2012: Mozilla Open Badges update

It’s been a while since I’ve posted an update about our work on the Mozilla Open Badge Infrastructure: we have had our heads down working on making it the best possible system for a while. Here’s some insight into what we’ve accomplished thus far and where we’re heading in 2012.

First of all, a thank you to those who have not only expressed interest in our efforts but have worked to help us find ways to make it better. We’ve been lucky enough to have some of you work directly with us; we look forward to having even more of you do so in the future. Your enthusiasm and commitment feeds our work.

Second of all, a hearty thank you to everyone who has started imagining the rewarding possibilities of a future with Open Badges in it. The MacArthur Foundation’s 4th Digital Media and Learning Competition, Badges for Lifelong Learning, has provided us with the opportunity to interact with a wide variety of folks. Through it we’ve discovered nascent badge systems, well-developed badge systems, strategic assessment platforms, deep interest in alternative learning environments, and a variety of long-range goals. Perhaps most importantly, the DML competition has helped to enliven the conversation about alternative assessment and recognition of learning. We are tremendously excited about the three different competitions (Research, Badges, and Teacher Mastery), two of which (Badges and Teacher Mastery) will culminate at the DML conference in the beginning of March. You can see all the winners at the Mozilla Science Fair.

Undertaking something as significant as proposing and building an Open Badge infrastructure—with all of its attendant direct and indirect meanings—continues to prove to be a humbling and rewarding experience. As the Open Badges team engages the public to work with us to test this hypothesis, we’re learning a huge variety of things. Some of these things seem obvious in retrospect, and some seem surprisingly hidden, but this is the learning process, and we’re committed to it. As the Open Badges website states, we’re interested in capturing learning that happens anywhere at any time.

Consequently, we aim to keep on learning, modifying, adjusting, and recalculating as we go. We’re listening to your comments and we’re excited by your enthusiasms. We’re doing this to reimagine what learning can be. What’s nice about the entire experience is that we are stepping through the same process that others will experience themselves. The past few months have been revelatory: we’ve made new alliances, we’ve discovered possibilities for extensions of our work, and we’ve found eager audiences. As we continue to move forward, we run towards, stumble upon, back into, and greet with open arms new opportunities, like improving ease of use for the backpack or reconsidering our website (a full-on redesign is underway).

If you’ve been wondering what else is in store for 2012, please take a look at our newly modified roadmap. The first quarter of this year will see us posting Issuer APIs, Displayer APIs, and a rough cut of an Endorsement API. Looking at the immediate future, members of the team are about to kick off a week-long development sprint in New York City, speak at the Connexions conference in Houston, attend the DML conference in San Francisco, and then attend SxSW Edu in Austin. In addition, we’ll be conducting a webinar for Open Education Week on March 6th (more details to follow). We hope to see you at these events. And if there are other events you think we should know about, please drop us a note.

Two Three last things worth noting:

1) We now have an Open Badges community call every Wednesday at 9:00am PST (-08 UTC). You can learn more about that call, including the local and international dial-in numbers here: https://openbadges.etherpad.mozilla.org/openbadges-community.

2) If you are not already a member of the Open Badges conversation area/google group/mailing list, please join: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/openbadges. There you’ll find a rich history of software questions, notices of documentation efforts, philosophical considerations, and references to github repositories.

3) You can find us on Twitter here: @OpenBadges

Thanks!

Mozilla Open Badges: help us build the future

Mozilla is collaborating with the world to develop an open badge ecosystem.

What, might you ask, is an open badge ecosystem? Well, it’s a system that recognizes learning no matter where it occurs, whether it’s someone sitting alone in their room learning html from a peer-based learning organization like Peer to Peer University, or someone separating from the military getting recognition for their prior learning, or a non-traditional student taking an open education sociology course vetted by a prestigious university like Parsons / The New School.

