Festival2012/Submit/Badging Our Story So Far

• Title of session: Badges: Our story so far
• Your name and affiliation: Tim Riches, DigitalMe
• Session format: (select Design Challenge, Learning Lab, or Fireside Chat): Fireside Chat

What will your session or activity allow people to make, learn or do?

Since winning a prize in the 4th Digital Media and Learning Competition, DigitalMe and schools based social learning platform Makewaves have been piloting the Mozilla Open Badges system for our S2R Medals project. We’ve been developing an exciting new way to recognise and reward the skills young people develop by taking part in our award winning Supporter to Reporter programme.

We know that through becoming a sports reporter, young people develop confidence, improved speaking and listening skills, teamwork and resilience, as well as the maturity to become mentors and pass on their skills to others. The DML open badges project is enabling us to build a series of online ‘Medals’ which recognise and reward these achievements, which young people can use to demonstrate their skills to future employers.

We’d like to share our experience of the DML pilot to date. Young people who have informed the pilot will be involved, to share their experiences and contribute to discussions. We’ll talk about the process of designing the Medals and the assessment criteria to support them, building the issuing and displaying technology and - with the input of participants - explore some of the challenges we’ve faced so far, including:

• Building value into our badges and the psychology of motivating learning behaviour through badging
• Issuing badges automatically using platform technology - what needs human input and can badges issued without any have real value?
• How can we use peer assessment to create feedback loops and allow young people to issue badges as well as earn them?
• How can we develop tools to support centres to create “pop up” instances of S2R internationally?
• How do we meet the needs of formal and informal educators?

The Makewaves team will also discuss some of the challenges they have faced in building the issuing and displaying technology, such as:

• Making the user journey as simple and accessible as possible
• Embedding badge information using json files
• Displaying all badges from the Mozilla badgepack on Makewaves, but keeping them appropriate to the platform and working around security issues and school firewalls
• The user centric nature of the system, which may cause issues when working in a school setting

How do you see that working?

We’ll spend some time telling the story so far, present visuals to show examples of the processes, and describe the challenges we’ve faced. We’ll invite the group to take part in an open, informal exploration of the different themes, possible splitting into groups and assigning them themes if working with a larger number.

We aim to bring some young people who’ve been active in S2R for years to the session, who’ll be encouraged to get involved in the discussions to bring a young person’s - and users - perspective.

Questions will be welcome throughout, and we hope to inspire and inform other organisations who want to get involved in S2R, or become issuers and displayers themselves.

How will you deal with 5, 15, 50 participants?

With 5 participants we’d have an intimate chat, holding in depth discussions around areas most relevant to those involved. A circle discussion would be possible with fifteen, covering a wider range of subject matter to suit the participants. With a larger group we’d consider splitting the group to discuss key issues, to cover more ground, but present findings back to the group. 50 participants would require a faster paced presentation to allow more time for group discussions (with up to ten per group), feeding back and questions.

How long within your session before someone else can teach this?

Immediately after the session participants will feel informed about all areas of the badging process, be inspired to explore the Open Badging system further and look at how their organisation could use it in the future.

What do you see as outcomes after the festival?

We’d like to explore the idea of centres across the globe creating “pop up” and possibly more permanent instances of S2R with the young people they work with. We’re hoping to help schools in the UK to develop their own badging programmes replicating the process we have used with S2R Medals. By sharing the approaches and lessons we have learnt to date we hope that other organisations will be able to apply this successfully to their learning programmes. We hope that the Mozilla Festival will allow us to make critical friends, to explore our thought process with innovators and experts in a range of subjects who can challenge us and inform our work with badging as it develops.