-fraudulent certifications out there. As a person-who-hires-people, I’ve never used professional certifications as a significant hiring factor. However, I’ve definitely used Github, code samples, and general internet-profile-google-stalking of someone as a hiring factor. Badges codify some of what we’re already doing. And since anyone can make them, it seems like there’s less incentive to build bullshit ones, or at least, bullshit badges will be quickly supplanted by not-bullshit badges. Time will tell.

@lmorchard @plural @chmcavoy so how do we get @adafruit and @OpenBadges connected?

March 21, 2012 8:41 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@raster

Pete Prodoehl

Good question.  The hardest part is deciding what kind of badges you want to issue, the rest is straightforward.  I’ll explain.

Earn a badge!

Let’s start by earning a badge on openbadges.org. Click on the big blue “Get Started” button on the front page and you’re given an easy quiz, testing your Badges 101 level knowledge,

The Start of the Badges 101 Quiz

After you finish the quiz, you get a fancy badge, which you have the option of sending to your backpack,

You earned the Badges 101 Badge

When you send it to your backpack, you’re asked to sign in. The sign in is through Mozilla Persona (aka BrowserId), so this is also a great opportunity to set up a Persona account if you haven’t already.

Logging into your Open Badges Backpack

After you’re done adding the badge to your Backpack you can share your badge out through a share page like mine.

What’s that badge, really?

Badges can represent all kinds of things, completing trivial quizzes, or months of study, regardless of what you had to do to earn them, the actual guts of a OBI compliant badge (a badge that you can push into your Backpack) is three things,

1. A badge graphic
2. A badge criteria url
3. and a badge assertion url

A badge graphic

The badge graphic is a square PNG. That’s it. Here’s the badge graphic for the Badges 101 badge,

The graphic isn’t specific to the person (though it could be) and it doesn’t have any information in it that describes the badge (though it could, via Badge Baking, a service that embeds the assertion information in the badge to make it truly portable).

A criteria url

The content of this url describes what I had to do to earn the badge. For the Badges 101 badge, we cheated a bit and just said that the criteria was the Open Badges homepage. For now, the criteria url is any valid url, in the near future we’re going to release a spec for machine readable criteria url’s. The issuer hosts the document, which proves that the badge came from the issuer.

An assertion url

The assertion is the specific document that ties a badge to a Persona id. Just like the criteria, the issuer hosts this document. When I earned the Badges 101 badge, Open Badges (the issuer) created an assertion url, which you can see here.

The above example is using a slightly older version of assertions which include the Persona ID in plain text, we just rolled out the salted hashes as identifiers (salty hashes! delicious!). When we update the Badges 101 badge to assert a hashed ID, I’ll update this post to show the new method.

The assertion ties all the pieces together, it’s hosted on the issuers site – so you know they know about it, it has an ID associated with a Persona account – so you know it belongs to the person that earned it, and it links to the criteria – so you know what they had to do to get it. Oh, and it has a picture, so it looks cool too.

Push the badge to the backpack

Once you, the issuer, have created the two generic requirements (a picture and a criteria url), and the learner has shown they’ve earned the badge (up to the issuer how this accomplished), the issuer creates the assertion url, and then passes this whole mess of stuff to the Backpack via the Issuer API.

The Issuer API is a Javascript API, which pulls a dialogue from the Backpack. The Open Badges Infrastructure is for the learner, we don’t want any badges pushed into their backpack without explicit approval, we want the learner to see which badge is going in, why, and approve it.

Including the API on your site is a JS include, which then gives you access to the all important OpenBadges module.

What the OBI isn’t

From all the above, you might have picked up on something about the Mozilla Open Badges Infrastructure isn’t, which sometimes confuses people. The OBI isn’t a badge issuing platform. Issuers need a system that assesses learning and awards badges within their own site. What the  OBI is, is a lightweight specification that allows for learners to collect badges from multiple issuers.

However, if you look at the way Open Badges.org is issuing badges, you’ll see – it’s not that complicated. Atul built a nice JS assertion creator which hosts the assertion on Amazon S3, so nothing about the Badges 101 badge is server side, it’s entirely on the client.

Oh, and…

Several heavyweight platforms for badge issuing are in development, some of which will be open sourced. There’s room for a light issuer, similar to Atul’s assertion creator, but with a bit more refinement. If you’re looking for a way to contribute to the project, that would be a great start. Otherwise, if you’re interested in the OBI bits, and want to lend a hand, we’re really interested in finding collaborators.

If you’re looking to create OBI compliant badges, now’s a great time to get started. Beta is launching at the end of this month, so things will be pretty stable by then. Jump into the Open Badges Google Group for discussion, or come talk to us on IRC at irc.mozilla.org #badges.

@chmcavoy what @OpenBadges would Isham have collected?

March 6, 2012 5:16 pm via Twitter for AndroidReplyRetweetFavorite

@plural

jason gessner

My pal @plural (Jason Gessner)’s funny tweet inspired a second (shorter) post explaining badges in terms of Isham Randolph.  (for those just joining, Isham Randolph was the chief engineer of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, the canal that reversed the flow of the Chicago River, I’m sort of obsessed with him.)

So, Jason, in response to your tweet – Isham Randolph is an excellent example of an entrepreneurial learner who would have benefited a great deal from OpenBadges.  Here, in convenient bullet format, I present my argument:

• Isham began his career by learning carpentry from a man (whom he owned, sadly, he was a slave owner) on his plantation, he was not formally apprenticed or trained. citations
• Isham worked his way up from axeman to chief engineer of the Chicago and Western Indiana Railroad, leveraging his on the job learning to advance his career. citations
• Isham became chief engineer of the Chicago Sanitary district, dug the CS&S canal, then used his achievement to gain an appointment to the Panama Canal Committee. citations

So, in short, he would have had at least three badges, all of which were important to his career, none of which would was considered formal learning at the time: carpentry, surveying (probably engineering management), and canal building.

I joined the Mozilla Foundation this week, putting consulting on hold for the time being. Proud to be a part of the @OpenBadges team.

March 6, 2012 4:54 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@chmcavoy

Chris McAvoy

I’m now a Mozillian, or more specifically a Mozilla Foundationian. I joined the Open Badges team this month. I haven’t given up on the idea of starting a consulting business, but I like the project, the team, and the organization enough to want to work with them in a more full way than what consulting offered. As part of the commitment to work in the open, I’ll be using my blog to talk more about the project, and my involvement with it. I’ll still write about the other stuff I love, but this will be the first time in recent memory that I include a significant amount of work stuff here. The fact that I want to do that is part of the appeal of the move for me.

Explain Badges

Badges, along with other loaded phrases like crowd-sourcing and gamification, doesn’t have a single easy to explain meaning, unless you take the absolute bare minimum explanation that a badge signifies something for someone. Lots of sites have badges, Khan Academy is a pretty easy way to demonstrate the idea, so are Steam achievements and Wikipedia barn stars. MIT is getting into the badging game (though they prefer to call them certificates) through their MITx initiative, and last week the MacArthur Foundation (with the support of Mozilla, HASTAC, the Gates Foundation, and others) announced the winners of the DML Badges for Lifelong Learning competition.

A sample of the winners of the DML competition show the breadth of ideas around the relatively simple of idea of digital badges:

• NASA will use badges, and their enormous online assets, to encourage robotics and space education programs.
• Young Adult Library Services Association will use badges to help librarians develop new skills to improve their work with teens.
• Smithsonian Institution is building a museum education program to link visits to the museum with online learning to encourage lifelong learning.
• The Department of Veterans Affairs is will use certified digital badges to represent work skills that soldiers develop while in-service, making it easier for them to find solid jobs in the private sector.

The list of ideas is enormous, and the companies and organizations participating in the space is amazing – Pixar, Disney, Microsoft, Intel, Design for America, Carnegie Mellon, PBS / Storycorps, 4-H, plus a bunch of organizations that are on the cutting edge of new models of technology fused education, like Mouse and Hive Network. Of the ~90 finalists in the contest, ~25 were funded. Having sat in on some of the judging sessions, I can say that the finalists were all good ideas and could be executed, and probably will be executed, regardless of whether or not they received funding from the contest. The space is tremendously busy, with lots of thinking about how to make a simple badge meaningful to a learner, and the people that can provide that learner with new opportunities.

But you’re not a teacher

Yeah, totally – I’m not a teacher, I’m a technologist with a love of learning and long history of supporting open source communities. All three of those things, technology, lifelong learning, and open are fulfilled with this project.

Technology

This was our booth at the DML Mozilla Science Fair, where we explained OpenBadges dozens of times.

Badges aren’t just simple pictures, the idea is to build a system that builds badges with meaning. Meaning in this case is a set of metadata that can be verified and attributed, both to a particular recipient (the learner) as well as the institution (the issuer). Both sides of that transaction should have control of their choices, a learner should be able to take their badges wherever they go, and the issuer should be able to issue whatever badges they see fit.

If a learner chooses to display their badges, on their blog, their Twitter stream, their Facebook, their online resume, they should be able to, regardless of the silo in which the badge was earned. If the badge is public, or shared with a specific party, the person viewing it should have the ability to verify that it was actually earned, that the issuer is who they say they are, and that they did give the learner this badge.

Over the course of the project, I’ll dive deeper into the bits and pieces that make all this possible, in the meantime – we’re building the majority of the infrastructure in Node.js with the Express framework, and developing it in the clear on Github, and planning the project in an open Pivotal Tracker.

Lifelong Learner

It’s a phrase that keeps coming up, it was the subheading of the DML competition, it’s in lots and lots of explanatory copy around badges. It’s a simple enough idea, which I thought didn’t need much explanation (because, really, it doesn’t). That said, this John Seely Brown keynote from the DML conference last week really blew me away. I’ve always thought of myself as a lifelong learner, but now I’m convinced I’m an entrepreneurial learner (his phrase). It’s a really great speech, and worth the hour and a half investment to watch it.

As it relates to badges, formal degrees and certifications only explain half of who a lifelong learner is, lighter-weight systems need to be acknowledged as valid learning experiences. Verifiable digital badges bridge that gap between informal and formal learning experiences, and make it easier for a non-formally educated person to prove their worth at a glance.

Open

The (open, heh) view from the SF Mozilla Office, with Brian the OBI tech lead / super architect in the foreground.

It goes without saying that Mozilla is an open organization, they promote the openweb, promote open source software, and advocate for open learning, open journalism, and even have a pretty badass manifesto. Given the enormous number of companies involved in the badging ecosphere, (see above) who do you want to develop the plumbing that keeps all this together? A company that sees every eyeball as a dollar sign? Or a foundation built on the principals of open source? Badges won’t survive without the support of lots and lots of organizations, and there isn’t anything wrong with using them as a profitable pursuit. As a learner though, I want to ensure that I control my badges, any of which could represent hundreds of hours of effort.

I don’t want a single company to decide how I can represent myself, not even Mozilla, which is why every piece of the code that represents an OpenBadge is open source, the same goes for the backpack you store the badge in, the ways in which you can display them, and (eventually) where the backpacks are hosted. In the next few months, you’ll be able to self host every piece of the OpenBadges infrastructure, without ever talking to Mozilla.

In Conclusion

This badge thing is happening, it has enough momentum that it’s highly likely that your children will include a significant number of fancy online badges in their first job interview, that you might include some in your next job interview, or that you yourself might issue a badge for teaching your neighbor how to hand code an html page. Badges aren’t magic, and yes – they’re just like Boy Scout merit badges, except in the case of OpenBadges, we all have access to that fancy sewing machine that makes the pretty pictures for your sash.

The Badges for Lifelong Learning Competition pitches occurred all morning on Wednesday, Feb 29 and judging occurred all afternoon the same day. Winners were announced at the end of day 1 of the DML conference on March 1 in San Francisco, CA. 

Everyone is a winner

As far as Mozilla is concerned, we sincerely believe that everyone that made it to this point of the competition is a winner. The groups that descended upon San Francisco to pitch this week, were a very selective group that had made it through Stages 1 and 2. Stage 1 applicants alone topped 500. 

Where to go from here…

We are fully committed to supporting all winners of the competition, both funded and unfunded. As partner and product manager of Open Badges, I hope teams and projects continue to participate in the badges conversation through the google group mailing list and our weekly community calls, and feel free to utilize me as a resource. 

We are energized by the enthusiasm around badges that was pervasive throughout the competition and conference and are excited to continue supporting badging efforts from teams and projects, whether funded or unfunded. 

We look forward to our continued collaborative efforts in promoting badges for lifelong learning. 

We’ve been working hard at redesigning our website, openbadges.org, with the goal of educating our visitors both of the concept of badges as well as Mozilla’s Open Badge Infrastructure.