Badges, the core of the open badge ecosystem, are digital representations of learning, skills, competencies, and experiences. They do not have to occur online but are represented through badges that contain metadata indicating the learning. You can learn more about our work at http://openbadges.org

We are building the core infrastructure technology for a digital badge environment that will support a variety of badge issuers—groups, organizations, academic institutions, or individuals who have developed assessment criteria and want to award badges to individuals as representations of their experiences or competencies. They can address both hard skills and human or soft skills.

And we hope that you are as excited about this new possibility as we are, and that you’ll help us build this brand new world. Experiment with us through the Digital Media and Learning competition: Badges for Lifelong Learning. Stage 2 is now underway.

Join today’s webinar Thursday, December 15 at 1pm Eastern / 10:00am Pacific. Check out http://dmlcompetition.net for more information about Stage 2.

Considering the Badges 101 Webinar

Last thursday, HASTAC hosted a webinar about the DML competition: Badges for Lifelong Learning. Erin Knight led a discussion about the foundational ideas underpinning digital badges and Mozilla’s efforts to develop the Open Badge Infrastructure. Sheryl Grant considered the meaning and potential for digital badges, and Cathy Davidson historicized our current academic system while addressing some of the opportunities for badges and badge systems.

We had an excellent turnout that produced many wonderful questions. Some of those questions we were able to respond to on air and the remainder we gathered together in a working document—a document that the team is working to consider and answer. You’ll find some of those answers on the HASTAC site. Erin pulled a few of those questions and responded to them on her blog.

Not surprisingly, there are a number of fairly philosophical questions about digital badges, some of them bordering on existential. Some of those question were tactical, but all were earnest. The audience expressed excitement, yearning, concern, and impatience. We take this all as encouragement.

We’d like to note that as we develop the Open Badge Infrastructure, the badge recipient is foremost in our minds. Paraphrasing Erin, users will control the privacy settings for badges pushed into the Open Badge Infrastructure. They will have to accept each badge into their Badge Backpack and all badges will be private by default, meaning they are only accessible to the user. However the user can decide to share badges with specific displayers (i.e. a social network or job site) through the Backpack and/or set badges to public making them discoverable through the OBI. As the badge ecosystem grows, recipients will have increasing opportunities to display their badges in new venues.

The Open Badge Infrastructure is one attempt to address learning, skills and competencies that are currently either unrepresented or underrepresented in traditional, formal personal representation on resumes and CVs. Soft skills such as community-mindedness, peer interaction, and mentoring present great assessment opportunities that may result in some of the most important badges to arise from the ecosystem. But as it’s early on in this brand new system, we’ll have to see where value arises. It may surprise us all. And while the academic community has responded mightily to the idea of open badges, the target audience is much broader and consists of organizations, institutions, individuals, groups, etc.—ideally anyone who would like to offer and support representations of learning, achievements, skills, and competencies.

During the session, Cathy Davidson noted that the Badges for Lifelong Learning DML Competition “is an experiment.” As this experiment continues, we welcome your thoughtful comments.

– – –

If you missed the “Badges 101” webinar, you can watch the recorded presentation here. And we’re offering another webinar Tuesday, 10/11 at 3:00pm ET: “Process and Application.”  https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/953425726 If you have any questions about the DML competition application process, we encourage you to attend.

Moving forward: an open badge ecosystem

As the DML competition and badges conversation continues to move in many directions at once, at Mozilla Foundation we are starting to consider the future of the open badge ecosystem that the Open Badges Infrastructure (OBI) will help to originate. The good news? As a citizen of the open web, you are empowered to help define and build the digital badges that will populate it. You can help define what characterizes a badge; how, why, and where someone might obtain one; what it might look like; how long its lifespan might be; and perhaps most importantly, how it might live and interact in the larger sociocultural landscape.

Instead of badges arising from a traditional, top-down hierarchical, paternalistic system, think of them as a fluid opportunity. An opportunity to entirely rethink what it means to assess and recognize skills, competencies, learnings, experiences and achievements. In other words, think big, think extraordinary, think “why not?”.

