I just wrote the following to email out to people who are interested in recognizing learning with digital badges, and I’ll keep on my project coordinator hat and post it here too for people who are looking at this blog for info on badges. You can sign up for the project’s email updates here.
—
The Design Principles Documentation Project (DPD Project Homepage) is tracking how the badge systems developed across ~30 winners of the 2012 MacArthur/HASTAC Digital Media & Learning (DML) grant competition. We followed each project’s intended practices to see how they were enacted and formalized for continued operation after the grant period. We are focusing on four types of badge system functions: recognizing, assessing, motivating, and studying learning. We’ve described general design principles in each category that can be remixed into new contexts.
Our initial draft reports are available for download (PDF), including the first 5 of 30 case studies on DML winners’ badge systems.
Digital badges have a lot of potential to recognize achievement in learning.
They are a credential backed up with verifiable metadata that “contain detailed claims about learning, links to evidence of learning, and they’re shareable over the web.” -Dan Hickey, DPD Project principal investigator
They are a credential backed up with verifiable metadata that “contain detailed claims about learning, links to evidence of learning, and they’re shareable over the web.” -Dan Hickey, DPD Project principal investigator
Badge systems are the collection of badge definitions, associated learning opportunities, assessments, technology, and supporting practices that fulfill all the necessary functions for an organization to credential learning or accomplishments with open badges. There are a lot of moving parts, and they all impact one another. The DPD Project hopes to describe much of this interaction between practices and their associated challenges so badge system designers can make intentional choices about how to recognize learning with digital badges.
