Category: #openbadges

A Typology of Interpersonal Recognition

Back in the old days of social media, h/t was a thing. (I remember having to ask what it meant…) Being restricted for characters as was the trend then, hat tip became h/t. I often posted half-baked drawings inspired by hearing someone speak at a meeting or event and used these precious 3 characters to…
The Meaning of Recognition

I think in the early days of thinking about open credentialing, I got fixated on the credential part. The proof you might receive from an authoritative body, qualified to judge, rather than a human nod or tip-of-the-hat from someone in my community. Recognition – we all need it. By the way, it’s a long time…
Microcredentials and Recognition

Hidden in conversation are a whole host of metaphors, which are pictorial clues to the stories being told. Contrasting two metaphors allows us to compare how different each one feels from the other. That being said, for those living in bungalows, this might need some explaining… This illustration was created for a series of credentialing…
Elements of a badging policy

What creates the spark behind an illustration? There’s nothing I love better than playing idea ping-pong with a co-collaborator. This illustration was created for a series of credentialing workshops with Badge guru Doug Belshaw for the N-TUTORR project.
Here may lie an Open Badge programme. Time for a pre-mortem…

Last week I was facilitating a Think-a-thon with a WeAreOpen client in Edinburgh alongside co-op member Grainne Hamilton. We were helping our client to think through the integration of an Open Badge programme into their current offering. The Pre Mortem is an extremely helpful way to air intuitive spider-sense discomforts amongst the team, without anyone…
Stand in their shoes

“We’re going to start issuing digital badges.” Great. Make sure you stand in the shoes of the people you intend to be the recipients of your badges, and understand why they might want to earn badges from your organisation in the first place… Created for the recent IDB Digital Credentialing Workshop run by We Are Open Co-op
Distribution of Innovation

Together with Doug Belshaw and WeAreOpen Co-op I’ve been working a micro-credentialing project with the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington D.C. On the second day of workshops we put together, we organised a succession of badge project “surgeries”. I captured some of the dialogue using live drawing – which we then evolved into the Credential Project Blueprint. Here’s one of the many doodles…
Open Badges 2.0

I attended the badge summit in London last week. I had the opportunity to visually digest the chatter from different speakers regarding V2 of the Open Badges spec. If you have a look at how the standard is described, you hopefully agree that abstract things need all the visualisation help they can get…
Pathways

Gold, Silver, Bronze, yawn… This (standard) approach prevents the issuing organisation from having to think too deeply about how learners might interact with what they’ve got to offer. There’s more than one way to string together some badges.
Open Badges from Dialogue

It’s one thing to decide how to badge a group of people on your own terms. It’s quite another to catch potential badges as they appear like apparitions out of dialogue with the people. What is that? … and what would it look like? This thinkery is from the We Are Open Co-op meetup.
Computing Badges

Desired Experience: Swift Or Objective C, JavaScript, Cordova, Angular… I’ve always thought that one of the most obvious areas ripe for micro-credentials is Computing skills. It’s a pretty fresh sector, so school credentials are miles behind. However, the speed at which it’s changing also lends itself to recognising small chunks of competency. Most skills in…
The unwritten books of Dr Belshaw

Conversational thinkery is where it’s at. Armed with a pen and paper, there are gems to be uncovered and captured. Recently, with my WeAreOpen comrades Doug Belshaw, Laura Hilliger we thought (online) through the overlap between Digital Literacies and Employability and before long I found myself capturing these book titles which ultimately helped us frame what we…