I’ve posted before about this nonsense but then I heard the exciting news about how you can bypass all that messy unpleasant formal education stuff and get straight on and get some real recognition for your achievements via this super Open Badges concept:
Want to get started? Earn a Mozilla Webmaker badge.
Or set up your Mozilla backpack to start storing, collecting and sharing your badges across the web.
Earn a badge from one of these members of the Open Badges community.
Need a demo? Take the badges 101 quiz, and earn a badge in the process!
Get recognition for the things you learn, online and off
Not an accredited qualification
Open Badges includes a shared technical standard for recognizing your skills and achievements. Badges help make them count towards an education, a job or lifelong learning.
Earn badges from anywhere. Then take them everywhere. Collect and store your badges in your backpack, sort them into categories and then display them across the web — on social networking profiles, job sites, websites and more.
Prove skills. Employers, organizations and schools can explore the data behind each badge issued using Mozilla Open Badges to verify your skills, achievements and interests.
Knit your achievements together. Whether they’re issued by one organization or many, badges can build upon each other, joining together to tell the full story of your skills and achievement.
And if you go to this site you can make your own badges. It’s all a bit Blue Peter really. I made my own:
Still struggling to see any merit in any of this. Also I really can’t take claims of shared standards at all seriously. And which employers are treating these kinds of things as comparable to formal qualifications.
Writing about higher education in all its glory. Strictly my personal opinions only and not those of my employer.
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2 thoughts on “Badges, badges, badges”
I can see some uses for the idea, though not at the level of higher qualifications. I think Wikipedia is a good example – it is a massive resource run by a huge community of volunteer editors which has its own internal system of rewards (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Awards) which largely takes the form of badges. The prestige of earning them may be small, but it’s still a reward and people tend to like being rewarded even in small ways for contributions. Eventually, a culture has developed where earning these small rewards is viewed as worthwhile, all at negligible cost to the organisation.
In a HE context, why not use such a system to reward professional development? The Khan Academy is a great example of using minor awards to encourage e-learning. Similar small reward systems could be used to make online professional development e-learning more interesting and give people a more interesting way of showing that they’ve undertaken professional development courses than listing “I completed my Agresso requisitioning training last March.” Why not display training badges on workspace? It may not be to everyone’s taste but it will encourage some staff to develop their skills further, which is of net value to the institution and practically negligible cost.
All entirely fair points. Many of the badge enthusiasts though do seem to suggest that badges should be seen in some ways as equivalents or alternatives to academic qualifications.
Registrarism 
I can see some uses for the idea, though not at the level of higher qualifications. I think Wikipedia is a good example – it is a massive resource run by a huge community of volunteer editors which has its own internal system of rewards (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Awards) which largely takes the form of badges. The prestige of earning them may be small, but it’s still a reward and people tend to like being rewarded even in small ways for contributions. Eventually, a culture has developed where earning these small rewards is viewed as worthwhile, all at negligible cost to the organisation.
In a HE context, why not use such a system to reward professional development? The Khan Academy is a great example of using minor awards to encourage e-learning. Similar small reward systems could be used to make online professional development e-learning more interesting and give people a more interesting way of showing that they’ve undertaken professional development courses than listing “I completed my Agresso requisitioning training last March.” Why not display training badges on workspace? It may not be to everyone’s taste but it will encourage some staff to develop their skills further, which is of net value to the institution and practically negligible cost.
All entirely fair points. Many of the badge enthusiasts though do seem to suggest that badges should be seen in some ways as equivalents or alternatives to academic qualifications.