I’ve been learning about badges for use in online and community education and I just created one too. Here it is.

This is a badge to show you are communicating your love of tea. Here is where you can earn it! This is the badges part of p2pu.org. They have reworked their system and made it easier to use. Check it out. This only took 10 mins to set up.

The graphical elements of the badge were created at https://www.openbadges.me/   That bit only took 5 minutes.

I think this combination could work for the Artists DO. IT course that I’m helping to run at CAN this summer. If we break up the skills of the 10 week course into badges then we can award them every week. Each participant will have a blog so we can use the wordpress plugin wp-badge displayer to show these badges.

The key thing for us is that it is something that will work quickly and easily. We are covering a lot of ground on this course and don’t want to get bogged down with another set of forms that participants have to fill in. If it doesn’t work we’ll be back to certificates, but it’s worth trying out in any case. Maybe it could be introduced around week 4 or 5 as a review of what your have learned session.  Watch this space for more info. Here’s info on the DO.IT course (places are full)

I’ve been learning about badges and awarding them to people in the online community for a while. But this is the first project to take that knowledge and try to make it real in Manchester. Like a certificate it has to be something tangible. Unless the badges can be displayed on their own blog then it is unlikely that anyone will see them. There’s no point in this context doing it just for the sake of it. Let’s see if these online badges are a real incentive and get some grass roots feedback from learners. It should be very interesting to see what they say.