To help frame all of this big, extraordinary, “why not?” thinking, here’s a bit about our role in this experiment. Think of Mozilla’s OBI as the plumbing: the thing that allows everything to work, the pipes that will help to irrigate and propagate the developing ecosystem. And it’s open source plumbing. If there are aspects that you’d like to mess around with, copy the code and fork it. That’s the beauty of open source code: it’s accessible and mutable.

Ultimately, Mozilla will make the system self-service, so that any organization, academic institution, group, or individual will be able to create a badge or badge system(s), as well as host it in their own backpack. This means that badges will always be portable, extensible, personal, and recipient-owned.

Already, interested folks are creating useful widgets that will help to extend the work that we’re doing. They include: Leslie Michael Orchard’s Django handicraft, Django-badger; Andrew Kuklewicz’s Ruby on Rails work; and Open Michigan’s (Kevin Coffman and Pieter Kleymeer) Drupal 6 effort. Eventually, you’ll be able to access these directly from the Open Badges github repository.

Mozilla is interested in keeping the commons of the web open, and that includes a badge and assessment system. If you’re curious about participating in the active tech conversation about OBI, join our badge-lab group. If you are interested in creating widgets for the OBI, review our code at GitHub and away you go. If you’re ready for a larger commitment to open source software and Open Badges in particular, consider joining our expanding team. Erin Knight, our stellar project lead, writes a terrific blog: World of E’s. There you’ll find detailed explanations of our work to date as well as our open positions. In brief they are: an Open Badges Developer; an Open Badges Partner Manager (Business and Design); an Open Badges Engineer (Tech and Support); and a Mozilla Badge and Assessment System Designer/Specialist.

We’re counting on you to be involved in the conversation and creation of the Open Badges ecosystem. So, open web citizen, get out there—there’s no time like the present to start changing the future.

Thanks.

State of the DML competition conversation

General overview
This past week saw activity in response to the 4th Digital Media and Learning (DML) competition: Badges for Lifelong Learning announcement as well as the idea of badges themselves. It was a bit of a bounce-back week where people were absorbing the idea of the competition and considering the impact of badges, primarily within the academic environment. Thus far, the business community’s response has been limited.

Blogs
There has been a good deal of interest and response in the blogging community to the DML competition. And the DML competition website’s blog has been producing some great posts that spur continuing conversations. As for the general blog world, we’re getting responses in several directions from the academic side: “the current system is broken”; “peer learning is vital”; “the proposed system is problematic because it commodifies learning”; reference to the work initiated by the edupunk movement; and, concern about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. I unearthed one thoughtful blog post that sought to address badges for business: there the concern revolved around the potential for a plethora of badges in the ecosystem, and the potential for blowback in specificity of hiring criteria.

Twitter
hashtags: #dmlbadges #openbadges
Lots of discussion and general poking-it-with-a-stick is occurring on Twitter. The conversation ranges from curiosity to “I’ve been thinking about something like this for a while,” to “when can we start implementing this?” While a few negative tweets float through, the initial shock of the new seems to have worn off and contemplation is beginning in earnest. A wonderful outcome: it appears that potential entrants are searching each other out through Twitter.

G+
Note: Bryan Alexander will host another G+ hangout Tuesday, 10/4, 1pm ET.
A relatively new venue: one that could yield impressive information as we move ahead with the digital badges initiative. Additionally, it offers the ability to have small ad-hoc pseudo-webinars as the stages unfold. This past week, Bryan Alexander tweeted that he’d be leading an impromptu hangout where other members of the academic community could weigh in on the Open Badges Infrastructure as well as the concept of digital badges. This type of informal hangout seems to be an ideal communication method. Matt Thompson followed up with him to lead another in the coming week. Additionally, I have asked attendees of Bryan’s hangout to participate / mediate future discussions with the caveat that a badges team member attend to glean useful data. Additional recommendations about pursuing this venue or ideas about potential conversations are welcome.