We thought the dml competition and conference which took place this past week would be a great opportunity for us to reintroduce our website to the wider community of learners and educators. 

It goes without saying that this was a team effort; Jess Klein, provided us with amazing branding and design, Mike Larsson led implementation, Brian Brennan, Atul Varma and Chris McAvoy finessed the issuer API and backpack utility, while Carla Casilli and Matt Thompson helped finalize the content. 

I’ve posted some images below for your enjoyment but you should definitely check out the live website. I’ve also included wireframe images upon click for comparison and review of evolution. 

You’ll notice, Gladis, wiggle the badge. Make sure to wait for it!

Mozilla open badges that is.

Simon and I organised a session “Are open badges the future for recognition of skills?” for the CETIS conference last week, with more than a little help from Doug Belshaw. As described in more detail onthe session’s wiki page, the programme was simple: presentations from Doug and Simon followed by discussion structured around a SWOT analysis for the use of badges in two scenarios.

Badges at the CETIS conference 2012

Source : http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/philb/2012/02/29/badges/

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Author: Phil Barker, JISC CETIS

And the Mozilla Science Fair at #dml2012.

#dml2012!!!! Listening to John Seely Brown’s inspiring keynote.

#dml2012 Today’s schedule

@jseelybrown keynote

The DML competition finals kicked off yesterday at the wonderful Cal Academy of Sciences. 

Gathered on Day 1 were competition finalists who got to work with their team to put together and practice their final pitch for Day 2 Pitch day. 

Today’s pitch day has been a marathon day full of back to back concurrent pitches. 

Lots of excitement and positive energy in the air!

Not to sound cliche, but at this point, seriously everyone should feel like a winner!

As a side, the albino alligator at @calacademy must not be missed!

On Tuesday, we carved out the morning half to meet with partners plugging into or planning on plugging into the Open Badge Infrastructure (OBI). We thought it’d be great to take advantage of our presence in NYC during the sprint week and meet with those based out in NYC or anyone else who would be able to join us. We wanted to learn about any pain points our partners may have experienced while plugging into the Open Badge Infrastructure (OBI) in addition to learning about their badge systems/platform development efforts which can help inform the next phase of our product development. 

The below is some of the feedback we received:

Badge Baking Service

• We should be more clear about the badge baking service and how it fits into plugging into the OBI

Our partners mentioned it wasn’t very obvious where the badge baking service fit into the OBI. We plan on conducting a user experience audit thinking from the perspective of the differing audiences, i.e. issuer, displayer, learner and making sure the user experience is as intuitive as possible for each. 

Backpack Management Features

• If a badge system has collections defined already, can these be passed directly into the backpack? 

• Can there be an option to automatically push all badges into the backpack in addition to doing so individually for each?

We think these are great feedback items and something to revisit after the public beta push. 

Badge spec

• Could the OBI support animated gifs in addition to simple pngs?
• Could the OBI support secondary images for badges; one badge can possibly take on multiple forms
• Could OBI support adding additional fields to badge metadata?

Similar to the above, we think these are great ideas for us to consider for future product feature development after public beta. 

Regarding OBI support of additional fields in the badge metadata this is actually currently supported. Caveat: Issuers can put a reasonable amount of extra material into the badge, but that material must be static — once the badge is issued, that information must not change. Directly embedding things that could go stale would be bad.

Google mailing list

• Think about splitting for dev folks and general interest/badge higher level discussion folks?

Great feedback which we will incorporate once the mailing list traffic starts to increase. 

Issuer badge system

• Certified OBI issuers: Can badge issuers register themselves with the OBI, get a unique ID and provide some level of tracking ability? A notion of a “verified issuer”. 
• Similar to how badges can be clicked on, and you land on a badge page, sort of like a badge profile page, with associated metadata, could there be an issuer page, sort of profiling the issuer?
• Support badge hierarchy

      - eg. Team Treehouse has existing badge map and structure

      - Can badges be contextualized within larger organizational badge ecosystem? 

          - Perhaps this can be done on the badge badge page?

Again similar to the above, we think these are great ideas for us to consider for future product feature development after public beta. 

Spam Badges = Spadges

• How do we plan on mitigating spam badges? 

We are taking measures to mitigate spam in the OBI. However we will not be the arbiter of determining badge value. We are thinking we’ll let the market, so to speak, determine value, once the badge economy starts to flourish. More on badge value in another post. 

We are thankful to our partners who came out to meet with us and provide us with valuable feedback. We hope partners as well as members of the community feel free to send us feedback and keep us informed on how we can better support their badge-related efforts. 

We’ve received inquiries on several occasions on how we plan on mitigating spadges (i.e. spam badges) from flooding the system. We have also received questions on our plans to create some level of a badge value system.

These concerns boil down, in my humble opinion, to the question of badge worth; i.e. what makes a badge valuable or not?

It turns out this is more complicated to discern than it seems on surface level. Also, since the digital badge world is chartering relatively new territory, it can be challenging for us to think outside of the assessment mold in which we’ve been ingratiated for so many years. I find myself subconsciously reverting back to the existing thinking around learning and assessment of grades, certifications and SAT scores, even wondering on occasion, how would we standardize badges, then realizing that badges are meant to capture all the learning, even motivation, that happens that isn’t being captured in these standardized systems. 

With this in mind, going back to the discussion of badge value, let’s think about the example of the showing-up type of badges. Is there any worth to a badge rewarded to learners for simply showing up? For instance you get a badge for making it to school today or, for attending a hack jam.

My initial concern was that a badge rewarded in this manner would make the badge seem simply like a sticker, sort of like a trivialization of the system. 

But then I started thinking about the cases in which, just showing up means quite a big deal;

What if you’re Ronnie from Washington Heights, and you got accepted to a prestigious charter school an hour and a half away from your home. That means waking up at 5 am, dealing with a 1 1/2 hr commute each way, every day, while most of your friends go to the local high school with a pretty low rate of graduation and university acceptance. Showing up everyday in this instance is a _big deal_. 

What if you’re Cami from Orange County, and it’s Saturday, and you’re friends are asking you to go to the movies or hang out at the mall, but rather you chose to go to a locally hosted hack jam to learn about web making skills. Showing up is a _big deal_. 

The badges awarded in these 2 instances are not merely for showing up; they’re taking into account the discipline, the resistance of temptation, the diligence, the will power and the motivation required to show up. These are all incredibly valuable things that are frequently not accounted for in a simple grade. 

Badges are a great adjunct to the existing assessment systems that can fill this gap and sort of portray the learner in a more nuanced way. Rather than simply defining a student in terms of whether they are earning As or Cs, we can get a fuller picture of the learner and let them express their full selves beyond the standardized mold. 

So….what is a badge worth? Who should make this call?

These are worthwhile questions and we’re excited to start thinking about them. But determining badge value is definitely more a 1000 shades of grey than black and white. 

We invite the community to start thinking about these questions, participate in this conversation and weigh in. 

It’s been a while since I’ve posted an update about our work on the Mozilla Open Badge Infrastructure: we have had our heads down working on making it the best possible system for a while. Here’s some insight into what we’ve accomplished thus far and where we’re heading in 2012.

First of all, a thank you to those who have not only expressed interest in our efforts but have worked to help us find ways to make it better. We’ve been lucky enough to have some of you work directly with us; we look forward to having even more of you do so in the future. Your enthusiasm and commitment feeds our work.

Second of all, a hearty thank you to everyone who has started imagining the rewarding possibilities of a future with Open Badges in it. The MacArthur Foundation’s 4th Digital Media and Learning Competition, Badges for Lifelong Learning, has provided us with the opportunity to interact with a wide variety of folks. Through it we’ve discovered nascent badge systems, well-developed badge systems, strategic assessment platforms, deep interest in alternative learning environments, and a variety of long-range goals. Perhaps most importantly, the DML competition has helped to enliven the conversation about alternative assessment and recognition of learning. We are tremendously excited about the three different competitions (Research, Badges, and Teacher Mastery), two of which (Badges and Teacher Mastery) will culminate at the DML conference in the beginning of March. You can see all the winners at the Mozilla Science Fair.

Undertaking something as significant as proposing and building an Open Badge infrastructure—with all of its attendant direct and indirect meanings—continues to prove to be a humbling and rewarding experience. As the Open Badges team engages the public to work with us to test this hypothesis, we’re learning a huge variety of things. Some of these things seem obvious in retrospect, and some seem surprisingly hidden, but this is the learning process, and we’re committed to it. As the Open Badges website states, we’re interested in capturing learning that happens anywhere at any time.

Consequently, we aim to keep on learning, modifying, adjusting, and recalculating as we go. We’re listening to your comments and we’re excited by your enthusiasms. We’re doing this to reimagine what learning can be. What’s nice about the entire experience is that we are stepping through the same process that others will experience themselves. The past few months have been revelatory: we’ve made new alliances, we’ve discovered possibilities for extensions of our work, and we’ve found eager audiences. As we continue to move forward, we run towards, stumble upon, back into, and greet with open arms new opportunities, like improving ease of use for the backpack or reconsidering our website (a full-on redesign is underway).

If you’ve been wondering what else is in store for 2012, please take a look at our newly modified roadmap. The first quarter of this year will see us posting Issuer APIs, Displayer APIs, and a rough cut of an Endorsement API. Looking at the immediate future, members of the team are about to kick off a week-long development sprint in New York City, speak at the Connexions conference in Houston, attend the DML conference in San Francisco, and then attend SxSW Edu in Austin. In addition, we’ll be conducting a webinar for Open Education Week on March 6th (more details to follow). We hope to see you at these events. And if there are other events you think we should know about, please drop us a note.

Two Three last things worth noting:

1) We now have an Open Badges community call every Wednesday at 9:00am PST (-08 UTC). You can learn more about that call, including the local and international dial-in numbers here: https://openbadges.etherpad.mozilla.org/openbadges-community.

2) If you are not already a member of the Open Badges conversation area/google group/mailing list, please join: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/openbadges. There you’ll find a rich history of software questions, notices of documentation efforts, philosophical considerations, and references to github repositories.

3) You can find us on Twitter here: @OpenBadges

Thanks!

Design digital badges for NASA, Intel, Disney-Pixar, the U.S. Department of Education and other leading organizations in the “Badges for Learning” competition. Deadline for entries is January 17.

Help the world level up with NASA, the MacArthur Foundation and Mozilla

Mozilla is seeking designers and developers to participate in the $2 million “Badges for Learning” competition. Participants will have the chance to design digital badges for more than 60 different leading organizations, all aimed at providing recognition for learning that happens on the web or outside of school.

Winners will receive funding from the MacArthur Foundation to make their designs a reality, plus the opportunity to collaborate with Mozilla and other leading organizations in education, industry and government.

The goal: supercharge 21st century learning by building a free, open source badge system that helps people around the world use the web to gain new skills and level up in their life and work.

Why digital badges for learning?

The web provides revolutionary new ways for people to learn, but it’s often difficult to get recognition for learning that happens outside of school.

Mozilla’s Open Badges project aims to help solve this problem, providing software that makes it easy for any organization to award digital badges for learning and achievements that happen online, outside the classroom, or just about anywhere.

Organized by the MacArthur Foundation and HASTAC, the “Badges for Learning” competition provides an ideal opportunity to test this software and approach in the wild, gathering leading organizations, designers and technologists to build badge systems together, all using Mozilla’s free and open source Open Badges Infrastructure.

Collaborators in the "Badges for Learning" competition

From robotics and digital literacy to botany and the environment

As part of the competition, more than 60 badges for learning projects are now open for your design and technical ideas on the competition web site. For example:

• NASA is seeking design and web development expertise for its new “NASA Robotics Badges.”
• The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration wants help with “Planet Stewards” badges that drive youth awareness around local environmental issues.
• The National Association of Manufacturers will issue badges to help learners gain the skills they need to find jobs in today’s high-tech workplace.
• Disney-Pixar is creating “Wilderness Explorers” badges that help youth become advocates for wildlife and nature-based exploration.
  
• The American Museum of Natural History will offer badges for science literacy.
• 4-H will award badges for youth around science, engineering, technology and applied math.
• Plus many, many more badge projects on the competition web site, all seeking design and web development expertise.

Design digital "Robotics Badges" for NASA

Who should enter?

Anyone with an interest in design. Graphic designers, web designers, product or industrial designers, educational technologists, digital humanities majors. What’s important at this stage of the competition is visual and conceptual creativity.

All of the badge projects will ultimately plug into Mozilla’s Open Badges Infrastructure, but it’s not necessary to possess the technical chops to implement at this stage.

All you need is to provide some early visual designs, plus a written description of how your badges will help participating organizations meet their requirements. Visual representations can include a video, diagram, screenshots, napkin sketches or anything that helps get your ideas across. (See the competition web site for complete details.)

