Tag: @DAJBelshaw

The Open Elevator

How open is your organisation? Is it moving in the right direction? Need some help?
Chicken and Egg…

I couldn’t make it to ISTE 2016, so instead I joined Doug Belshaw, Noah Geisel and Ian O’Byrne remotely for some off-the-cuff thinkery on Open Badges. Rich dialogue is where the ideas are waiting to be unearthed…
TIDE at 50

A beach is a place of wonder – I’m never happier than when on a beach. An endless supply of creative materials, with a landscape that continually changes. Task #1 – let’s find out what the tide is doing, and how fast it’s doing it… If you haven’t come across the TIDE podcast, it’s well…
Transparent and Open

I’ve been thinking about Cooperative business models recently, thanks to Doug Belshaw and John Bevan. Engaging with different ideas means playing out scenarios, and like splitting light through a prism, you can’t quite imagine how it will be until you shine it through.
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…
Learning to Credential

Due to the nature of the system, we start with the Credential and work backwards. Ah. This is further illustrated by this graphic, highlighting the massive difference between prescriptive and descriptive pathways.
What every business needs…

I was on a train with Doug Belshaw and John Webber recently, and someone mentioned an appointment described as “director of out-of-the-box”. I suddenly realised what I had seen play out in all the businesses I’ve been involved with – the tension between Quality and Innovation. Obviously, every business needs both…
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…
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…