Webinar
Upcoming: October 6, 2011, platform: GoToMeeting
Details and registration requirements: https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/977635438
Hosted By: Cathy Davidson, Duke University Professor and HASTAC Co-Founder; Sheryl Grant, Director of Social Networking, HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation DML Competition; Erin Knight, Assessment and Badge Project Lead, Mozilla and P2PU; Matt Thompson, Education Lead, Mozilla Foundation; Carla Casilli, Project Manager, Open Badges, Mozilla Foundation

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
The following information presents more granular explorations of the synopsized information above. 

Sites
HASTAC / MacArthur Foundation DML competition http://dmlcompetition.net
Scoop.it (a compendium of blog posts) http://www.scoop.it/t/badges-for-lifelong-learning/
Planet Open Badges (a compendium of badges blog posts) http://planet.openbadges.org/
Open Badges Infrastructure: http://openbadges.org
Archived video of announcement: http://www.dmlcompetition.net/Competition/4/dc-event.php
 

Blogs, sample posts
http://www.dmlcompetition.net/Blog/
http://commonspace.wordpress.com/2011/09/30/going-big-in-learning/
http://openmatt.wordpress.com/2011/09/29/making-assessment-work-like-the-web/
http://blogs.p2pu.org/blog/2011/09/30/loads-of-learning/
http://saxifrageschool.org/badges-the-boy-girl-scouting-of-higher-education/
http://www.alex-reid.net/
http://ahrashb.posterous.com/badges-as-signals-for-employers-a-critique
A special mention for Cathy Davidson’s cool, collected and significantly commented-upon post from 09/16/11
http://hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/2011/09/16/why-badges-why-not
 

Twitter, sample tweets
“I hope @khanacademy is getting in on this #openbadges conversation and submitting a proposal to the @dmlComp Badges + Knowledge Map = !!”   —@timothyfcook

“I think #openbadges has legs. Many common concerns but consensus we need assessment that is open, portable, modular, realworld ”  —@anya1anya

“@mvexel interested in Mozilla #openbadges for OSM, especially for mappers-in-training here in Haiti. Potential for @dmlComp collaboration?”   —@mapmeld
 

G+ hangouts 
Bryan Alexander: https://plus.google.com/104952151710859328097/about
NITLE blog post based on the hangout: http://blogs.nitle.org/2011/09/27/badges-and-education-a-nitle-videoconference-discussion/
 

Fear of a Badge Planet

On Thursday, September 15, two related things happened. 1) The MacArthur Foundation announced the 4th Digital Media and Learning (DML) Competition. 2) Mozilla Foundation’s Open Badges project entered early beta. Some other related things occurred around that time, too. Sebastian Deterding posted a somewhat damning critique of Gabe Zichermann and Christopher Cunningham’s O’Reilly Media book Gamification by Design. This last thing, while seemingly unrelated, complicates the perception of Thing 1 and Thing 2.

Thing 1 on its own is thrilling and exciting because it sounds the call for organizations, academic institutions, businesses, groups, students, even individuals to begin thinking about alternate ways to represent both personal and community achievement. This new approach toward achievement won’t focus solely on degrees or certificates but will seek to include soft skills like co-learning, collaboration, camaraderie, and community-mindedness. The DML competition hearkens a new way of thinking about performance that doesn’t rely on formal education or traditional methodologies.

Thing 2 signals a beginning, a break with the past, a series of possibilities and vast potential. Additionally, it may signal a sort of beginning of the end of formal education’s monopoly on acceptable representations of academic and business success: one that has dominated our culture for at least the last thirty years. With the introduction of the Open Badge Infrastructure, Mozilla is engaging the net in rethinking achievement recognition in an open source, open access, open education manner.

This all sounds good, so what’s the problem? The complication surrounds the term badge. Prior to social software like FourSquare, a badge was most likely something you remembered from your years in the Scouts system. No longer. Cue the ominous music as we conjure the dark arts of gamification. Ian Bogost calls gamification exploitationware. Elsewhere, he wasn’t even as charitable as that. Suffice it to say that it’s a touchy subject.