Design "Wilderness Explorers" badges for Disney-Pixar

How to get involved

• Choose a badge project from this list on the competition web site. (These are “Stage 1″ winners and collaborators seeking your ideas for the “Stage 2″ design and tech portion of the competition.)
• Then submit your proposal here, with early visual ideas and a written description of how you’d tackle it.

You’re free to enter as many proposals as you’d like — but act quickly. The deadline for submissions is January 17, 2012. Winners will be announced March 2, 2012. Good luck!

Building a generation of web makers has been a big topic of conversation recently. This was the theme of our recent Mozilla Festival. And it was the topic of a conversation I led on my blog. Moving people from using the web to making the web is becoming a major focus for Mozilla.

At the most recent Mozilla Foundation board meeting, we dug into the question: what concrete things can we do in 2012 to tackle our big picture goals around web makers? I’ve pulled together board slides plus a summary of our emerging plans in this slidecast:

These slides (PDF / WebM video) represent a first cut at a Mozilla Foundation plan for 2012. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be hashing out more details and asking for ideas from people who want to get involved.

If you don’t have time for the full 30 minute slidecast, here is a summary of essential points:

• What started out as Mozilla Drumbeat has evolved into a series of ‘learning labs’ for web makers: a mix of learning programs and software tools for people who create things on the web.
• In 2012, we plan to grow the community and reach of the most successful of these learning labs: Popcorn (video); MoJo (journalism); and Hive (teens).
• We also plan to strengthen our best software and learning offerings, such as PopcornMaker, Hackasaurus and School of Webcraft. We’ll integrate these into all of our learning labs.
• A new effort for 2012 will be developing Mozilla web literacy badges: a way to get recognized for developing skills and contributing to a community within a learning lab.
• For all of this to succeed, Mozilla will need to get better at making software for web makers need and also build up strength in the learning arena. We’ve got great people in both areas, but we’ll need more.

These plans are a direct result of a Mozilla Foundation program leads meeting this summer (‘the hedgehog summit’) as well as the feedback a series of blog postings I did earlier this fall (‘creating a web literate planet‘).

While this conversation has been going on for many months now, these are still early stage plans. They are very much designed to evolve as we dig into the details and start work over coming weeks and months.

If you have ideas and want to get involved, the best channel is our weekly web makers community call on Tuesday (formerly the Drumbeat call). Also, feel free to post comments here.

Excerpts from the article:

…the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is putting millions of dollars into a competition to spur interest in a new type of badge — one that people can display not on their clothing but on a Web site, blog or Facebook page while they are looking for a job.

The badges will not replace résumés or transcripts, but they may be a convenient supplement, putting the spotlight on skills that do not necessarily show up in traditional documents — highly specialized computer knowledge, say, or skills learned in the military, in online courses or in after-school programs at museums or libraries.

Prospective employers could click on an e-badge awarded for prowess in Javascript, for example, and see detailed supporting information, including who issued the badge, the criteria and even samples of the work that led to the award.

In preparation for the contest, MacArthur has also given $1 million to the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation to develop a common standard or protocol for the badges.

Developers will use this protocol so that their badges will work across the Web on various platforms, no matter which organization is awarding them, just as e-mail works across the Internet regardless of the particular program used, said Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation in Mountain View, Calif.

“People will be able to take courses at a dozen places, and then put the badges from these different places on their Web site,” he said.

Mr. Surman’s group tested an early version of the badge system this spring at the School of Webcraft at Peer to Peer University, an online school offering free courses organized by peers, said Erin B. Knight, who works on the badge project for the Mozilla Foundation. Students in the pilot program were awarded badges in Javascript, HTML, teamwork, collaboration and other areas.

Many organizations, including NASA, Intel and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, are collaborating with MacArthur in the competition, providing information about their programs and activities that could be the basis for badge awards, said Cathy N. Davidson, a professor at Duke University and co-administrator of the competition.

NASA, for example, has educational programs in robotics for young people that might be suitable content for badges.

Designers have until Jan. 12 to submit their ideas for badge prototypes. Design winners will be paired with content providers to compete for the final awards….

Last thursday, HASTAC hosted a webinar about the DML competition: Badges for Lifelong Learning. Erin Knight led a discussion about the foundational ideas underpinning digital badges and Mozilla’s efforts to develop the Open Badge Infrastructure. Sheryl Grant considered the meaning and potential for digital badges, and Cathy Davidson historicized our current academic system while addressing some of the opportunities for badges and badge systems.

We had an excellent turnout that produced many wonderful questions. Some of those questions we were able to respond to on air and the remainder we gathered together in a working document—a document that the team is working to consider and answer. You’ll find some of those answers on the HASTAC site. Erin pulled a few of those questions and responded to them on her blog.

Not surprisingly, there are a number of fairly philosophical questions about digital badges, some of them bordering on existential. Some of those question were tactical, but all were earnest. The audience expressed excitement, yearning, concern, and impatience. We take this all as encouragement.

We’d like to note that as we develop the Open Badge Infrastructure, the badge recipient is foremost in our minds. Paraphrasing Erin, users will control the privacy settings for badges pushed into the Open Badge Infrastructure. They will have to accept each badge into their Badge Backpack and all badges will be private by default, meaning they are only accessible to the user. However the user can decide to share badges with specific displayers (i.e. a social network or job site) through the Backpack and/or set badges to public making them discoverable through the OBI. As the badge ecosystem grows, recipients will have increasing opportunities to display their badges in new venues.

The Open Badge Infrastructure is one attempt to address learning, skills and competencies that are currently either unrepresented or underrepresented in traditional, formal personal representation on resumes and CVs. Soft skills such as community-mindedness, peer interaction, and mentoring present great assessment opportunities that may result in some of the most important badges to arise from the ecosystem. But as it’s early on in this brand new system, we’ll have to see where value arises. It may surprise us all. And while the academic community has responded mightily to the idea of open badges, the target audience is much broader and consists of organizations, institutions, individuals, groups, etc.—ideally anyone who would like to offer and support representations of learning, achievements, skills, and competencies.

During the session, Cathy Davidson noted that the Badges for Lifelong Learning DML Competition “is an experiment.” As this experiment continues, we welcome your thoughtful comments.

- – -

If you missed the “Badges 101″ webinar, you can watch the recorded presentation here. And we’re offering another webinar Tuesday, 10/11 at 3:00pm ET: ”Process and Application.”  https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/953425726 If you have any questions about the DML competition application process, we encourage you to attend.

Last Thursday I presented on a Badges 101 webinar run by HASTAC. The goal was to give some foundational information and answer questions about badges in general. It was well attended - over 200 attended and more weighed in with questions. 

You can see the recording here: http://www.dmlcompetition.net/Blog/2011/10/badges-101-webinar-follow-up-and-recap/

We were only able to address a handful of questions during the webinar since time was running out, but we are all currently weighing in on the great questions that came in and will be continually posting our responses via the HASTAC Badges forums. There were a few that caught my attention and I wanted to answer here as well:

Isn’t grade just another form of a badge I can post A,B,C,D, F on fridge, The internet just makes fridge bigger?

I love this question. The internet as a big fridge just makes me smile. But it is also a really good question. Are badges the same as grades? Aren’t we just reinventing the same system? I think this is exactly what we should avoid. Grades are a very limited and in many cases, ineffective system. A grade is abstract and often tells very little about what was behind the grade. Even for those situations where the criteria differentiating an A from a B is clearly defined, once removed from that experience, the grade loses all of that information. Even just looking at the system - 5 grades - imposed on everything regardless of what is being taught/learned, feels irrelevant and artificial. And then there is normalizing and grade inflation… 

A driving principle behind the badge work is that we will use badges to capture a wide, granular range of learning so that the skill, competency, achievement, etc. is explicitly expressed through the badge, and of course that badge carries with it all of the information needed to understand the badge, including the criteria/assessment behind the badge and potentially even a link to the learner’s work as evidence (an optional piece of metadata). Thus badges move us away from a standardized, artificial system and start to lay the foundation for an authentic, personalized system that captures and continues to communicate the learning and skill development that occurred. 

And returning to the fridge metaphor - in my childhood, only the papers, quizzes or homework that got the A made the fridge. Regardless of the work, when my parents saw an A, they implicitly knew what that meant and knew how my work compared to others’. Badges sets us up for a different, more personalized system where learners can collect badges for a wide range of skills and achievements. Badges can represent unique and individualized pathways of learning. It becomes less about comparisons to other learners, and more about personal interests and accomplishments. It becomes less about the rating and more about the work itself. This makes some people nervous - how will we make sense of it all if we don’t have the standardization? It will be a different system, that’s for sure. But what gets me excited is that it opens up the opportunity for so much more authenticity, flexibility and recognition. A learner’s collection of badges could be on that fridge but instead of just a few papers with A’s, and it would represent a much more complete picture or narrative around that learners achievements, strengths, interest and skills. 

Seems like the success of badges at least partly depends on educating employers and the public about their value?

Yes, there will certainly be a learning curve. We are starting something new here so it can’t be expected that HR departments are going to suddenly know what to make of badges on digital resumes or applications. But that said, we have talked to a bunch of employers and hiring managers and many are open to the idea, and beyond that, almost all (if not all) recognize a need for a new system. They are looking for a way to get more contextual information on applicants, including the evasive social or softer skills that are so important and relevant to employers and success as an employee. Badges can offer a way to present more granular and comprehensive information about a person, and that information is more than just something flat listed on a resume but instead is linked to information about criteria and evidence to validate the badge. So while, yes, as with any new system, there will need to be some initial education around badges, the potential is so huge that I don’t anticipate it will take much to tip folks in favor of a the new approach. But we’ll see!

There is a follow-up Badges 101 webinar on October 17th at 2pm ET so if you missed that one, or still have more questions - check that one out. Also, for questions specific to the competition details and instructions, check out this webinar tomorrow (10/11) at 3pm ET. 

-E

As the DML competition and badges conversation continues to move in many directions at once, at Mozilla Foundation we are starting to consider the future of the open badge ecosystem that the Open Badges Infrastructure (OBI) will help to originate. The good news? As a citizen of the open web, you are empowered to help define and build the digital badges that will populate it. You can help define what characterizes a badge; how, why, and where someone might obtain one; what it might look like; how long its lifespan might be; and perhaps most importantly, how it might live and interact in the larger sociocultural landscape.

Instead of badges arising from a traditional, top-down hierarchical, paternalistic system, think of them as a fluid opportunity. An opportunity to entirely rethink what it means to assess and recognize skills, competencies, learnings, experiences and achievements. In other words, think big, think extraordinary, think “why not?”.

To help frame all of this big, extraordinary, “why not?” thinking, here’s a bit about our role in this experiment. Think of Mozilla’s OBI as the plumbing: the thing that allows everything to work, the pipes that will help to irrigate and propagate the developing ecosystem. And it’s open source plumbing. If there are aspects that you’d like to mess around with, copy the code and fork it. That’s the beauty of open source code: it’s accessible and mutable.

Ultimately, Mozilla will make the system self-service, so that any organization, academic institution, group, or individual will be able to create a badge or badge system(s), as well as host it in their own backpack. This means that badges will always be portable, extensible, personal, and recipient-owned.

Already, interested folks are creating useful widgets that will help to extend the work that we’re doing. They include: Leslie Michael Orchard’s Django handicraft, Django-badger; Andrew Kuklewicz’s Ruby on Rails work; and Open Michigan’s (Kevin Coffman and Pieter Kleymeer) Drupal 6 effort. Eventually, you’ll be able to access these directly from the Open Badges github repository.

Mozilla is interested in keeping the commons of the web open, and that includes a badge and assessment system. If you’re curious about participating in the active tech conversation about OBI, join our badge-lab group. If you are interested in creating widgets for the OBI, review our code at GitHub and away you go. If you’re ready for a larger commitment to open source software and Open Badges in particular, consider joining our expanding team. Erin Knight, our stellar project lead, writes a terrific blog: World of E’s. There you’ll find detailed explanations of our work to date as well as our open positions. In brief they are: an Open Badges Developer; an Open Badges Partner Manager (Business and Design); an Open Badges Engineer (Tech and Support); and a Mozilla Badge and Assessment System Designer/Specialist.

We’re counting on you to be involved in the conversation and creation of the Open Badges ecosystem. So, open web citizen, get out there—there’s no time like the present to start changing the future.

Thanks.

I want to us create a web literate planet. One where almost everyone — filmmakers, teachers, scientists, artists, bankers — understands what’s going under the hood on the web. Can take things apart. Remix them. Express what they want the web to be. Since starting Mozilla Drumbeat 18 months ago, I have seen that there is a thirst for this.

