'Digital Badges' Would Represent Students' Skill Acquisition

Initiatives seek to give students permanent online records for developing specific skills

For many adults, the thought of earning badges evokes childhood memories of sewing Boy Scout or Girl Scout patches onto sashes and vests.

But some educators are hoping that the current generation of children will associate the word with something new: digital badges.

In this vision, electronic images could be earned for a wide variety of reasons in multiple learning spaces, including after-school programs, summer workshops, K-12 classrooms, and universities. And once earned, the badges could follow students throughout their lifetimes, being displayed on websites or blogs and included in college applications and résumés.

The concept originated at the end of 2010 at a conference held by the Mozilla Foundation in Barcelona, Spain. The idea is getting a toehold in higher education and is being tried with some youths at the precollegiate level.

Advocates of this vision for K-12 contend that such badges could help bridge educational experiences that happen in and out of school, as well as provide a way to recognize "soft skills" such as leadership and collaboration. Badges could paint a more granular and meaningful picture of what a student actually knows than a standardized-test score or a letter grade, they say.

But not all educators are convinced of the merits of the idea. Because badges are still being developed and have not yet been introduced into classrooms, how they would fit into the structure of K-12 education and whether they could actually fulfill the goals that proponents have described are still up for debate.

Other skeptics argue that introducing digital badges into informal education settings—where most agree they would have the greatest impact initially—could bring too much structure and hierarchy to the very places students go to seek refuge from formal achievement tracking. And many point to research that suggests rewarding students, with a badge for instance, for activities they would have otherwise completed out of personal interest or intellectual curiosity actually decreases their motivation to do those tasks.

Advocates see it differently.

Among the strongest proponents of the idea is the Chicago-based John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which has spearheaded the digital-badges movement for lifelong learning by launching a competition for badge proposals in partnership with Mozilla, a nonprofit Web organization best known for its open-source browser Firefox, and HASTAC, or Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, a network of individuals promoting new technologies for learning.

"Kids are learning in their peer group. They're learning online. They're learning in interest groups and after-school programs," says Constance M. Yowell, the director of education for U.S. programs at the MacArthur Foundation. "One of the things that is abundantly clear to us is that learning is incredibly fragmented, and there's nobody that's helping the learning that's happening across those connections."

Helping to string together learning achievements across informal and formal education, as well as at transitional education points, such as from precollegiate to higher education and from formal education into the workplace, is one of the main goals of badge advocates.

For example, K-12 students could earn badges for mastering certain content, such as physics or trigonometry, or for soft skills acquired in afterschool settings, such as leadership or environmental stewardship, that could paint a clearer picture of themselves for college admissions officers.

"How do you make visible what kids are learning, and how do you help them get credit for it?" says Yowell. "How do you build bridges across the multiple places that kids are learning so they can see the connections between what they're learning inside of school and outside of school?"

'Steppingstones'

Another advantage of digital badges, their boosters say, is the ability to create learning pathways where none previously existed. For example, students who have earned an introduction to HTML badge, which refers to a type of computer programming language, could then be encouraged to pursue an intermediate level HTML badge to continue building their skills, a website creation badge where they could apply that skill, or a badge for a new programming language, such as Java or CSS.

"With badges, you can actually scaffold out a pathway of what is next," Yowell says. "We want as much as possible to create multiple entry points for learning and multiple pathways for career and academic success."

Yowell envisions a recommendation tool that could point students to a variety of opportunities based on the competencies they've demonstrated through earning their badges.

"It becomes an integrated process as opposed to one where the assessments are ...

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Vol. 05, Issue 03, Pages 24-25, 28,30