Deterding’s concerns about gamification—in a review that was roundly touted in game design circles as impressively well considered—are valid; however, gamification is not entirely worthless. Even Deterding himself notes this in his follow up to Tim O’Reilly. Perhaps what’s most important to realize here, though, is that Mozilla’s Open Badge effort is not a gamification of anything. Instead, the Open Badge system is an opportunity to reimagine personal communication of social representation. Think of it as an entirely new, authenticatable, verifiable, dependable means to an end: a brand new vision for the old resume/curriculum vitae. Consider the possibilities. Badge systems that, with some nurturing, will develop into a robust ecosystem capable of altering not only the current western educational paradigm, but possibly some sociocultural and economic ones, as well. (The rise of the Badge Class?)

This endeavor will empower individuals in ways that may seem impossible now. When learning can happen in a self-paced, self-motivated way outside of traditional formal systems, and when that learning can be formally recognized in a useful way, then change has great potential. By engineering a system that more accurately represents personal achievement, Mozilla is working toward addressing at least two long-standing problems: the inability of both formal education and business to capture vital, useful and relevant communication and interaction skills, and the failure of the educational system to keep apace with technological advancement. This project has the potential to radically shift worldviews while improving individual lives. If that’s what others are mistakenly decrying as gamification, then I say bring it on.

I’ve touched on the potential for change inherent in Mozilla’s effort. Over the next few months, I hope to expand upon our direction, our challenges, and our successes. And I hope that you’ll make the trip with me. I welcome your thoughts and comments. Let’s move past our fear of a badge planet and look out onto the vast universe of possibility together.

The golden rule still rules

It’s not about privacy, it’s about trust. This is what the social networks keep getting wrong. It’s about trust that works on a micro scale and balances on a macro scale. Sure, my privacy is important, but it’s the trust that is carelessly discarded that kills relationships.

Can I trust you with my information? The minute you automatically select a trust option that is not in my best interest, I begin to question your integrity. Now I append “and for how long?” Regardless of corporate rationalizations and machinations, the user/participant/player’s personal self-interest remains uppermost.

If you choose to default it to agree with your marketing plan, you’ve lost me. Because that turns our relationship into a prisoner’s dilemma protocol. I start our relationship attempting to be friends, but if you defect, it becomes tit for tat. And it seems invariably, that one defection eventually leads to another. Each seemingly inconsequential default selection you make in your best interest finds my micro level of trust further eroded, until there’s no macro level left to balance anything out. And then I no longer have a reason to integrate you into my life. Somewhat unsurprisingly, it’s seeming more and more like online social networks are a commodity. And that means it’s a buyer’s market.

Like a precog, I can hear the new communication paradigms being formed in the heads of intrepid early/mid/late stage funding founding partners and established C-level executives right now, “We’re establishing a new and vital communication system. And we’ll be worth billions, maybe even trillions. Everyone will have to use this social network or risk being left behind. We call the shots. We invent the reality.”

This thinking assumes that my ability to connect with my friends—my friends whom I trust—is entirely impeded. Au contraire. So-called old technology still manages that just fine. Phones still make and receive calls. Text messages still arrive promptly. Email still gets delivered. Even mail still arrives at my doorstep 6 days out of the week.

Yes, eventually all data will be lost. It has a lifecycle akin to my own. The need for permanence arises from fear—fear of irrelevance, of inconsequence. But the reality insurgents are already at the door. They want to talk about the new growth opportunities opening up at MySpace.

¡Hola, muchachos!

Here’s a post because I promised myself I’d post and so I’m posting. I’m leaving the “Here are some suggestions for your first post” content because something about it strikes me as universal and welcoming. We’ve all seen it before, right? And this PressThis thing, it might come in handy.

Or it might simply be another way for organizations to monetize the site by tracking my every move. Paranoia and the web go together like peanut butter and jelly. Mmm. Toast.

Here are some suggestions for your first post.

1. You can find new ideas for what to blog about by reading the Daily Post.
2. Add PressThis to your browser. It creates a new blog post for you about any interesting  page you read on the web.
3. Make some changes to this page, and then hit preview on the right. You can alway preview any post or edit you before you share it to the world.