This thirst shows up partly in ideas: people calling out for web literacy, and in particular for a world where everyone knows at least a little code. Douglas Rushkoff is an example:

When we gained literacy, we learned not just how to read but to write. And as we now moved into an increasingly digital reality, we must learn not just how to use programs but how to make them.

I experience this thirst even more viscerally when I look at the web makers, including my 11 year old son. He posts video game commentaries online everyday. He craves creating things on the web. Yet, increasingly, he bumps up against the black box of YouTube, unable to take it apart, understand it or reconfigure how it works. He is not fully web literate.

As outlined in a number of posts recently, I believe Mozilla can play a leading role in creating a web literate planet. Concretely, I think Mozilla can — and should — build out a major P2P learning initiative that teaches web skills and web literacy to coders and non-coders alike. We should also take an active role building up the whole ecosystem of orgs emerging around web literacy and innovative, web-like learning.

With the aim of focusing (and firing up) a conversation on these ideas, I’ve written a summary of all my posts so far here. My major points have been:

Post #1: Our biggest achievement in the first 18 months of Drumbeat has been carving out a new way for Mozilla to work: teaching and building things with people I call ‘web makers’. The next thing we should do is build on this particular aspect of Drumbeat.

Post #2: The people I am calling web makers are teachers, filmmakers, journalists, artists, scientists, game makers and curious kids who a) want to be part of what Mozilla is doing and b) are making things using the open building blocks that are the web.

Post #3: We need to teach the world to code. Or, more specifically, we need to mentor web makers on a massive scale, giving them new skills to make their corners of the web more creative, participatory and open-ended. We need a big community of mentors to do this.

Post #4: We’ve noticed something: impressive learning happens when people get to make something new and innovative. If we want to drive learning, we also need to build a lab where people are invited to tinker, make and invent future pieces of the web.

Post #5: At the foundation of all this, we need a P2P pedagogy built around friendship and passion for a particular topic or interest (e.g. hip hop). Our mantra might be: people learn at Mozilla by building exciting things on the web with their friends.

Post #6: To make this concrete: we need a clear simple Mozilla learning program that anyone can dive into, no matter their age or skill level. This starts with the best bits of Drumbeat: Hackasaurus, School of Webcraft, MoJo, etc.. And is wrapped in a system of Mozilla badges that recognize the most skilled and generous community members.

What I am proposing is building a global P2P learning institution, tinkering lab and web skills certification system into the core of Mozilla’s work. Which raises the question, doesn’t this already exist? Partly yes, but mostly no.

Lots of people teach about computers. Few people teach about the web. For school age kids, the bulk of the focus remains on basic office apps and watching out for cyberbullies. And, for adults, the most popular out of school tech programs still continue to be things like the MCSE and Cisco Academy. Technical, but not very webbish, and certainly not at all helpful to the web makers.

Similarly, many people talk about educational innovation on the web. Few are trying build web-like learning experiences where making, tinkering and collaboration are at the core. You can see this in the myriad of e-learning and open educational resource sites that simply present videotaped classroom lectures. They aren’t even aiming a P2P pedagogy that works like the web.

Luckily, there are pioneers who are pushing forward on both web literacy and p2p pedagogy. Projects like Code Academy, Young Rewired State and CodeNow are teaching people great web coding skills. And people like Howard Rheingold, Cathy Davidson, Philipp Schmidt, Katie Salen, Dave Humphrey and everyone in MacArthur’s broader digital media and learning community are building learning experiences that work like the web. These are Mozilla’s allies, people we can both learn from and support as we build out a broader ecosystem around all of these ideas.

For now, we have a question: should Mozilla go big in learning? And how? The role we can play in teaching web skills and web literacy at a massive scale is clear, at least to me. And there is huge potential to contribute more broadly to learning innovation with things like Open Badges. But, as we deliberate on where to go next with Drumbeat, are these the right places to focus our energy?

PS. If you want to read more detail, I’ve posted all of my posts on this topic on a single page here.

General overview
This past week saw activity in response to the 4th Digital Media and Learning (DML) competition: Badges for Lifelong Learning announcement as well as the idea of badges themselves. It was a bit of a bounce-back week where people were absorbing the idea of the competition and considering the impact of badges, primarily within the academic environment. Thus far, the business community’s response has been limited.

Blogs
There has been a good deal of interest and response in the blogging community to the DML competition. And the DML competition website’s blog has been producing some great posts that spur continuing conversations. As for the general blog world, we’re getting responses in several directions from the academic side: “the current system is broken”; “peer learning is vital”; “the proposed system is problematic because it commodifies learning”; reference to the work initiated by the edupunk movement; and, concern about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. I unearthed one thoughtful blog post that sought to address badges for business: there the concern revolved around the potential for a plethora of badges in the ecosystem, and the potential for blowback in specificity of hiring criteria.

Twitter
hashtags: #dmlbadges #openbadges
Lots of discussion and general poking-it-with-a-stick is occurring on Twitter. The conversation ranges from curiosity to “I’ve been thinking about something like this for a while,” to “when can we start implementing this?” While a few negative tweets float through, the initial shock of the new seems to have worn off and contemplation is beginning in earnest. A wonderful outcome: it appears that potential entrants are searching each other out through Twitter.

G+
Note: Bryan Alexander will host another G+ hangout Tuesday, 10/4, 1pm ET.
A relatively new venue: one that could yield impressive information as we move ahead with the digital badges initiative. Additionally, it offers the ability to have small ad-hoc pseudo-webinars as the stages unfold. This past week, Bryan Alexander tweeted that he’d be leading an impromptu hangout where other members of the academic community could weigh in on the Open Badges Infrastructure as well as the concept of digital badges. This type of informal hangout seems to be an ideal communication method. Matt Thompson followed up with him to lead another in the coming week. Additionally, I have asked attendees of Bryan’s hangout to participate / mediate future discussions with the caveat that a badges team member attend to glean useful data. Additional recommendations about pursuing this venue or ideas about potential conversations are welcome.

Webinar
Upcoming: October 6, 2011, platform: GoToMeeting
Details and registration requirements: https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/977635438
Hosted By: Cathy Davidson, Duke University Professor and HASTAC Co-Founder; Sheryl Grant, Director of Social Networking, HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation DML Competition; Erin Knight, Assessment and Badge Project Lead, Mozilla and P2PU; Matt Thompson, Education Lead, Mozilla Foundation; Carla Casilli, Project Manager, Open Badges, Mozilla Foundation

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
The following information presents more granular explorations of the synopsized information above. 

Sites
HASTAC / MacArthur Foundation DML competition http://dmlcompetition.net
Scoop.it (a compendium of blog posts) http://www.scoop.it/t/badges-for-lifelong-learning/
Planet Open Badges (a compendium of badges blog posts) http://planet.openbadges.org/
Open Badges Infrastructure: http://openbadges.org
Archived video of announcement: http://www.dmlcompetition.net/Competition/4/dc-event.php
 

Blogs, sample posts
http://www.dmlcompetition.net/Blog/
http://commonspace.wordpress.com/2011/09/30/going-big-in-learning/
http://openmatt.wordpress.com/2011/09/29/making-assessment-work-like-the-web/
http://blogs.p2pu.org/blog/2011/09/30/loads-of-learning/
http://saxifrageschool.org/badges-the-boy-girl-scouting-of-higher-education/
http://www.alex-reid.net/
http://ahrashb.posterous.com/badges-as-signals-for-employers-a-critique
A special mention for Cathy Davidson’s cool, collected and significantly commented-upon post from 09/16/11
http://hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/2011/09/16/why-badges-why-not
 

Twitter, sample tweets
“I hope @khanacademy is getting in on this #openbadges conversation and submitting a proposal to the @dmlComp Badges + Knowledge Map = !!”   —@timothyfcook

“I think #openbadges has legs. Many common concerns but consensus we need assessment that is open, portable, modular, realworld ”  —@anya1anya

“@mvexel interested in Mozilla #openbadges for OSM, especially for mappers-in-training here in Haiti. Potential for @dmlComp collaboration?”   —@mapmeld
 

G+ hangouts 
Bryan Alexander: https://plus.google.com/104952151710859328097/about
NITLE blog post based on the hangout: http://blogs.nitle.org/2011/09/27/badges-and-education-a-nitle-videoconference-discussion/
 

CBS Moneywatch just called digital badges for learning and Mozilla’s Open Badges project “a thrilling and much-needed development that could shake up the monopolistic higher-ed world.”

The traditional college degree may not be as necessary in the future if the concept of so-called digital badges takes off. People who earn digital badges signify to employers what their skills and knowledge are regardless of whether or not they possess a degree.

The digital badge endorsers, including Mozilla, which is involved in the effort, envision that badges could be awarded by online and open-courseware providers, companies, community organizations, professional groups and even colleges. 

I’ve talked about Mozilla going big in learning quite a bit recently. Specifically, I’ve talked about making Mozilla the biggest, most innovative technology learning organization on the planet. I’ve also talked about the importance of doing this in a Mozilla-like way, with P2P pedagogy and strong focus on making. The question now is: how?

The first step is fairly easy, or at least obvious: roll the best bits of Drumbeat into a single, coherent program designed to teach web culture and web skills at a global scale. This includes the clearly educational bits like Hackasaurus and School of Webcraft. But it also includes media and innovation programs like Web Made Movies and MoJo that are already helping new kinds of people learn, tinker and make things on the web. And, of course, it includes Open Badges as a basis for offering recognition and credit for what people have learned.

My personal opinion is that it’s time for us to focus in this way. What we’re hearing from you  is that we need to relentlessly focus on the small number of things we can be best in the world at. This is what separates all great organizations from merely good ones.

The harder part is defining what a ‘Mozilla goes big in learning’ program would look not as a loose set of programs, but rather as a cohesive whole. Based on dozens of discussions and comments on my blog, I’ve put together a high level straw man outline. It looks like this:

Mozilla wants to spread web culture and skills at a massive scale
by being the biggest, most innovative tech learning org on the planet.

We’ll drive this through:

• top quality Mozilla web literacy and web skills content for all ages
• a community-run lab where learners and inventors make things together
• a global community of webmakers who learn and mentor with each other
• Mozilla Badges that recognize skills, achievement and contribution
• P2P learning and making, building on Mozilla’s collaborative way of working

These last two bits point to something critical: if we want to create a vibrant community of learners and mentors, we need to build a recognition system that rewards the best and most generous people in this community. When I think of the social scaffolding for this community — and for the learning programs I describe above — I imagine something like this:

The idea: give people a clear way to advance through Mozilla learning programs and labs, and then recognize their achievements and contributions through badges. This not only provides a way to incent learning and mentoring, it will also help us build the next generation of Mozilla community leaders.

The good news: we already have a head start. The best bits of Drumbeat give us a set of learning programs, software and community from which to build. Once we strengthen and systematize these things, we can snap them into a bigger learning offering like the one I am describing. We can then build up more content, a mentor network and Mozilla web skills badges system on top of these foundations that we’ve built through Drumbeat.

Of course, we haven’t yet decided if this is what we want to do. There is huge opportunity in learning: Mozilla could help millions of people gain the literacy and skills they need to shape how the web works in their own lives and careers. However, dedicating ourselves to learning at this scale would be a big bet. It would take significant time, resources and patience.

I want to start a broader conversation over the next few weeks to help deliberate and iterate on these ideas. It starts with the simple questions: Should Mozilla go big in learning? and What would that look like? I’ll do a summary post early next week as a way to focus this conversation. However, I’d be happy to hear people’s thoughts a comments on this post in the meantime.

From the book jacket to Cathy Davidson's Now You See It

Cathy Davidson‘s comment on my last post about Open Badges — and her recent op ed in the Washington Post — get to the heart of an exciting shift taking place in learning and assessment. A shift where assessment is no longer seen as separate, standardized and external (first you learn, then you externally measure it). But instead, where assessment and feedback are baked right into the learning process, in a much more transparent, social and participatory way.

Assessment that’s social, transparent and participatory

Cathy’s view is that the process of collectively deciding what’s worth measuring — whether for learners, communities of peers, or organizations — represents a crucial learning opportunity in its own right, “as an exercise to engage all an institution’s members in thinking about what it wants to credit and why.”

It’s a fantastic exercise, in other words, in institutional self-reflection, self-evaluation.

My big “Now You See It” lesson is that, until we go through this preliminary step of thinking deeply together about who and what we are, who we want to be, what matters to us, and why it is important to know who contributes to our network and how, then we cannot even think about moving forward in open, innovative new directions.

The problem with an inherited system — whatever that system is: it comes with parameters already defined. To me, the most important thing about this badge experiment is it is an opportunity for a community to explore and understand what its own parameters are.

