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We’ve been working this fall on what it means to issue badges as representations of learning. It has been an exciting opportunity to really wrestle with what it means to know learning has happened, what it means to have evidence of that learning, and more. Whether you ultimately find youself to be a fan of badging or not, we need, as educators, to think about questions like these.

Above, you’ll see some of the 63 badges we issued at the OELMA conference alone.

This past weekend, we were collectively delighted to see an article on badging in The New York Times. The article gives an overview that is worth reading. It should be said, however, that the article focuses its attention more on higher education than on K-12. While badging holds great potential in higher education and even in MOOCs, it is certainly not constrained to those scenarios. (Our badging work focuses more on badging in professional development and with middle schoolers in a makerspace-like setting.)

From the article:

By developing information-age credentials backed by a wide array of organizations outside the education system, creators of badge programs may be mounting the first serious competition to traditional degrees since college-going became the norm.

One of the most important functions of college degrees is signaling knowledge and skill to potential employers. Yet degrees and certificates often do a poor job of communicating detailed information about graduates. Grade inflation has steadily obscured the meaning of G.P.A.’s, and there’s no easy way to know what someone who got, for example, an A-minus in Econ 206 actually learned. A badge, on the other hand, is supposed to indicate specific knowledge and skills …

Long before gamers began displaying their badges online to demonstrate prowess, Girl Scouts were sewing theirs on sashes for everyone to see. So it’s not surprising that they are among winners of a competition last year held by Mozilla, with $2 million from the MacArthur Foundation, to recognize the best digital badge systems. In their program, Girl Scouts who learn to build apps for the Android operating system earn badges they can display and share on their mobile phones …

Just as photographs taken by GPS-enabled smartphones have latitude and longitude coordinates embedded within them, digital badges contain information about where they came from …

Anyone can click on [a user’s] Stack Overflow badge to examine the answers he wrote to earn it. With metadata, badges are instantly accessible portals to evidence of a person’s accomplishments, like internship experiences and portfolios of work. Imagine organizing your credentials into “groups” representing a larger body of skill, much as a sequence of college courses adds up to a major. Except these come from many different sources, not just from formal institutions. (Mozilla has created a site where badges earned in different places can be organized and stored.) In this way, badges may be not just an alternative to traditional résumés and transcripts but an improvement on them …

A system whereby only accredited colleges can offer valuable degrees, [says Mozilla’s Director of Learning Erin Knight],  is a “shared monopoly across education, where you have to go down a very prescribed path to get learning that quote-unquote counts. We want to open that up.”

Read more here.

This morning, as I fed my ballot into the machine, I received this sticker. Now, sure, it’s a sticker.  But it’s also something else … a badge.

What does that mean to those who saw it on my lapel?

Well, it could mean, “Look who thinks she’s a hot shot with her ‘I voted’ sticker. She must want me to know how awesome she thinks she is.” In other words, the sticker badge represents pride.

Or it could mean, “Oh, heck! I see that sticker, and now I’m spurred to run out and vote myself!” In this case, the fact that I’ve earned the sticker badge motivates others to do the same.

Or it could mean, “Someone stuck this on my lapel, but I have no emotional or mental connection to it.” In other words, I’m not invested in it, and it doesn’t necessarily represent anything.

You can assume that I got this because of the election, but you don’t have the specifics, and the message is unclear. And here’s where my “I Voted” sticker diverges from good digital badge design.

With better badge design, you would know why I earned that badge, not just that I got a badge called, “I voted.”

In better badge design, you could click on the digital badge and see the criteria  — the tasks or behaviors I had to demonstrate in order to earn the badge. For example, perhaps I had to turn in a complete ballot and/or successfully show a photo ID and/or color in the ovals completely and/or feed it into the ballot machine and/or watch the machine’s counter go up by one.

Ideally, there would be evidence as well, perhaps a video showing me turning in my ballot. (In this case, with cell phones banned by state law in the room, and with privacy integral to voting, we’d perhaps have to rely on the badge issuer’s observation of my action. If they gave the badge, we would assume that the criteria was achieved in exchange.)

So as we all continue to refine how we think about badges, it’s important that we keep reminding ourselves that simply giving out a sticker (or a badge, or a sticker with a badge on it) is a first step. But for badging to be a game-changer, and not just a trendy word for relabeling existing practice, we need to challenge those who issue badges to tell us more. Specificity matters.

PS – Did you vote early or not get a sticker at your polling station? Slate‘s got you covered with the printables below:

No “I Voted” stickers at your polling station? Print your own here. via kwout

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