Lecture 7: Digital badges and portfolios

Overview

The purpose of this lecture is to introduce two recent innovations- digital badges and digital portfolios.  What are they and how do they enhance the learning experience?  Or are they a passing fad and a was waste of time?

Lecture notes

Following a brief introduction to badges and portfolios students were asked to design their own badge for their new school, using the DigitalMe Badge Design Canvas.  They were also asked to consider introducing a digital portfolio and to identify the key benefits. In a class discussion we identified a number of benefits including: helps to document and orhganise your achievments over time, makes this information available to a wider audience and richer content can be added – when compared with a traditional portfolio. An additional benefit would relate to encouraging students to take control of their learning and become responsible for their own online profile. The issue of badge inflation was also discussed. If badges are easy to obtain and if everybody leaves school with hundreds of badges, then they may begin to loose their value.

Please spend one hour reading the links below. Can you identify the key critisisms of both badges and portfolios? Please tweet any interesting links to #edu2004

Digital Badges

Digital Badges: An Annotated Research Bibliography – these resources make reference to badges in some way, whether digital badges or open badges, and represent conference proceedings, scholarly journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, and other academic publications.

Digital Badge Alliance –  a network of organizations and individuals working together to build and support an open badging ecosystem, with a focus on shared values including openness, learner agency and innovation.

Open Badges by Mozilla – Open Badges are reimagining ways to recognize learning beyond formal credentialing systems. Today, Open Badges are an emergent technology and require further development for widespread market development and adoption.

IMS Global Learning Consortium

Digital Me – Start your own open badge adventure

Against Badges: The Most Common Criticisms of Digital Badges

For the latest news and developments with Digital Badges see #digitalbadges.

Digital Portfolios

 

Academic articles 

Blogs