featureHot Spot: Teens, Tech,& Learning

Badges: ShowWhat You Know

Grant

B adges for learning are digitalcredentials that recognize a person'sskills and achievements.' We

often associate credentials with degreesor diplomas, but credential means a "fact,qualification, achievement, quality, orfeature used as a recommendation orform of identification."'^ In other words,credentials provide a way to vouch thatwe are who we say we are, and have thequalities we claim to have. Traditionalcredentials like degrees are critical tomeaningful employment, and yet whenwe find ourselves vying with 200 othercandidates for a single job, we begin theage-old practice of fluffing up our resumes.We may add a list of skills like HTML,CSS, Microsoft Excel, or Dreamweaver.We add work experiences that hopefullyconvey our leadership qualities, our projectmanagement skills, and our ability toconnect with youth. After we land the job,credentials start to go stale, so we updateour resumes with lines of text about newthings we can do. Digital badges do thesame thing as credentials, but they do alittle more. To unpack what badges forlearning can do and why they matter,consider where they come from.

In 2011, Secretary Arne Duncanof the U.S. Department of Educationintroduced digital badges to a nationalaudience for the first time. During alive-streamed event in Washington, D.C.,Duncan told a crowd, "Badges can helpspeed the shift from credentials thatsimply measure seat time, to ones thatmore accurately measure competency."'Together with the MacArthurFoundation, government agencies,corporations, and nonprofit organizations.Secretary Duncan launched the "Badgesfor Lifelong Learning" initiative andstarted a national conversation aboutlearning, assessment, and opportunity,the core of what digital badges represent."Today's technology-enabled, information-rich, deeply interconnected world meanslearning not only can—but should—happen anywhere, anytime. We need torecognize these experiences, whether theenvironments are physical or online, andwhether learning takes place in schools,colleges, or adult education centers,or in afterschool, workplace, military,or community settings. In short, wemust begin to see schools, colleges, andclassrooms as central points—though still

Sheryi Grant is Director of Social Networking for the HASTAC/MatArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competitionand a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina, ChapelHill School of Information and Library Science.

very important ones—in larger networksoflearning.""*

Learning does happen anywhere,anytime, but recognition ofthat learningdoes not. The learning we do in museums,libraries, and on the Web can and doesenrich us, but the knowledge and skillswe gain are rarely recognized. Badges forlearning are designed to change that.

Why Badges?In the "technology-enabled, information-rich, deeply interconnected world" thatDuncan describes, badges are found inpeer networks and game environmentsthat pervade our highly social Web.Predating the Internet, badges wereused to signal rank and membershipwithin a group, whether literally affixedto a uniform or figuratively evokedto symbolize the status, achievement,reputation, or membership within a socialclass.^ Badges provided social proof fordesired attributes, and functioned asboth incentive and reward while rapidlyconveying important information aboutidentity. In today's networked digitalenvironment, badges function the sameway, whether in video games or socialmedia marketing campaigns. Today,they do all that and more, as tokens thatrepresent goal setting, instruction, andreputation.* As the Internet evolves intoa seemingly limitless site of learning, newforms of assessment have emerged, drivenlargely by the tools and social practices weuse to rate, rank, recognize, and rewardthe contributions and participation ofothers online.

Assessment, a form of evaluation weoften equate with school, is actually an"integral part of all human learning" thatarises whenever social groups seek waysto mentor and police participants.^ Wetend to think of assessment as somethingthat happens in classrooms and on testsbecause school is traditionally where

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learning gets counted. Our networked,connected, technology-mediated worldsays otherwise. Assessment, like learning,in fact happens anywhere, anytime,online and offline, inside and outside theclassroom, throughout our lives. Mentors,experts, and peers assess us both formallyand informally, and whether we learn inschool or out, we are evaluated againstnational, organizational, and industrystandards. Badges are the connectors, thepieces that link this learning, assessment,and opportunity together across all partsof our lives.

