Erin Knight – Mozilla Open Badges

How Mozilla and others are working to help solve the problem of recognizing and legitimizing learning and skill development that happens outside of the classroom.

Key Questions and Comments:

• (14:08) In terms of the identity of the person holding their backpack, how will that be validated or will it?
• (16:25) How do you become a badge issuer and is there a quality control for issuers? How do you enable a very broad spectrum of issuers without it getting spammy?
• (22:04) I’m wondering if you can talk about some of the pushbacks and some of the downsides and some of the counterarguments you have to address them?
• (44:52) To “do” badges now with the system, do you have to understand APIs and programmer-type things?
• (46:38) How do the “description” and “criteria” badge metadata relate to learning outcomes which seems to be the lingua franca of learning descriptors in higher ed?
• (49:06) What should we plan on…how much time…what’s the investment in taking someone who wants to get in and get started issuing badges for a specific activity?
• (52:06) How much of a badge initiative is there for teaching the humanities?

View the Conversation
During the broadcast, the conversation also took place on Twitter using the hashtag #connectedlearning.

Guests for this webinar included:

• Phillip Simon
• Doug Belshaw
• Carla Casilli
• Daniel Hickey
• Michael Lai
• Erin Knight: Erin Knight subbed in for Mark Surman on this session. Erin Knight is the Senior Learning Director at Mozilla and currently spearheads the learning and badge work, overseeing the building of learning pathways for webmaker skills, as well as the development of the Open Badge Infrastructure. She previously worked in the education tech industry and ran a learning research center at UC Berkeley.
• Howard Rheingold

Resources for this webinar:

• Mozilla Open Badges
• U. of Oregon’s Project DIRECT (Distance Innovations for Rural Educators using Communication Technologies) overview
• Overview of Open Badges on MozillaWiki
• Getting Started with Open Badges on MozillaWiki
• Introduction to Mozilla Persona: their complete Identity offering
• Etherpad for Mozilla’s weekly Open Badges community calls
• The Open Badges Google Group
• GitHub for Open Badges
• “Sociocultural Theories of Motivation” – education.com article
• Donella Meadows – “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System” (PDF)
• Dr. David Wiley’s explanation of how he is using Open Badges
• “Badge System Design: learning from Caine’s Arcade” – Carla Casilli blog post
• “Badge System Design: standardization, formalization & uniqueness” – Carla Casilli blog post
• Indiana University’s Participatory Learning and Assessment Network
• GitHub for OpenBadger: a lightweight badge issuing platform
• “Towards a Comprehensive Understanding of Badging Systems: A Participatory Work-in-Progress” (Google Doc)