Category: #openbadges

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…
Issuing Open Badges

What gives an open badge value? Well, apart from the fact that value is a conversation between two parties, I reckon there are a few interesting ingredients – not least the parties involved in the issuing of the badge itself. This thought was created as part of a blog post by Doug Belshaw: Badges, Proof…
Keeping badges weird

This thought, born in a session at Mozfest, where Mark Surman related back to the kookiness of the origins of Open Badges. As micro-credentials become more mainstream, and the standard itself evolves (the proposed V2 has a number of big improvements from V1.1) the stuff that will stretch the development of the standard and the…
Introducing Badge News

If you’re interested in Open Badges, you’ve probably asked the question well who’s using them? The team at We Are Open, lead by Doug Belshaw have assembled a number of interested parties, and put together an awesome fortnightly newsletter for just this reason. Sign up here: badge.news
From hunch to policy

What would that look like if it were a badge? I’ve long since thought about a badge prototyping machine that would take a person through the process of creating the badge on the fly, and easily create a prototype. There’s a danger that we start with the policy in mind, rather that going with the…