Digital badge advocates claimthat by validating a range of skills andachievements not currently assessedin traditional K-20 schooling, and bydoing so in a way that also validatesmore granular skills, badges can meetneeds not currently being met.* In OpenBadges for Lifelong Learning, a white papercoauthored by the Mozilla Foundationand Peer-to-Peer University, a group oflearners experience "a problem in makingtheir knowledge and skills visible andconsequential in terms that are recognizedby formal educational institutions andbroader career ecosystems."' These learnercomposites are intended to reflect howpeople acquire career-ready skills andknowledge in the 21st century, whetherthat learning is assessed through experts,computers, or peers, and whether it takesplace inside or outside school.

Learning and BadgesOur 20th century model of education isbased on the "assumption that teachingis necessary for learning to occur," andyet digital technologies have madeit possible for us to learn anywhere,anytime, teacher or no teacher.'" As aresult, how we learn in the 21st century isshifting from "issues of authoritativenessto issues of credibility, and within thischanging context of learning and online

participation, digital badges are gainingtraction, not only as viable credentials, butas relevant and useftil ways to recognizeskills and knowledge." For youth, thisissue of authoritativeness and credibilityis even more acute, due to the "culture gapbetween educational systems designedin the industrial age and the emerginglearning practices of the knowledge age."'^Many young adults are immersed inmediated activities that revolve aroundgames, photography, music, apps, print,television, image, video, and voice andtext communication. This mediatedenvironment is rich with learningexperiences that expand and diversifymeaningful life pathways, connectingyouth to new opportunities. Badges havethe potential to make this learning count inways that traditional credentials have not.

In response to the Badges for LifelongLearning initiative, organizations aredesigning systems that integrate badgesinto their learning content. The net effectof emerging badge systems is a marketplaceof credentials that are no longer tetheredpredominantly to schools and universities.Many of these nontraditional learninginstitutions are issuing credentials for thefirst time, building digital badge systemsthat have the potential to change the waytheir learners issue, display, and sharecredentials with others online. If badgesbecome synonymous with credibility andtransparency, nontraditional institutionsof learning could end up validating thekind of interest-based learning and peerassessment that schools are slow torecognize.

Schools can and probably willeventually issue digital badges that we candisplay on the Web, on mobile phones,social media platforms, personal blogs, orwebsites. But a conventional badge systemthat functions independent of any changesto pre-existing systems of assessment failsto make itself relevant. As badges spread,we will see badge systems overlaid on all

kinds of learning programs, connected tomany kinds of assessments. Just as thereare many types of learning content andprograms to deliver that content, there aremany types of badge systems, includingones that are combinations of oflSine andonline learning.

More innovative approaches arehappening among institutions thathistorically have never issued credentials,especially as currency with value outsidetheir programs. Museums, libraries,professional associations, youthorganizations, and afterschool programsrepresent only a handfiil of entities that seepotential for badges to impact their learners.These organizations represent a wide rangeof learning content, pedagogical approaches,and assessment types. As these innovatorsconsider how to measure what counts,they make assessment and design decisionsthat not only impact their learners, but thebroader experiment about what we valueand how that knowledge is evaluated.

Assessment and BadgesSchools and the Web have one thingin common: a fundamental drive toincrease participation. Most schools use acombination of punishments and rewardsto motivate learners. On the Web, a mixof social, mobile, and immediacy motivatespeople to participate. In 2006, Internetresearchers estimated that only 1 percentof people on the Internet contributecontent, 9 percent edit, and the restconsume what others produce." We cansee that much of the online innovation inthe past decade has focused on technologyfor deeper social participation, withreading and contributing on one endof the spectrum, to collaborating andleading on the far end.'** Reading content,tagging photos, rating contributions,editing wikis, sharing videos, postingblogs, producing webinars, or developingopen-source sofhvare—we are learning.

