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
- Davis, Molly; Lewis, Amy; Guingab, Terri Ann.Creating digital portfolios for reflective learning. Innovations in Teaching & Learning Conference Proceedings, [S.l.], v. 8, p. Innovation Hall (Room 208), July 2016.
- Effective practice with e portfolios: Supporting 21st Century Learning (pdf), JISC, 2008
Blogs
- Every student should have a digital portfolio, Tom Vander Ark, Getting Smart, June 25th 2016
- Digital Portfolios: The Art of Reflection | Edutopia, June 30th 2015
- 10 Tools to Create Online Student Portfolios, January 9th 2016
- How to create digital learning portfolios in the classroom, Rudy Blanco, TED Blog, May 7th 2016
- Why paper just can’t compete – the 7 benefits of digital portfolios
- Digital Portfolios: The Art of Reflection, Edutopia, June 30th 2015
- JISC eportfolio website