Nate Otto
Loves open education, Open Badges, free culture, Progress of the Useful Arts and Sciences, people-powered politics, and local food production. Coordinator for the badges Design Principles Documentation Project at Indiana University.
Design Principles for Digital Badge Systems: A Comparative Method
I’m traveling to Tallinn, Estonia next week for a workshop on Open Badges in education. I was accepted to present a paper on how we studied the 30 badge programs from the 2012 DML Competition for the DPD Project. I think our method could be used again to study a different set of badge programs, […]
Cross posted: MIT Questions Course Metaphor
I recently made a guest post to Daniel Hickey’s Re-mediating Assessment blog: MIT Report Questions the Fitness of the Course as the Organizational Metaphor for Higher Learning by Nate Otto, Project Coordinator for the Badges Design Principles Documentation Project Today saw the release of a 213 page report (PDF) from a cross-disciplinary MIT task force […]
A story of employer perspectives on online credentials for front end web design
I like keeping one foot in the technology side of Open Badges practice, but I also like that I found my first great excuse to do work with badges on the research side. This morning Sheryl Grant, Carla Casilli and I kicked off the Badge Alliance Research Working Group. Here’s a record of the call, where […]
Mozilla, an inclusive space
Working with Open Badges has drawn me into the Mozilla orbit regularly over the last year, even though I am not an employee of Mozilla the Company or Foundation. Going to the Mozilla Summit in October was really interesting, particularly because I got to see how this big crazy community works ( and it is […]
We value kids’ engagement. How can we say so?
Alfie Kohn makes an argument today for recognizing children even when their attempts fall short (in the sense we use “recognizing” when talking about what we do with badges). He asks, “have you ever met a child who doesn’t regularly experience failure and frustration? I haven’t.” Haha! True, and consider your own story as well. […]
DPD Project updates
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 Gold Standard of Education: A Flawed Currency
At the prompting of the Badges research call reading club, I’ve finally got around to digging into “Cracking the Credit Hour,” a report from Amy Laitinen and the New America Foundation on how the time-based conception of college credit has no real connection to learning or skills and causes huge problems for nontraditional students (most […]
A badge describes a relationship
I have been collecting definitions of Open Badges, the online credentialing technology developed by Mozilla. My own current definition is this: Open badges are web-enabled tokens that recognize achievement, like merit badges you might have received in the real world. Anyone can issue a badge, receive one, verify that a badge is real, or see […]
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