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Badges: Show What You Know

doing, making, and contributing massiveamounts of online content. One surprisingengine driving this collective activity issocial assessment. Interest-based socialparticipation has exploded in the lastfifteen years, and so have new ways ofassessing each other, whether throughvoting, ranking, commenting, or otherforms of peer feedback.̂ ^

eBay implemented one of the earliest,most successful examples of peer-to-peerevaluation that allowed buyers to ratesellers. Since then, similar systems haveproliferated, including peer ratings ofreviews and comments (The New YorkTimes), voting on the quality of questionsand answers (Stack Overflow, Quora), andrecommending the expertise and merits ofcolleagues (Linkedin). Engaging in peerassessment is its own form of participation,and in systems like Amazon, individualscan vote on the quality of comments leftby others. Nothing inspires feedback morethan commenting on someone's expertise.̂ ^The same is true about commenting onsomeone's values.̂ ^ While research onbadges is still in its infancy, some studiesshow interesting results. On Wikipedia,researchers found that contributionsincreased by 60 percent after editors wereawarded badges.'* All of this activity isvisible and easy to count. Communitysize, page views, downloads, and temporalpatterns measure participation, andclicking, viewing, tagging, rating, posting,uploading, commenting, editing, and othertypes of contributions have become easymetrics to track.'' There is no shortageof things to count online, and no paucityof metrics for measuring. The only thinglacking is a standardized, credible way torecognize and share what we know, acrossall of the contexts where learning occurs.

What Is a Badge?A badge is an image file with informationin it. Compare that to a traditional

credential, which exists separate fromthe proof of learning associated with it.By the time we see someone's degree,the criteria and evidence for how it wasearned is long gone. Badges, however,are transparent and information rich.Everything is bundled into one click, sowe can see what someone did to earnthe credential, including a link to theevidence behind the learning, maybe atestimonial from the instructor, or anofficial endorsement from a third party.Some badges have an expiration date tosignal that the skill needs to be renewedeach year. The ability to click badgesand view relevant information about alearner's skills and knowledge adds a layerof trust to credentials that is more thana technological fiourish. Developing ahighly credible way to authenticate whatsomeone knows challenges the existingsystem, and raises profound questionsabout what credentials mean and whodecides what counts. If digital badges"challenge the monopoly on credentialingheld by conventional degree-grantinginstitutions," and nontraditional learninginstitutions can decide what counts, whatdoes credentialing look like in the ftiturei''*

Here is what it looks like today.We progress through classes and gradelevels after demonstrating satisfactoryperformance on exams and other criteria.After successfial completion of courserequirements, we accumulate credentialsin the form of diplomas, certificates, ordegrees. Schools and universities issue outcredentials by handing them out on stageor sending them by mail, and the mostcommon way we display them is to adda line of text to our transcript or resume.In a digital badge world, those lines oftext are displayed as badges that we shareon websites, social media platforms, andmobile devices. For skills we want todemonstrate with greater granularity,badges will provide that additional layerof proof.

What does badge proof mean?Technically, a digital badge is a PNGfile embedded or "baked" with JavaScriptObject Notation QSON) data thatconforms to a set of standard technicalspecifications. Each badge contains useridentity information in the form of ane-mail addtess, as well as a set of metadatathat includes the badge description, issuer,issue date, evidence URL, image, andadditional infotmation required to makethe badge fully portable so that it can bedisplayed anywhere on the Web. Thismetadata is what makes digital badgesinformation rich and portable, and withoutit, institutions could issue badges, butthere would be no "badge ecosystem" ofsystems to recognize the badges. In otherwords, badges would exist only withinthe institutional technical systems thatissued them and lack the information-rich,transparent, and portable features that setthem apart. Badges can be "hosted," whichmeans that the badges live at a stable URLto show that the badge exists, and is hostedby the issuing institution. Badges can alsobe "signed," which is a way for a thirdparty to endorse a badge. Professionalorganizations could endorse badges thatmeet certain criteria, and add an additionallayer of validity.

