Active Learning

In a conversation with a colleague about advice she had received to include badging in a project design, I asked, “What did the advisor push you to have badging do inside your project?” She responded, “I think right now, they’re mostly just encouraging us to have badges.”

The digital badging movement has taken off faster than I think anyone dreamed it would. Most of us agree that having a new way to signal expertise, accomplishments, and credentials is alluring, as is having a central repository in which those signals can be stored, sorted, categorized, and displayed. And pretty soon, there’s going to be a kind of social pressure, like described above, to “have badges.”

But what I’ve learned in our near-year of badging experiments, is that the decision to “have badges” and track credentialling is the easy part. It’s figuring out how what to badge and how to do so with fidelity that’s the hard part.

How do we keep badging from veering into what we, in our hallways, call “sticker charting” — extrinsic motivation with gold stars or A.R. points — and keep it learner-centered? How do we keep badging objective, knowing that by doing so, we run the risk of only measuring easy-to-identify, binary activities? It’s easy to measure yes/no questions for badging: did your Arduino light blink? BADGE. Did you turn in your permission slip? BADGE.

Yet those are minimum performance standards, and for me, the power of badging is in the power to transcend the kinds of measurements we already do. How can we employ badging in such a way that it measures the Big Stuff, where there are less concrete aspects of success? (More importantly, implicit in this question is, “How do we keep badging from being low-level and dumb?”)
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Can badging be used to signal the quality of someone’s reflection? The level to which an art student has mastered a media? How do we know, when looking qualitatively at someone’s work, that it is “good enough” when we can’t measure it by yes/no? How do metrics/rubrics fit in such a way as to welcome innovative deviations from the norm, when we have such a hard time with rubrics in the non-badging world?

A trusted colleague said to me yesterday, “So … badging isn’t really about badges!” She’s right. It’s about learner-centric motivation, assessment, growth, perceptions of who has “authority” to assess, norms and expectations within a community (and who sets them), etc.

In other words, a robust badging system has to conquer the same challenges that today’s classrooms are struggling to figure out.

Which, for me, makes conversations about badging endlessly intriguing … digital badging has, among my colleagues, students, and community partners, been an invitation to openly discuss the hard stuff about learning, growth, and evidence. If we can persevere and delve into those questions, then digital badging will not only match the portfolios, merit badges, report cards, and resumes of the past; it will surpass it.

If, on the other hand, badges are just a way to do what we always did but with pictures instead of percentages or gold stars? Beyond showing how “novel” and “hip” we are, we’ll just be treading water.

“sunday afternoon, hands on hips” cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Jack Lord

There are a lot of people on our campus and in our community thinking about badging, the Open Badges project, and badging for learning. On our small faculty hallway, I count four. My colleague Chuck said in the hall today that it’s no one particular badge that defines you or your skill set. It’s the combination of badges.

And that got me thinking about metaphors and parallels we could draw on/from as we talk aboud badges. The other day, I mused here about whether we could draw parallels between the portfolio movement of the 1990s in schools and the badging for learning movement. That can lead us to important past research and practitioner knowledge upon which we can draw about choice in what we display, choosing our most exemplary and relevant work, crafting useful “artist statements” or evidence statements, and more.

Another metaphor would be to say that badges are like dabs of paint. Seen one at a time, each is a dot of a single color. Put them together, and you’ve got pointillism, a Seurat painting — the whole picture.

Finally, one badge is like a single star: pretty but lacking in context. Multiple stars (or badges) create a constellation — another picture of learning.

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Pictures have always helped humankind to make sense of the world …

So implicit in the evolving ecosystem of badging will be the need to think about how we engage students in sculpting, sorting, and selecting the badges they will display to various audiences. In Curriculum 21, edited by Heidi Hayes-Jacobs, David Niguidula talked about portfolios involving collecting, selecting, and reflecting. The evidence shown to get a badge is the product, but it rarely includes the reflective practice that accompanies it. What is the role of reflective practice in the badging movement?

Just filing these thoughts away for future thinking. What about you?

PS – Lovely interview with Erin Knight of Mozilla over here.

“M45, the Pleiades (aka Subaru, aka Seven Sisters)”cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by write_adam