Category: #edtech

Open Badges – can you take them with you?

How do we capture a richer picture of our skills and abilities, so that you can take them with you on your next journey? Open Badges may have the answer. For a collaborative community-built resource, check out the all new Badge Wiki. Why not jump in and add your badge related stuff to the wiki?
Cities of Learning

Joining up informal learning opportunities in a locality makes a lot of sense to me. The Cities of Learning programme has its roots in the Chicago summer of learning – which was instrumental in the use and promotion of Open Badges back in 2013. It gathered together over 100 organisations, a lot of them civic…
Credentials big and small…

Every time I find myself on a beach, I’ll be looking for a pebble that catches my eye. I’ll pick a few contenders, and over the course of a two week holiday will end up with maybe 100 pebbles. At the end of the holiday, I’ll take maybe two or three home. I have attached…
Open Badges (P.S. there’s data inside…)

Open Badges seem so simple, don’t they? But wait – don’t make assumptions – ask questions! They’ve got stuff inside. Data. Authenticated data. But the big news? – you can take them with you because they’re built on an open standard. They can be connected together to form a learning pathway. The data structure inside the…
Let’s just badge everything

This week, the team at the University of Southampton organised an excellent Open Badge conference, which I really enjoyed taking part in. Doug Belshaw (his slides are here) and Carla Casilli were keynoting. “Let’s just badge everything” is probably not the best strategy in getting up and running with micro-credentials. Here are two questions worth…
What’s inside an Open Badge

It’s easy to talk about open badges without really understanding what’s inside (it’s just a digital badge, right?) There’s actually a whole bunch of stuff inside. The badge class is like the template. All badges issued from a certain badge class will inherit those properties. The assertion relates to the recipient of the badge and…
Digital Skills Sandwich

Sandwich anyone? I do love a good sandwich. If potatoes are the king of carbs, then surely bread is its queen? As an Irishman, I am of course very biased. Anyway, I digress… The Digital Skills Sandwich is an idea that’s been rumbling around in my head for a while now. It’s seed germinates from the fact…
Open Badges paint a better picture…

Dr. Doug Belshaw and I got together to think visually about Open Badges resulting in the blog post “3 reasons open source needs Open Badges” which featured this piece of thinkery. Macro credentials are like broad brushstrokes on the canvas, whereas micro credentials could fill in the detail. Oh, and I wish I had wallpaper like this…
What next for Open Badges?

Blockchain, the underlying technology used by Bitcoin, is cool. At least, I think it is, if I could only get my head around it. A group of thinkers (including Serge Ravet) from the Open Badges Community got together to start thinking about how the Open Badge standard could be used inside the Blockchain. What would…
Choosing a badging system

With any solution there are often three different approaches: bespoke, modular and off-the-shelf. Choosing the most appropriate path is more difficult than it seems. This is certainly true of selecting a Badging system. There’s also value in learning through trying multiple approaches at the same time, and assuming that as a result unseen requirements and…
Badge Platform Questions

A while ago, Doug Belshaw and I were working on the #OB101 course, in order to help others think about OpenBadges and how to dip their toes in the water. Some of this thinking relates to a discussion at the Badge Alliance community call about some OpenBadge platforms not really being open. So what should you…
Badge Taxonomy V0.2

This is version two of the Badge Taxonomy – the purpose of which is not to classify rogue badges – but to understand how badges were being used, and help think through badging solutions.