Category: #edtech

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…
Adventures in Blockchain!

Anywhere there’s innovation being touted, good ol’ Blockchain won’t be far away. There’s no end to the possible adventurin’. Embrace the future!
Is technology addictive?

It feels like I’m missing something. I wonder if there’s a record-setting sporting contest I need to witness. Um… nope. I wonder if anybody’s retweeted that awesome last thing I drew. I’d better check. Sheesh, tumbleweeds. Maybe something’s breaking in the news. It’s still snowing in Scotland. It feels like I’m missing something… Inspired by the post – Is…
Open Badges – describing my employment

If I was travelling on a journey from London to Glasgow, a set of prescriptive badges could mark the milestones to aim for (got out of London, passed Birmingham, reached Glasgow). A set of descriptive badges might encapsulate some of the valuable things experienced along the way (visited a National Trust stately home, invented a game that entertained the kids for 3…
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…
VocTech

I was invited to attend an event celebrating the Vocational Technology (VocTech) projects funded by UFI Charitable Trust last night. I find it impossible now to sit through presentations without drawing out what I hear…
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.
Artificial Intelligence…

So I’ve been meeting with Kin Lane recently (aka API Evangelist) trying to get a deeper hold on all things API (or Application Programming Interface for what it’s worth). As an ex-programmer, I’m interested to understand the evolution of how APIs are being used. A number of insights emerged from our conversation, including this aligned view…
Academic failures – got any previous?

We carry around our academic failures like previous convictions. If pressed, we might even blame something: but I’d never even been to France so it just didn’t make sense… Whether or not the excuse is fair, we accept what the piece of paper tells us. I’m not very good at that. Sadly, what we really believe is…
Beyond the Islands of Innovation

I managed to catch the first day of the ALT conference in Liverpool, and thoroughly enjoyed catching up with some of the open crew, and meeting some new faces. Some of my earliest thinkery dates back to altc conferences, like this and this. Good people…