Oct 27 2013

Thoughts on Badges for Digital Leaders /and more general musings

  • Incredibly motivating for young people
  • Young people ‘get’ the idea, and are empowered by knowing the criteria and are able to pursue the activities, learning and experiences independently. However, teachers add value (as always) by having a dialogue about what the standards mean.
  • Badges can show breadth of skills and experience that haven’t been shown before
  • Badges gain even greater meaning as they get aggregated and show a range of skills and experience
  • Badges provide a click through to criteria and evidence that has not been possible before – especially for digital content. I think the idea of digital badges and evidence in the hands of the learner is very powerful.
  • Assessing criteria is still a chore and takes time – as always
  • Threat that insubstantial badges will flood the market place. Need tools and to educate the learner as to how to represent themselves. They will pick out what is appropriate for a particular purpose.
  • Threat that the criteria can be interpreted in difference ways by busy teachers
  • Any badges are better than young people have at present – eg 4 grades and a UCAS statement – especially non traditional subjects
  • Badges can fulfil many purposes – add granularity to big courses; difficult to measure or smaller learning chunks.
  • The tipping point may be the demand led path where students go to institutions that have thought ahead and offer badges compared to those that don’t.
  • Again, anything is better than present – the negatives of drunken sprees on Facebook compared with positive footprint of badges

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