Media literacy badges from Global Kids

Assessment as a social act

This suggests that the process of deciding what “counts” towards a given goal, competency or achievement is, essentially, a social act — something decided on by communities of people, rather than by some top-down cathedral or gatekeeper. And that peer-to-peer assessment is a vital 21st century skill in its own right.

Standardized testing and other pre-defined yardsticks — which typically offer assessment models that are opaque, hard for many to fully understand, and handed down to you in advance, without discussion or community goal-setting — deny us this learning opportunity. And in many ways, are out of touch with a world where working collaboratively — which includes tactfully evaluating the work of peers, and assessing how well that work relates to larger shared goals — is increasingly important.

Excerpt from iRemix's badge framework

Peer-to-peer evaluation as a 21st century skill

We often talk about the need to assess and recognize “21st century skills” — competencies and achievements difficult for traditional institutions to recognize, because they’re new, reflect changing literacies, and evolve at a rapid rate that’s hard to capture.

Cathy’s point suggests that getting good at “social assessment” and peer-to-peer evaluation — helping to collaboratively set goals and translate them into metrics, being a fair judge of others’ work, collectively defining mastery, understanding nuance or levels of proficiency, designing processes and social mechanisms to work all this stuff out  — is an important 21st century skill in its own right.

Here at Mozilla, for example, we use “code review” to assess the quality of a given community member’s contribution. It’s important that the process is transparent (the criteria are clearly stated and understood), participatory (in that anyone can participate, and *everyone* is subject to code review — there’s no free pass for senior staff or the specially anointed),  and social (in that these reviews are done in the open by recognized peers, rather than some inscrutable gatekeeper).

What drives this approach is not naive idealism or some commitment to kumbaya values — it’s a form of assessment that’s agile, pragmatic and effective. Without these social and transparent elements, our global community would wither and our software would break.

Screen grab from Mozilla's beta1 "Badge Backpack"

“Gatekeeper credentialing” vs. “social proof” that you know what you know

For me, this emphasis on the social aspect of recognition and assessment — assessment as a social act — is crucial. It shifts us from the cathedral (a certificate or credential handed down from on high) to the bazaar (social proof that you know what you know, backed by communities of peers and shareable artifacts.)

In a fantastic online discussion with educators and ed tech innovators organized by Bryan Alexander, this point came up in the context of whether or not badges represent the “commodification” of learning — the reduction of complex human abilities into standardized little bits and pieces that can be plugged into the vagaries of “the market.”

It’s a question that is probably deserving of another post in its own right. But the social dimension of assessment that Cathy and others talk about seems key to me in this regard. The outward piece of badges you can see — the “display” layer, showing what you know — may ultimately prove to be only the small, visible tip of a much larger and more important iceberg: a paradigm shift in assessment. A shift that embraces more social, transparent and participatory models as a vital compliment to (or eventual replacement for) the standardized models we’ve inherited from the industrial era.

Breaking down the barrier between doing and evaluating

We’re seeing an explosion in this kind of assessment, whether it’s stealth assessment, portfolio-based assessment, peer-based assessment, micro-credentialing, or even (shudder) gamification — which done badly, represents gimmicky attempts to sugarcoat or apply simplistic models of human motivation. But as Cathy points out elsewhere, done properly, we can learn something from the best games — where doing and evaluating are not separate, they’re one and the same. When you’re playing a game, you don’t play for a bit and then stop and measure what you did, as a break from the action. Evaluation is woven seamlessly into the experience. Through constant feedback and heads-up displays that are clear, granular, and allow for continuous improvement and self-correction.

Similarly, learners at the School of Webcraft, for example, or iRemix may be earning recognition from their peers for being a great collaborator, team player or communicator — without even knowing it. Rather than teaching or learning to a test, they’re just doing it — working on projects, tackling specific challenges together, and producing shareable artifacts where the social proof is in the pudding.

Prototype community and peer badges from Mozilla and P2PU's School of Webcraft

Assessment that works more like the web

As Cathy’s book details, the old standardized systems of measuring ability — like multiple choice and IQ tests — were never originally intended to play the massive role they currently play in our educational system, and were shaped by a dominant technology: the assembly line. Now that we’re in a new age, with new technological and social paradigms, how can we adopt forms of assessment that tap our full human potential and bear greater relevance in the real world? If badges help accelerate that kind of experimentation and innovation, they’ll form the tip of a much larger and more exciting iceberg.

Friendship is a powerful force for learning. Especially friendship built around a shared interest or passion. Space travel. Cooking. Technology. Gardening. Whatever. We tend to gather, explore, make, play — and learn — with friends who also share our passions. As people like Mimi Ito have shown with research: friendship and interests drive learning.

Mozilla’s learning programs should to be designed around this combination of friendship and passion. Our mantra might be: people learn at Mozilla by building exciting things on the web with their friends. Notionally, all of our learning programs need to be built around a P2P pedagogy with a big emphasis on making things and expressing your passion. Or, as our friends at MacArthur often say to me, we need to be doing ‘connected learning’.

Funnily enough, the importance of friendship came up in the debate about ‘Mozilla as teacher’ vs. ‘Mozilla as mentor’ in response to one of my recent posts. Ken Saunders said:

I suppose that mentor seems like (and may be) a friendlier, perhaps even more modest word. I’ve had many mentors who were also my friends, but few teachers that were.

Ken’s pointing to something critical here, even if indirectly: what makes the existing Mozilla community tick is a sense of common cause, collegiality, helping each other out, inventing and building things together. Friendship.

We need to keep this idea of friendship at the core of what Mozilla in learning. The good news is that a collegial P2P learning spirit is already built into what we’ve been doing with programs like School of Webcraft and Hackasaurus. What we need to do now is figure out how to be more systematic, how to do this with some scale.

Mentorship is likely one of the keys: encouraging senior community members to befriend and help others learn. The idea is to use friendship and shared interest to connect people with different experience levels. We’ve talked about building this kind of mentorship program like this with Hackasaurus and other youth-oriented programs. It’ll probably be one of the first new things we push on in 2012, alongside a badges program for web skills.

Interest and passion are the other side of this learning coin. Given our goal is to teach people web skills and web culture, we need to tap into their other interests: e.g., use their interest in gardening to teach them about the web. This may sound crazy or hard, this recent video about our  work with the Bay Area Video Coalition reminded me we’re already doing it:

We’re also working with the New Youth City Learning Network (more on this soon) to connect kids who are interested in science, art, poetry, hip hop, etc. with web technology that lets them express themselves. This is interest-based learning.

Through Drumbeat we’ve already  started to connected with interest-based communities: teachers; journalists; filmmakers; artists; etc. These people want Mozilla to help them learn how to apply the culture and skills of the web to their own domain. Many of them have also said they want to help Mozilla in return. These are the sort of new community leaders and mentors we’ll need if Mozilla wants to go big in learning.

One question still looms: what does Mozilla going big in learning look like? I’m going to take shot at that in my next post. In the mean time, I’m interested to hear from people whether what I’ve written hear addresses some of the concerns people raised around my ‘Mozilla as teacher’ post.

The Mozilla Open Badges Team is expanding! 

As you might have guessed, there is a lot going on in the Open Badges world right now. We recently launched beta1 of the Open Badge Infrastructure (OBI) and are hard at work on beta2 and 1.0 development and preparations. We are developing documentation and materials to onramp folks as seamlessly as possible to the OBI, but also want to provide channels for direct assistance to those partners that need it - whether that be through advising on badge system components, developing interfacing widget technology to assist with connections to the OBI or custom building technological components. We are working with the MacArthur Foundation and HASTAC on their DML Competition to facilitate a set of high-quality badge systems and badges that will all be plugged into the OBI and thus, the wider badge ecosystem. We are also working on badges within various Mozilla programs, such as School of Webcraft and Hackasaurus, and are starting conversations about an even bigger Mozilla badge system that would extend across various projects and programs and create a consistent experience and pathway for Mozillians to participate and grow with us and through us. And more. As I said, TONS a’happening in Open Badges land. 

But all of this will not be possible without some really good people to help get us there. So we are currently hiring for 4 positions, with another one soon to follow. Please share these with your networks and if you fit the bill for one and are interested, please let us know! From my own experience, its a fun, chaotic, innovative and inspiring project to work on, so join us!

Open Badges Developer

• Work with the tech lead on OBI development - create and iterate on the core infrastructure for the badge ecosystem!
• http://hire.jobvite.com/j/?cj=oq5XVfw7&s=MoFoPost

Open Badges Partner Manager: Business and Design

• Support partners on badge system development and design. Help to build badges into various programs and environments. Become/be an expert in an emerging field. 
• http://hire.jobvite.com/j/?cj=ot5XVfwa&s=MoFoPost

Open Badges Partner Engineer: Tech and Support

• Support partners in connecting badges systems to the OBI or pulling badges out. Develop tools and widgets to streamline the process.
• http://hire.jobvite.com/j/?cj=ox5XVfwe&s=MoFoPost

Mozilla Badge and Assessment System Desginer/Specialist

• Design and build a badge system for Mozilla that motivates and rewards participation, provides learning pathways through various programs and experiences and fosters the next millions of Mozillians to be involved in the open Web.
• http://hire.jobvite.com/j/?cj=oz5XVfwg&s=MoFoPost

We are a distributed team - all positions are remote and flexible. All are one year positions with potential for extending based on our success together. So come on board!

-E

As I (and numerous others) have already mentioned, last week in addition to our announcement of the Open Badge Infrastructure beta1 release, the MacArthur Foundation and HASTAC announced the 4th annual Digital Media & Learning Competition, which is focused around badges. These two efforts work together well in that we at Mozilla are building the infrastructure to support an ecosystem of badges-as-credentials for learners, and MacArthur is bootstrapping that ecosystem with high-quality, high-value, learning-focused badge systems through the competition. Together with MacArthur and HASTAC, as well as all of the people that join the competition (and conversation), I think we can take this experiment and exploration pretty far, pretty quickly, and learn a lot.

The announcement was made in DC at the Hirshhorn (which somehow was my first time there despite living in DC for 7 years - cool museum). It was a jam-packed few hours that went from the conceptual introduction of badges, through goals and aspirations for this work, to very real examples of badge systems that are already out there now. It took an initiative that was certainly publicly talked about (we are Mozilla, afterall), but within a limited range, to a much bigger stage with much wider reach. Needless to say, there has been a lot of chatter about it since then - this post from my colleague, Matt Thompson, highlights some of that. While much of the feedback was positive, there were definitely some concerns and issues raised among the voices, some of which I want to address here.

But first let me just say that for me, it was an incredibly surreal day, given that I could remember back when some of these initial conversations were happening in a not-so-well-lit corner in Barcelona at the Mozilla Drumbeat Festival. And fast forward a relatively short amount of time (and a TON of work) later and I was sitting in front of Secretary Duncan from the Department of Ed and Administrator Bolden from NASA, among others, saying some pretty inspiring and generally awesome things about these efforts. 

Now. I realize that I am coming from a different vantage point in this than most. I have been thinking about badges, talking about badges, designing badges, critiquing badge systems, building the badge infrastructure, etc. So I’m a little close to all of this. Some may argue that makes me blind to some of the concerns raised in the blogosphere and twit-o-sphere (?) after the event, but I would actually say it makes me more tuned into them. And appreciate them even more.

I still very much see this as a conversation, or as I said before, an experiment or exploration. Not so much in a starting-from-scratch or winging-it way, since again, there has been A LOT of work and thought put into this, but instead in a we-don’t-have-blinders-on, let’s-tackle-these-issues-together way. I think as many perspectives as possible are important for this conversation and I would be a little nervous if there wasn’t any push back from anyone. We don’t have everything figured out yet, and its only through this conversation and these explorations that we will make progress. (Note: I do not, however believe that not having all the answers means we shouldn’t try)

Again, most of the feedback was overwhelmingly positive and Matt captures some of that, but there were a few common themes in some of the more concerned feedback that I wanted to address here. This is a conversation after all, and so as conversations go, let’s talk it out. 

A few themes emerged in some of the feedback:

Theme #1: DANGER! This is being done by technologists, not education people

There seems to be some confusion about Mozilla’s role and the role of the technologists in all of this. Mozilla is building the technical infrastructure - the plumbing, or the part that makes sense to have techies involved in - but the key goal of that infrastructure is to support (and not constrain) innovation at the fringes. This means that the education folk have complete control over their badge systems - they can decide what the badges are, what the assessments look like, how the learning experience plays out, etc. So the educators are VERY much involved and in fact are driving the early badges, criteria behind those badges and ultimately the value of the badges.