Mozilla, developers of the open-source Firefox browser, are responsible forthe Open Badges Infrastructure (OBI),the set of standard metadata specs thatconnect digital badges across the Web. Fordigital badges to work within an ecosystemwhere organizations can issue them,earners can display them, and institutionscan recognize them, badges must containstandard technical specs that are hard-coded into the badge. The OBI includesboth the open technical specificationsreferenced above and the badge "backpack"or repository, a central place online wherepeople can collect, manage, and displaytheir badges. An individual who earns abadge issued from an institution must then

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"push" this badge to the backpack, andfrom there, can "pull" the badges to otherOBI-compatible systems on the Web.

Empirical research about badgesystems is limited; even so, a growingnumber of nontraditional and traditionalinstitutions of learning are interestedin building digital badge systems evenbefore fiilly fianctioning use cases havebeen deployed and evaluated. While theintellectual and technological scaffoldingfor a robust badge ecosystem is still new,the momentum and interest aroundbadges is taking off (Figure 1). In 2012, theHumanities, Arts, Sciences, TechnologyAlliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC)awarded $2 million in fiinding to 30organizations to build badge systemplatforms. Microsofr, Intel, NASA, theSmithsonian, University of California-Davis, the Adams 50 School District inColorado, Girl Scouts, 4-H, YALSA, andother major organizations are only someof the groups launching badge systems.In 2013, hundreds of cities, universities,corporations, schools, and professionalorganizations signed on to the 2 MillionBetter Futures (www.2MBetterFutures.org) badge commitment launched bythe MacArthur Foundation at ClintonGlobal Initiative, and Chicago announcedit will host its second citywide Summer ofLearning badge program next year afrer asuccessful first pilot in 2013.

Digital technologies like badges havethe potential to become a "default mode ofsocial ordering."^" We know that badgesintersect with powerful social and technicalsystems, especially during the first quarterof our lives when our chief preoccupationis admission to and graduation fromcollege.^' They also answer a social neednot currently being addressed. Traditionalcredentials issued by universities andschools do not recognize all the learningthat happens, nor do they teach andrecognize many of the skills employersmight value. Badges are a "good enough"

Figure 1: Google trends shows a spike in search terms for "digitalbadges" between 2011 and 2Q13.

1 digital badges1 Search term

Interest over time

2006

+ Add term

2007 200911

News headlines

AN2011

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solution to cause the kind of systemicsocial change that fiandamentally changesthe institutions that teach and employus."^ The extent ofthat change, though,depends on how organizations design theirbadge systems and the choices they makeabout learning and assessment. It is truethat not all badge systems will transformthe status quo, but an open marketplaceof digital badges may change how wecommunicate who we are and what weknow to others, and that could have far-reaching consequences. Badge systemshave the potential to select what kind oflearning gets counted, where and how thatlearning occurs, who assesses it, and how.If choices we make while designing newtechnologies influence the way we associatewith one another and the sociotechnicalsystems in which we function, thendigital badges may become the catalystthat validates new norms for learning,assessment, and opportunity.^' YALS

References and Notes1. Badges have also been referred to as

"micro-credentials," "achievements,"

and "open badges." For consistency, the

terminology used in this article is "digital

badges" or "badges."

2. John Simpson and Edmond Weiner,

"credential, n." def. 3b, Tfce Oxford English

Dictionary, Oxford University Press

(accessed Sept. 2013).

3. Arne Duncan, "Digital Badges for Learning:

Remarks Made by Secretary Arne Duncan

at the 4th Annual Launch of the Digital

Media and Learning Competition," vrww.

ed.gov/news/speeches/digital-badges-

learning (accessed Nov. 20, 2013).

4. Duncan, 2011.

5. John Simpson and Edmond Weiner,

"badge, n.," The Oxford English

Dictionary, Oxford University Press, www.

oed.com/view/Entry/14550?rskey=Hsdu

Hp&result=l (accessed Nov. 20, 2013).

