Drumbeat/Badges

Overview

A digital backpack would allow you to store and display badges that you have picked-up from many different sites across the web. Badges can provide a good way for potential friends, collaborators, co-workers and employers to size you up. However, that’s only true if they can associate all your badges with you. You don’t want to send them traipsing around the web to look at sites like P2PU, iRemix and Badger to see your badges. Instead, you want to all the badges from these different places reliably associated with your online identity.

• Mark Surman's blog post Badges, identity and you.
• Aza Raskin's thoughts, Identity in the Browser (Firefox)

Existing Badge Systems

• See Josh Gay's blog post on 10 badge systems

Needs further research

• EduFire.com/badges (or see File:Edufire-badges.pdf) includes badges for a wide variety of activities on the site, some badges include: 'Friend Pirate. Yarrrrr.'; 'I've Promoted Myself on Craigslist', 'I've Left 20 Ratings', and 'My Idea was Implemented!', '1,000 Unread Inbox Messages', and '1000 Classes Taken'.

Badge Use Cases

These should be moved over to another page. A quick braindump of a possible use case might be as follows:

• Imagine a student taking a course on P2PU. Let's say to achieve one of the goals of the course, the student goes over to one of the Remix Learning web sites; the Remix Learning site assesses the students competency as a result ends up giving a student a badge; that student then comes back to P2PU and he or she would like to make sure they can add their Remix Learning site badge onto their P2PU profile page.

Badge Platform Specifications

• Badge Format — A specification for property and field values of a Badge.
• Badge backpack requirements document and specifications; includes work on identity management system; badge backpack; and protocols.
• Badge philosophy is a page to document our thoughts on the high-level requirements and philosophy of badges and the badge backpack as well as identity, privacy, et al.