Theme #2: This is going to be a top-down system forced on everyone that will ruin our motivations for the things we love to do just because we love to do them

Exactly the opposite, actually. This is at heart, a bottom-up, grass roots, OPEN ecosystem that is working to provide recognition where there currently isn’t any option. Issuers can issue badges for any number of skills, qualities, achievements, interests, affiliations, etc. Each issuer can decide what badges to issue and what things to recognize, just as each learner/user can decide what badges they care about. Learners/users control their collection of badges and can decide what to accept, what to reject, what to share, etc. For some, tinkering with robots may just be something they love to do in their free time (doesn’t everyone?) and that’s enough…for them, great. But for some, all of that experience and skill development could lead to job or further education opportunities and right now, there is no real way to get recognition for it. So that’s the gap badges are trying to fill. 

On the intrinsic/extrinsic motivation issue - I think this is definitely something that we want to track very closely. I agree with some of the more current thinking that this delineation is not as binary as we used to talk about it and that there are different motivations mixed into everything we do so I don’t think that the introduction of badges to interest-driven learning experiences is necessarily going to immediately bring us to the classic kid-getting-good-grades-because-they-want-to versus kid-getting-good-grades-because-they-get-paid situation. But again, this is definitely an area to research more and discuss further as we proceed. I am clearly not an expert on this and another great aspect of the competition is that is it supporting the people that are to do solid research on open questions, effectiveness, etc.

Theme #3: Oh great, more gamification, this time attacking education and learning.

Badges are linked in many people’s minds with gamification and so a natural reaction to these efforts is that this is another example of layering gaming on top of yet another space or discipline. These assumptions are not totally off-base, I think some of the concepts of game design and motivation will come into play in some badge systems, but this is definitely about more than that. Certainly, many of the badges developed through the competition will be backed by rigorous assessments and evidence. And we will see a lot of innovation that I think will move the learning/education space forward. This is not about just slapping some badges onto existing frameworks and calling it a day. This is about turning assumptions on their heads and taking a fresh, hard look at learning and how to support it. One of my Open Badges teammates, Carla Casilli, wrote a great post about this as well.

Theme #4: What happens when this gets out of hand and there are badges for everything?

This has come up since day 1 which is kind of funny given that we’ve all jumped from just talking about the potential for using badges to some future world where this has taken off so much, that there are a ton of badges in the ecosystem. I think that that future day is a real possibility, and in some ways would validate some of our thinking about the potential for badges. But while I understand the concern, I myself am not that concerned about this. One, we aren’t there yet. Two, we are building things into the Open Badge Infrastructure that can help with some of this. And three, if badges do become as big of a ‘thing’, then there will be markets and tools that emerge around them. Look at the Web in the early days - thanks to the simplicity of HTML among other things, there was an explosion of websites. It could have been complete chaos but then third party tools (and arguably quite lucrative markets) emerged to help us filter, rank and make sense of this world. I think the same thing will happen for badges. There will be tools that emerge to filter and visualize badges. Endorsements and other information built into the technical infrastructure (and the badge itself) will help people make sense of badges. And again, users will have complete control over their badge collections so can decide which badges to let in, how to value those badges, who to share them with, etc.

Anyway, I am super excited about these efforts and really looking forward to continuing the conversation. I encourage all of you to get involved in that conversation - in a constructive way of course (nothing is more frustrating than a negative (or positive!) remark without anything context or thoughts that we can all react to or build from so let’s just avoid that if possible). So join the conversation, join the competition. Explore this with us. 

-E

A lot of the early conversation from the Open Badges launch is rich with ideas we can use to strengthen the story and messaging going forward.

Doug Belshaw, for example, makes a great point about trying to clarify a fuzzy part of the story on OpenBadges.org:

We’ve got the learner stories, all the stuff on the Mozilla wiki and some great blog posts and articles.

Are we missing a coherent ‘elevator pitch’ here that catches (some of) the nuance between credentialising achievement and ‘assessment’?

Sounds like a good idea. The Open Badges concept is meant to be bottom-up, peer-to-peer, and aimed at making assessment and recognition a lot more transparent, social and participatory. But that may not be coming across clearly enough on the front page. <Doug & others: care to help fix that?>

How can we improve our messaging around badges and the competition?

In general, it’s a good opportunity to look for gaps in the general story and message. How can we digest some of the first round of conversation, and use it to clarify the story? What else is missing? What gaps can we fill over the next several weeks?

The current Open Badges pitch:

Here’s the high-level Open Badges story as it stands now (from the OpenBadges.org front page):

What is Mozilla’s Open Badges project?

Learning today happens everywhere, not just in the classroom. But it’s often difficult to get recognition for skills and achievements that happen outside of school. Mozilla’s Open Badges project is working to solve that problem, making it easy for anyone to issue, earn and display badges across the web — through a shared infrastructure that’s free and open to all. The result: helping learners everywhere display 21st century skills, unlock career and educational opportunities, and level up in their life and work.

Stuff we should consider adding to the next version:

• The peer-based / social / bottom-up element. The stuff Doug mentions.
• The $2 million “Badges for Lifelong Learning Competition” — and the fact that you can participate in it. As an educator, designer, developer, or organization. This is of course featured prominently in the page — but would be good to explicitly include in the project description right now.
• The “who.” Who is this for? Who is the primary audience / users / customer for Open Badges software — online courses? Schools? (The short answer is “anybody,” since it’s 100% free, open source, and available to anyone to pick up and start using. But saying “anybody and everybody” isn’t that helpful to readers.)

What else?

How could we make the Open Badges and competition story story and front pages clearer?  Please share ideas as comments on this  thread. We’ll also be chatting about this in each Monday’s Mozilla Drumbeat call – which of course are open to all. So let’s talk.

Mozilla’s Open Badges project reached a major milestone last week, with the launch of the MacArthur Foundation and HASTAC’s “Badges for Lifelong Learning” Competition. The competition includes collaborators like NASA, the Department of Education, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and a number of other organizations large and small — all testing the potential of badges to assess, recognize and reward learning.

Rounding up resources and early reaction

This post summarizes some of the key assets and early conversation from the launch, as we push toward the next major competition milestone: the deadline for Badge Content and Program proposals on October 14.

Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education, speaking at the September 15 launch of the "Badges for Lifelong Learning" competition

Video, transcripts and other useful resources

• DML Competition web site
• Mozilla Open Badges web site
• Video from the Sep 15 DML competition launch
• Complete transcript of the event
• Mozilla press release
• MacArthur Foundation press release
• Open Badges presentation slides
• Open Badges Infrastructure beta1 release
• Social media links (curated by HASTAC)

[ustream vid=17290131 hid=0 w=480 h=296]

Video streaming by Ustream

Press coverage

• TechShout: “Mozilla is simplifying the online process of issuing and sharing digital learning badges through the Open Badge Infrastructure project”
• Education Week: “The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is launching a $2 million open competition for ideas relating to badge development.”
• The Inquirer: “Mozilla offers developers a badge system”
• SD Times: “Mozilla’s plan to support life-long and professional learning”
  

Blog posts: Good high-level summaries

Education and learning innovators

• Andrea Zellner, “Thoughts on Badges for Learning“
• “I don’t feel as if I understand the theoretical basis for the research questions around badges for learning.”

• Alex Reid, “Welcome to Badge World” + “three learning assessment alternatives #dmlbadges“
• “As I view it, the badges/assessment thing tries to address four separate issues that really need to be disconnected. In fact, one could argue that their interconnection has produced the serious problems education faces today.
  1. How do we inspire students and/or support their intrinsic motivations to learn?
  2. How do we measure/value our students’ achievements?
  3. How do we measure/value the success of pedagogies, programs, institutions?
  4. How do we capitalize on the values of #2 and #3 in the job market?

Some early analysis and response (more coming)

• Carla Casilli, “Fear of a Badges Planet“
• “Mozilla’s Open Badge effort is not a gamification of anything. Instead, the Open Badge system is an opportunity to reimagine personal communication of social representation. Think of it as an entirely new, authenticatable, verifiable, dependable means to an end: a brand new vision for the old resume/curriculum vitae.”
• Audrey Waters, More Thoughts on Badges
• “Mozilla is part of the force that keeps the Web open and free. So I like them. I do. And I like the idea behind having an open source system by which people can showcase what they’ve learned, what they’ve achieved.”

Blog posts: global

• Mozilla lanzará insignias para mejorar la reputación online
• Open Badges: Schulungsplattform von Mozilla
• Mozilla stravolge la certificazione delle competenze con Open Badges

Hey all - 

As many of you probably heard, we formally launched the Mozilla Open Badge Infrastructure (OBI) last week in conjunction with the MacArthur/HASTAC Digital Media for Learning Competition focused on badges (more on my thoughts/reflections about this in the next post).

The OBI is an open infrastructure to support an alternative credentialing (badging) ecosystem where there can be lots of different badge issuers and any given learner/user can collect badges across those issuers, pull them into one collection that they control and manage, and then share them out as needed with various audiences, websites, etc. We are building the specifications/standards and core reference repository software to sit in the middle and make this ecosystem a reality. More on the OBI here and here and here. 

As of the middle of last week, we released the beta1 version of the OBI which is very exciting progress and means that there is now a there there. 

beta1 includes:

• Reference Badge Backpack technology
  • Repository of all badges for a particular user
  • Unpacks the badges to provide user with a view into the metadata behind the badge
  • UI for management and privacy control
  • Grouping - ability to create groups of badges (and then share them out)
  • Coming soon - access to display sites that have registered with the OBI, so can share out groups of badges directly from the Backpack

• Specifications/Standards
  • Metadata spec for badges - Badges pushed into the OBI from the issuer are simply JSON blobs, in other words, simply a set of metadata that defines the badge. This means a badge at any given time, carries with it all the information needed to understand the badge. Includes badge title, badge description, issuer, issue date, criteria to earn the badge (URL), badge image (URL) and optionally unique URL back to user work or evidence.
• Communication channels/API
  • Issuer API (to push badges in)
  • Coming soon: Displayer API (to pull badges out)
• Mozilla Baking Service
  • Service to embed JSON into PNG files*
• Line-up of Initial Issuers
  • We are working with a number of initial issuers (around 10 so far), including Remix Learning, Open Michigan, P2PU and Parsons New School, to push their badges into the OBI. They will be rolling out badges systems starting next week, through the next month or so. beta1 is a ‘private’ beta meaning that we are working closely with the initial partners versus releasing it widely for public use. However, we are definitely still open to working with more beta partners so if you have a badge system and are ready to plug in, just let us know!

*More on PNG files

We have taken a somewhat unique approach to the badges themselves, based on some awesome ideas from the ever-impressive Dan Mills at Mozilla. Instead of badges existing as the raw data - JSON blobs - throughout the system, we are ‘baking’ (embedding) them into PNG files so that each badge becomes a portable, ‘tangible’ thing that can be exchanged more easily. This means that issuers could email them directly to users, and users could email/send them directly to consumers, etc. This approach gives users more control over their badges and creates a more decentralized system. Users can decide to forward badges onto the OBI, or they could store them in their own Backpack that they host or even store them locally. The one caveat is that the embedded PNG is fairly unreadable without some unpacking software - this means that the badge is a viewable/exchangeable image but the metadata behind it is fully embedded into the PNG and unreadable unless unpacked. There are several ways to access the metadata: the OBI Badge Backpack will unpack badges for users (so if they are stored there, users can see the data), some technically-able users may write their own tool or third party tools may emerge within the community. But the idea that the badge can be easily exchanged/stored and all the information needed to understand that badge lives with in means that ultimately, the PNG approach gives users and the ecosystem, more flexibility and control.

Why ‘beta1’?

What’s this ‘beta1’ thing all about, why not just call it ‘beta’? Basically because ‘beta’ has come to mean something different than originally intended. Today we see a beta stamped on just about everything, sometimes for long periods of time. It seems to have come to mean, this is almost 100% but there may be a little flakiness or we may change a few things around from time to time. Our beta is much more in line with the traditional beta which means, its the step up from alpha that is critical feature complete, but there’s still a lot of tweaking, updating and building out to be done. Hence ‘beta1’.

What’s Next?

beta2: We are working to release the beta2 version later in October that will include the displayer side API and communication channels, enhanced Backpack UI, scalability considerations, etc. More issuers and the initial displayers will start to plug in at this point. We are also building a Facebook widget as the first displayer widget example.

Public 1.0 release: We will be releasing the fully functioning OBI as GA/1.0 in January of 2012. This will include documentation and materials to support issuers, users and displayers who want to use the system. At this point, the OBI is fully public and anyone can plug in on either end.