6. Judd Antin and Elizabeth F. Churchill,

"Badges in Ssocial Mmedia; A Ssocial

Ppsychological Pperspective,." In

Proceedings of CHI 2011, British

Columbia, Canada: ACM.

7. James Gee, "Human Action and Social

Groups as the Natural Home of

Assessment: Thoughts on 21st Century

Learning and Assessment," Valerie J.

Shute, Betsy J. Becker (eds.). Innovative

Assessments for the 21st Century:

Supporting Educational Needs, New York:

Springer.

8. Jeffrey R. Young, "Merit Badges for the

Job Market," The Wall Street Journal,

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Badges: Show What You Know

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204301404577170912221516638.1itml (accessed Nov. 20, 2013).

9. Mozilla Foundation and Peer 2 PeerUniversity, in collaboration with TheMac Arthur Foundation, 2011, "OpenBadges for Lifelong Learning," https://wiki.mozilla.Org/images/b/bl/OpenBadges-Working-Paper_092011.pdf

10. Doug Thomas and John Seely Brown,A New Culture of Learning: Cultivatingthe Imagination for a World of ConstantChange. Publisher: authors.

11. Cathy Davidson and David TheoGoldberg, "The Future of LearningInstitutions in a Digital Age," TheJohn D. and Catherine T. MacArthurFoundation Reports on Digital Media andLearning, MIT Press.

12. Allan Collins and Richard Halverson,Rethinking Education in the Age ofTechnology: The Digital Revolution andSchooling in America, New York: TeachersCollege Press.

13. James Nielsen, "ParticipationInequality: Encouraging More Users toContribute," Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox,October 9, 2006. www.useit.com/

alertbox/participation_inequality.html 19.(accessed Nov. 20, 2013). 20.

14. Jennifer Preece and Ben Schneiderman,"Reader-to-Leader Framework:Motivating Technology-Mediated SodalParticipation," AIS Transactions on Human- 'Computer Interaction 1, no. 1:13-32. 21.

15. David Huffaker and Jennifer Lai,"Motivating Expertise-Sharing inOnline Communities: Altruism orSelf-interest?" Computer Science, IBM 22.Research Report, www.davehuffaker.com/papers/HufFakerLai2006-Expertise-sharinginOnlineCommunities.pdf

(accessed Nov. 20, 2013).16. Kimberly Ling, et al., "Using Social

Psychology to Motivate Contributions 23.to Online Communities," Journa/ ofComputer Mediated Communication 10,no. 4: Article 10.

17. Stacey Kuznetsov, "Motivations ofContributors to Wikipedia," ACM SIGCASComputers and Society 36, no. 2:1.

18. Amout van de Rijt and Michael Restivo,"Experimental Study of InformalRewards in Peer Production," PLOSONE 7, no. 3, www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0034358 (accessed Nov. 20, 2013).

Preece and Schneiderman, 1989.Lucas D. Introna, "Maintaining theReversibility of Foldings: Makingthe Ethics (Politics) of InformationTechnology Visible," Ethics andInformation Technology 9: 11-25.Nicholass Lehmann, The Big Test:The Secret History of the AmericanMeritocracy, New York: Farrar, Straussand Giroux.

Clay Christensen, "Disruptive Innovationand Catalytic Change in HigherEducation," Educause: Forum for HigherEducation, pp. 43-46, http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/fi0810s.pdf(accessed Oct. 10, 2013).Langdon Winner, "Do Artifacts HavePolitics?" D. MacKenzie and J. Wajcman(eds.). The Social Shaping of Technology,Open University Press, pp. 28—40. Alsosee M. Olneck, "Insurgent Credentials:A Challenge to Established Institutionsof Higher Education." Paper presentedto "Education in a New Society: TheGrowing Interpénétration of Educationin Modern Life" at Radcliffe Institute forAdvanced Study, Harvard University,Cambridge, Massachusetts, April 26—27,2012.

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