Where Can I Learn More About the OBI/beta1:

• Website: http://openbadges.org
• Documentation: http://openbadges.org/infrastructure-tech-docs/
• Source Code: https://github.com/brianlovesdata/openbadges

Kudos:

Many thanks and praise go first and foremost to our rockin’ technical lead, Brian Brennan, who architected and built the current version in record time. Additionally, again, thanks to Dan Mills and the Mozilla Labs folks who assisted and guided the work. And finally, we are incredibly fortunate to have a totally awesome advisory group made up of folks spanning academia, development, federal agencies, industry and the open source world. They have been with us every step of the way, helping us vet ideas (and many times kill ideas), think through assumptions, etc. Thanks everyone!

-E

On Thursday, September 15, two related things happened. 1) The MacArthur Foundation announced the 4th Digital Media and Learning (DML) Competition. 2) Mozilla Foundation’s Open Badges project entered early beta. Some other related things occurred around that time, too. Sebastian Deterding posted a somewhat damning critique of Gabe Zichermann and Christopher Cunningham’s O’Reilly Media book Gamification by Design. This last thing, while seemingly unrelated, complicates the perception of Thing 1 and Thing 2.

Thing 1 on its own is thrilling and exciting because it sounds the call for organizations, academic institutions, businesses, groups, students, even individuals to begin thinking about alternate ways to represent both personal and community achievement. This new approach toward achievement won’t focus solely on degrees or certificates but will seek to include soft skills like co-learning, collaboration, camaraderie, and community-mindedness. The DML competition hearkens a new way of thinking about performance that doesn’t rely on formal education or traditional methodologies.

Thing 2 signals a beginning, a break with the past, a series of possibilities and vast potential. Additionally, it may signal a sort of beginning of the end of formal education’s monopoly on acceptable representations of academic and business success: one that has dominated our culture for at least the last thirty years. With the introduction of the Open Badge Infrastructure, Mozilla is engaging the net in rethinking achievement recognition in an open source, open access, open education manner.

This all sounds good, so what’s the problem? The complication surrounds the term badge. Prior to social software like FourSquare, a badge was most likely something you remembered from your years in the Scouts system. No longer. Cue the ominous music as we conjure the dark arts of gamification. Ian Bogost calls gamification exploitationware. Elsewhere, he wasn’t even as charitable as that. Suffice it to say that it’s a touchy subject.

Deterding’s concerns about gamification—in a review that was roundly touted in game design circles as impressively well considered—are valid; however, gamification is not entirely worthless. Even Deterding himself notes this in his follow up to Tim O’Reilly. Perhaps what’s most important to realize here, though, is that Mozilla’s Open Badge effort is not a gamification of anything. Instead, the Open Badge system is an opportunity to reimagine personal communication of social representation. Think of it as an entirely new, authenticatable, verifiable, dependable means to an end: a brand new vision for the old resume/curriculum vitae. Consider the possibilities. Badge systems that, with some nurturing, will develop into a robust ecosystem capable of altering not only the current western educational paradigm, but possibly some sociocultural and economic ones, as well. (The rise of the Badge Class?)

This endeavor will empower individuals in ways that may seem impossible now. When learning can happen in a self-paced, self-motivated way outside of traditional formal systems, and when that learning can be formally recognized in a useful way, then change has great potential. By engineering a system that more accurately represents personal achievement, Mozilla is working toward addressing at least two long-standing problems: the inability of both formal education and business to capture vital, useful and relevant communication and interaction skills, and the failure of the educational system to keep apace with technological advancement. This project has the potential to radically shift worldviews while improving individual lives. If that’s what others are mistakenly decrying as gamification, then I say bring it on.

I’ve touched on the potential for change inherent in Mozilla’s effort. Over the next few months, I hope to expand upon our direction, our challenges, and our successes. And I hope that you’ll make the trip with me. I welcome your thoughts and comments. Let’s move past our fear of a badge planet and look out onto the vast universe of possibility together.

Today we announced Mozilla’s Open Badge Infrastructure project, an effort to make it easy to issue and share digital learning badges across the web.

More and more people are looking at badges to show skills and achievements online. Mozilla is currently developing its own badges for things like Javascript courses at the School of Webcraft. We’ve also talked to groups as diverse as 4H, NASA, PBS, Intel and the US Department of Education, all of whom plan to develop digital badges.

Open Badges is a response to this trend: an open specification and APIs that provide any organization the basic building blocks they need to offer badges in a standard, interoperable manner.

If we’re successful, the benefits to learners will be tremendous. Open Badges will let you gather badges from any site on the internet, combining them into a story about what you know and what you’ve achieved. There is a real chance to create learning that works more like the web.

Also, this sort of badge collection may eventually become a central part of online reputation, helping you get a job, find collaborators and build prestige. This is another reason Mozilla wants to build an open badge format: it can show the real potential of open identity tools on the web.

Released today, the first Open Badges beta was developed by Brian Brennan and Erin Knight, with support from Dan Mills and Ben Adida in Mozilla Labs. It includes a badge format spec, APIs and reference implementation for ‘badge backpack’ software. It also builds on other Mozilla open identity technology like Browser ID. Our first implementation will be as part of School of Webcraft, an initiative Mozilla runs jointly with P2PU.

Today’s announcement coincides with the launch of a $2 million badges for learning competition funded by MacArthur Foundation and run by HASTAC. Earlier this week, MacArthur approved a $1 million grant to Mozilla to work on the Open Badges Infrastructure, a platform that will be used by all winners of the competition.

US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, MacArthur Foundation VP Programs Julia Stasch and Mozilla Executive Director Mark Surman spoke at the competition launch in Washington DC earlier today. Here is the MacArthur Foundation press release.

Cross-posted from Mozilla blog.

Article on our Open Badges project - interviewed by Audrey Watters (@audreywatters). Good stuff!

Last week, I trekked up to NYC for a two day meeting with the badge working group. What is the BWG you might be asking - its a pretty frickin’ cool group of folks exploring badges and innovative assessments for learning. 

This was actually the second meeting of the BWG which is funded by a MacArthur working grant. We first assembled the group from people we had met through various conferences, festivals, meetings and conversations we’d been part of for the previous year and met in Brooklyn, NY at the end of January 2011. These meetings are run “Gunner-style” (ala Allen Gunn, of Aspiration the best meeting facilitator you will ever encounter) meaning that they are unconference-y, participatory and interactive and the agendas are driven mostly by interests and issues of the participants themselves. We do a fun ‘post-it note party’ as I like to call it where all the participants write down topics, questions or issues on post it notes and we combine them all and somehow always manage to let order emerge from the chaos. The post-its are arranged into common themes and those themes then become topics of breakout sessions moving forward.

During the January meeting, these topics ranged from abstract to foundational. Questions like “what do we mean by badges”, “what might a badge system look like for my program”, “how will people distinguish badges”, etc. It was a great meeting for getting people on similar pages, airing concerns and planting the seed for potential projects.

This time around, 6 months later, we were hoping to be able to get more concrete. Our expectations were exceeded by far. We had allotted 1 hour to do short presentations about existing badge projects and ended up spending about 6 hours on them. There were not only more projects than we were aware of, but those projects were far enough along to warrant fairly detailed presentations. On top of that, the participants were so engaged in the presentations that we often had to cut off discussion to make time for others. It was incredible how far people have come in such a short time. We have gone from conceptual conjecturing to solution developing in just a few months. There are some amazing, game-changing things in the works and I am so honored to be working with these people on these important problems. 

If you are interested in joining the BWG moving forward, let me know.

-E

Oh yeah, here is the short report back I drafted for the powers that be. 

Meeting Details:

• July 18th and 19th at the Social Science Research Council in Brooklyn, NY (super kudos to NYCLN for organizing everything for us and being awesome hosts)
• Planning etherpad: http://etherpad.mozilla.com:9000/badge-working-group
• This is the 2nd meeting of the BWG, the first was in late January 2011 (initial planning etherpad: http://ierick.primarypad.com/7?)
• These meetings were funded by a MacArthur working group grant

Goals:

For this second meeting, our goals were to dive into much more concrete discussions and call-to-actions, including:

• Catch up on progress people have made since last meeting.
  • Report back from pilots that have run - SoW, Quinnipiac
  • Update on current projects in the works/currently running - Q2L, MOUSE, Global Kids, etc.
• Discussion of key research questions and plans
• Facilitate partnerships, feedback or assistance on badge pilots or ideas that are in the works or planning phases
• Update on the open badge infrastructure (OBI)
  • OBI Requirements gathering sprint

Participants:

• Participants of the BWG have been identified across the various conversations, meetings and conferences we have had with people, starting with a meeting on Open Assessment in September 2010 in Palo Alto, through the Drumbeat Festival and other meetings/conference calls that we have had in the first half of 2011.
• There were 16 participants in NYC, which worked out as about half returnees from the previous meeting and half, new faces. There were also more folks that could not make it to NYC but are participating through the etherpads and mailing list. In total, the working group now consists of approx. 30 people. 
• Participants included game designers, educators, academics, researchers, open ed folks, youth developers and programmers/web developers and spanned formal-informal, product/implementation-research, K12-adult, even open-closed, etc. This added a depth of perspectives and insights that is typically difficult to achieve and really added value to the discussions and breakout sessions.

Agenda:

• These meetings were held in the “Gunner-style” meaning that most of the agenda was determined by the attendees, based on key questions or topics that were important or relevant to them. We did a post-it note exercise early on the first day to identify these topics and plan out breakout sessions. 
• We also planned for time for people to present their projects, but actually needed much more time for this than anticipated (both b/c there were more projects than we knew about and also because people were eager to discuss each project at length).
• The agenda can be found here: http://etherpad.mozilla.com:9000/badge-working-group

Accomplishments/Evaluation:

• The goal of having this meeting be more concrete and focused on actual implementation specifics was met and exceeded by far. It was incredible to see the progress people have made, both in their own thinking and understanding of the badges work, but also in their own implementations and planning. As previously mentioned, we initially slotted an hour for mini-presentations of projects, but ended up spending about 5-6 hours total on this. This was because more people had things to present than anticipated, but also because the group was very interested in discussing each at length, which was also exciting. There were many points of collaboration that came out of these presentations as well. 
• We had fewer breakout sessions than originally anticipated, mostly because of the interest in exploring the specific examples and collaborations. Those breakout sessions we did have were incredibly robust - extending well past the allotted hour with deep dive, energized discussions from all participants. Participants are still adding notes, but many can be found here: http://etherpad.mozilla.com:9000/badge-working-group-notes
• Many of the topics and questions came back to the specifics of the open badge infrastructure since that is the core underlying technology to support everyone’s efforts. We were able get some very very helpful requirements gathering done, which also included defining what the infrastructure should not do (i.e. push the innovation out to the edges to the issuers/displayers), which was also very important to work through

Next Steps:

• There was a great deal of interest in continuing this working group in any way we can. Our grant is up at the end of August so we are exploring ways to leverage social media and other channels to continue discussions, share resources, etc. If we do find additional funding, we would hold another meeting in early 2012 to review all the badge systems that have most likely existed (and have been plugged into the OBI) for a few months at that point and build research agendas for moving forward.

As announced in another post, we’ve created the Mozilla Open Badges project to tap into the huge potential for badges as a way to incent and recognize learning online.

For Mozilla, there is an additional opportunity: badges may well become a significant part of our online reputation and identity. We could use our work on identity to speed up Open Badges, and use Open Badges to promote our thinking about identity.

Open Badges is built around this dual learning + identity goal set. Early plans are outlined in this presentation (pdf) that I gave to the Mozilla Foundation board last month (9 mins):

Erin Knight will be taking on the role of Open Badges Product Manager, which includes broad leadership on this project as well as continued work on the School of Webcraft badges pilot. Brian Brennan is technical lead for the project. Dan Mills and Mike Hanson are technical advisors.

Given the early stage, there are many details we’re still working out. However, things we already know we want to do include:

• Alpha badge backpack plus end-to-end demo planned for deployment on P2PU in Q3 2011.
• Seeking badge issuing partners through Q3 – Q4 2011. White House Office of Science and Tech / Dept. of Education may be interested.
• Release beta / firm metadata spec by January 2012.
• Work with MacArthur partner projects on more end-to-end deployments Q1 – Q3 2012.
• Related: badge issuers publish to our system / creating widgets to re-publish to 3rd parties. Also, infrastructure and UX more robust.
• Q3 2012(?): encourage wide adoption of ‘backpack’.

If you’ve got ideas or feedback, or if you have a badge project you want to hook into this, please contact Erin or I. Or visit the Open Badges Wiki.

Over the last 6 months, the potential of ‘badges’ to incent and recognize learning online has been a hot topic for many of us at Mozilla.

We’re in the early stages of creating the Mozilla Open Badges project to tap into the huge potential here. I’ve done a high level presentation (pdf) on the concept quite a few times recently. Here is a webcast version (19 mins):

As you’ll see from the slides, Open Badges is something we’re doing in close association with partners in the learning innovation space: MacArthur, P2PU, HASTAC, New Youth City Learning, Digital Youth Network and many others.

Open Badges Product Manager Erin Knight wrote this paper providing in depth thinking about badgess and learning. Matt Thompson summarized Erin’s work in a series of simple badge overview documents.

I’ve provided additional planning details in a webcast of the Mozilla board of directors presentation about open badges. You can also get details on the Open Badges Wiki.

I’d love your comments and feedback on the overall concept. It’s still early days — we’re really keen to get input, ways to improve and especially suggestions of badge issuing partners to work with.

We are currently in the midst of planning for the second phase of the School of Webcraft assessment and badge pilot and one of the key elements of this phase is the addition of more skill badges (and associated assessments). 

As I have previously detailed, last February we launched a pilot with 14 assessments and badges including skill badges (Javascript Basic/Expert, PHP Basic/Expert, Open Source Contributor), value badges (Accessibility Foundations/Expert), peer/community badges (Team Player, Peer Mentor, Good Communicator, Community Builder, etc) and some P2PU-specific badges (P2PU Veteran, Course Organizer). 

In this round, we are building out the skill badges significantly, adding at least 12 new skill badges to the mix:

1. HTML Basic
2. HTML Expert
3. CSS Basic
4. CSS Expert
5. Python Basic
6. Python Expert
7. JQuery Basic
8. JQuery Expert
9. HTML5
10. CSS3
11. Popcorn.js Demo
12. Popcorn.js Plug-In

The important part is to make sure that the assessments behind the badges are appropriate and effective at demonstrating the right skill. We don’t want something to easy or too hard, but that’s tough to tell since we aren’t experts in most (or all of this). So we need help. 

Here is an outline of the current thinking on the assessments. Please give us your feedback. 

3 key areas to focus your attention and feedback:

1. Filling in the blanks
2. Reviewing existing assessments
3. Reviewing rubrics 

1) FILLING IN THE BLANKS

You will see that there are two that are still pretty blank:

• Python Basic 
• JQuery Basic

What are some challenges, exercises or projects that demonstrate basic understanding of python or jquery? All ideas and resources are welcome and appreciated. 

2) REVIEWING EXISTING ASSESSMENTS

For the other badges, do these challenges/exercises make sense? Are they the right level? Do they sufficiently demonstrate the skill?

3) REVIEWING RUBRICS

For the rubrics, are these the right things to be looking for? What else should be in there to ensure quality work and skill? I am SURE that we have missed things since again, we are not experts in these technologies/approaches. 

Please have a look and give us your feedback either as a comment here or within the etherpad. As with everything we do, we are moving at warp speed but we want to make sure that we get this right so thanks in advance for all of your help! We are happy to give you acknowledgement for your contributions on the assessments and of course, there will be a badge for those who suggest ideas/feedback that gets incorporated. :)

-E

I have several posts that I have been meaning to do over the last few weeks but there has been so much going on that I have been remiss. So expect a flurry of posts (or a few at least) from me in the next few days.

But to kick things off - we have completed the first phase of the P2PU and Mozilla School of Webcraft Assessment and Badge Pilot. It’s a mouthful and rightly so, since it was full of a lot of very cool stuff. These previous posts here and here give some background on the pilot but to quickly summarize, the pilot consisted of new assessments and badges for skills, values, community interaction and participation in the School of Webcraft. These badges are meant to be an alternative pathway to accreditation and credentialing that SoW community members can earn to demonstrate skills and then share with stakeholders like peers, formal institutions or potential employers to network, progress careers and/or find jobs. 

This initial phase of the pilot included 14 pilot badges (ones designed by us and aligned with specific skills, values and community behaviors relevant to web development) and a bunch of participation badges that came with the core system we were using for the dedicated badge environment, OSQA. The latter were meant to encourage and guide participation in the site as a question and answer forum. Since we were not using it as a true Q&A system, but instead simply leveraging the functionality to support the assessments and badge issuing, many of the OSQA badges were not relevant or achievable by users but some were, such as First Responder, Popular Answer, Editor, etc.

The full evaluation report is available here, but for those that don’t want to read a (titallating) 17 page report, here are some highlights below:

Goals of the Pilot:

• Build proof of concept for a badge system for web development training 
• Create and roll out initial taxonomy for types of badges 
• Develop and roll out assessments that fit the peer and interest-driven learning environment
• Get initial feedback and reactions from the community
• Learn as much as possible that can be applied to later versions of the pilot or integrated solution
• Prototype and pilot the open badge infrastructure

Key Findings

Participation 

• Overall: Participation was lower than expected, with only 52 registered users (in the dedicated badge environment) and of those, 21 active users (earned a badge, assessed work, etc.) We feel there are a couple reasons for this low participation: 1) communication and 2) lack of integration. 
  • Communication: From a communication perspective, this pilot was intentionally tightly controlled, mostly because we wanted to make sure that course organizers were prepared and that we had assessments closely aligned with relevant courses to encourage more active participation and assessing. But this meant we only touched a small portion of the wider Webcraft audience and did so through course organizers who rightly passed the message along (if at all) on their own schedule, so traffic and attention was intermittent at best. We intend to communicate to participants more directly moving forward so that we can ensure that they are fully aware and have all of the information (including why these badges are worth their time). 
  • Integration: On the integration side, as mentioned before, we used an OSQA system that is separate from the P2PU platform and thus required learners to log into a separate site (we built it so that they could use their P2PU account to reduce this issue but it was still a separate action they had to actively take). We plan to integrate the assessments more directly into the learning environment and experience moving forward to make it more seamless.

Assessments

• Overall: Feedback on the assessments was very positive and it seems like we are on the right track with authentic, relevant challenge-based assessments.
• Types: Of the different types of assessments, we really only saw examples of peer assessment, which again were encouraging, with examples of constructive feedback and reworking of submitted work, as well as learners discussing how much they learned from the process of assessing peer work, but there was some struggle with ensuring that there were peers to assess submitted work. That incentive structure is still a gray area for us - we need to figure out how to attract quality people with the right skills to assess submitted work across the system. We will be exploring this more moving forward. We did not have any submissions for expert-level badges (see below) so we did not see any guru assessment, but hope to in subsequent rounds. There was some stealth assessment in the OSQA participation badges, but none of these were directly tied into the learning. 

Badges

• Overall: The main feedback was that people wanted more badges to cover more skills which we totally expected and plan to build out further as we move along. 
• Types: There was a good overall response to the types of badges we had and people felt it was important to have a mix of hard skills and soft skill badges, which we also know are important to badge consumers like potential employers, so we will continue down this path. 
• Levels: There were no submissions for the expert badges which makes some sense given that all of the courses were entry level with some pushing into intermediate for some skills. We do feel the expert level badges are important to have as a goal or benchmark for people to work towards, but we will need some more advanced courses and active advanced community members before we will get more traction on the expert badges. 

Infrastructure

• Prototype: We were planning to run the first phase of the pilot with a prototype of the open badge infrastructure (OBI) that would allow us to port the badges from OSQA into the infrastructure, and then display them on other sites including the P2PU profile. But due to development cycles on both the OBI and P2PU platform, we decided to push this to the end of the second cycle, which will be in late June. 

Summary

Overall, the initial phase of the badge pilot was a positive step in the right direction for our assessment and badge work. We had initially planned on starting with 2 badges and ended up with 14 badges which allowed us to explore more types of assessments and badges in this phase. While participation was low, we learned a lot that we will apply to the next rounds in terms of communication and outreach, and have identified areas that need dedicated focus like driving more peer assessors to be actively involved.

Revisiting our goals, we met most of them by building and launching a quality proof of concept badge system, which included a basic taxonomy for badge types and various assessments approaches built around peer learning. We got some great feedback and interest from the community, as well as other stakeholders, and have some solid direction around future versions of our efforts. The only goal that we were not able to meet was the prototype of the badge infrastructure, which again, was pushed because of delayed contingencies on the development sides, but is targeted to roll into the second phase of the pilot. This will allow us to port the badges out of the OSQA environment and into the P2PU profile to give learners more control over sharing and using the badges in other contexts.

Overall, we feel that we produced a good proof-of-concept to build off of moving forward, and initial responses and observations indicate that it is important and valuable to continue to move in this direction.

Phase 2

We are rolling all of the stuff that we learned from this pilot into the second phase of the pilot which will launch in early to midJune and run through July 2011. Look for another blog post shortly detailing the plans for that phase of the pilot.

Over and out,
E 

As we push forward with our badge pilot and other explorations of badges for learning, we are now facing the inevitable question of what is the badge itself? In some ways, its a much easier question than others we have been working through like how does one earn a badge, how does one use a badge, how much are badges valued, etc. But in other ways, its the toughest question to answer because the badge itself is the gateway, the alert, the attention-grabber, the story-teller. How does one little badge carry all that information?

Two ways. The up front story + the behind/underneath story.

1) What’s Up Front: DESIGN

The look and feel of the badge will tell some of the story at first glance (to humans…and maybe smart dogs like mine). And in fact, the more it can tell, the better, although that said, I much prefer something visual and simple than text-heavy

We are working with an awesome designer to design the badges for the pilot(s) and these are the most current iteration of the first subset:

A few things to note about the thought behind the designs:

Iconography: In our book, iconography can go a long way. We actually prefer icon treatment over text - when it works - but for the skill badges, we felt the text treatment was necessary because without it, we were getting too cute. And at the end of the day, we don’t want to make people guess what these badges are about. If I am putting my badges on a job application, I don’t want to confuse people or make them work hard to figure out what they represent.

 Shape: Shape can also add to the story and for the skill badges, we went with a gear shape to convey something along the lines of harder skills. May or may not be working - interested in feedback*.

Color: Some of this is design 101, but color can tell a story too. Red obviously pops and some felt was more aligned with skills than with community types of badges. (We were also driven by the colors that were automatically assigned to the different types of badges within the badge environment) I think at the very least, having some consistency in color treatments can help color add to the story.

Branding: This was a tricky one for us, and still is being worked out actually. Real estate is obviously an issue here - and while size is not prescribed (you can actually see two we were playing with), its doubtful anyone would display a badge that is 800 pixels wide. Most likely, they would resize it down so that they could display it alongside other badges and thus we would be back to square one. In addition to real estate, branding is tricky for us because we have so much of it :). These badges are being issued from the School of Webcraft, which are a set of P2PU courses that are backed by Mozilla. 

The current thinking is that carrying the Mozilla brand, especially on the skill badges, would have the most value in the marketplace, so that’s what we have now. But interested in feedback - is there more value in having SoW or P2PU? Having branding across all badges? What else?

That is actually a nice segue into the second aspect of badge’s story-telling power:

2) What’s Behind it: METADATA

What’s behind a badge can tell just as much of a story as what’s up front. In fact, it can tell more. Metadata gives us ways to extend the front end design and jam pack the badge with additional story-tellin’ information. For example, with simple html metadata, you may mouseover the badge to see more information like the title, description and branding. But beyond just that, we feel a badge itself should carry with it all of the information needed to understand the badge, value it, validate it (has it expired?), authenticate it (ensure it was issued to this person), etc. A badge is really (on the backend) just a blob of metadata that tells a story. This means that a learner can put that badge anywhere and it will still be able to tell the same, consistent story. 

Oh yeah, and computers don’t speak purty images, its the goods behind/underneath - the metadata - that they care about. And these badges are digital…aka, live, breath and thrive on and between computers…So obviously metadata is extremely important. 

As part of the open badge infrastructure project, we are working to define a metadata spec that each badge could adhere to and thus badges could be exchanged easily across sites. That spec is still in development* but here are some things we know it has to include:

CORE:

• Title
• Description (what does the badge represent, what did someone need to do to get it)
• Image file
• Issue Date
• Issuer
• Callback authentication link (link back to issuer to confirm that this badge was in fact issued on this date to this user)
• Expiration date (issuer can set a certain timeframe for the badge to be valid and require an update or new badge after a certain period)
• URL to evidence (learner work, endorsements, etc backing the badge)

OTHER:

• Group ID - to be able to say that x badge is from a certain group of issuers, this might be b/c you have a certain set of trusted issuers, etc.
• What else?

*How you can help:

• Help us help humans understand badges: Provide feedback and suggestions on the badge designs
• Help us help machines understand badges: Provide input and ideas around the metadata spec. What else will people/computers want to do with badges that should be captured in the metadata?

I *finally* got comments set up on this blog so the good news is that you can provide your feedback right here in line with the post! Brilliant! So, have at it!

-E