1. The Future of Learning
Dr James Stanfield
Lecture 8: Mobile and Ubiquitous Learning Part II
Thursday 15th November 2018
2. Plan of Action
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Part I: U-learning & Digital Badges
Part 2: One Lap Top Per Child & Principles
for Digital Development
Part 3: Computational Thinking &
Visualisation
4. Ubiquitous Learning: An Agenda for
Educational Transformation
Move 1: To blur the traditional institutional,
spatial and temporal boundaries of education
Move 2: To shift the balance of agency
Move 3: To recognise learner differences and
use them as a productive resource
5. Ubiquitous Learning: An Agenda for
Educational Transformation
Move 4: To broaden the range and mix of
representational modes
Move 5: To develop conceptualising capacities
Move 6: To connect one’s own thinking into the
social mind of distributed cognition
Move 7: To build collaborative knowledge
cultures
“new ways in which meaning is created,
stored, delivered and accessed”.
6. What are digital badges?
An Open Badge System Framework, White Paper by Peer 2
Peer University and The Mozilla Foundation (2011).
Badges are explained as “a symbol or indicator of an
accomplishment, skill, quality or interest”
The report states that badges “have been successfully used
to set goals, motivate behaviours, represent achievements
and communicate success in many contexts” and proposes
that when learning happens across various contexts and
experiences, “badges can have a significant impact, and can
be used to motivate learning, signify community and signal
achievement.”
7. Capturing and translating the learning across contexts:
• Capturing of the Learning Path –represent a more specified and broader set of
skills and qualities
• Achievement Signalling – represent skills or achievements and thus signal peers
or outside stakeholders, such as potential employers
Encouraging and motivating participation and learning outcomes:
• Motivation – Badges can serve as milestones or rewards throughout a learning
experience to encourage continued engagement and retention. Make learners
aware of skills or topics and encourage them to go down new paths.
Formalizing and enhancing existing social aspects of informal and interest-driven
learning:
• Identity/Reputation Building –encourage and promote identity and reputation
among peers. Badges can help make them more explicit and portable.
• Community Building/Kinship – Badges can signal community membership and can
help people find peers with similar interests
8. Gibson, Ostashewski, Flintoff, Grant, & Knight (2013) define a
digital badge as “a representation of an accomplishment,
interest or affiliation that is visual, available online, and
contains metadata including links that help explain the
context, meaning, process and result of an activity.”
Things you can verify and explore in a badge:
• Details about the organization issuing the badge
• What the individual has done to earn the badge
• The criteria that the badge has been assessed against
• That the badge was issued to the expected recipient
• The badge earner’s unique evidence (optionally included)
• When the badge was issued and whether it has expired
9. Common types of issuers
• After-school programs
• Communities of practice
• Educational institutions
• Employers
• Event organizers
• Government agencies
• International credential assessment agencies
• Informal learning organizations
• Online courses and open courseware initiatives
• Professional associations
• Teachers, tutors, coaches
10. Case study:
IBM Badges
• The need for ongoing skill-based learning
programs.
• Digital badges help to reinforce a culture of
life-long learning and developments
• Provide significantly more information than a
traditional badge
• Visible – internally and externally
• They validate industry skills in ways we could
not before
12. Stack Overflow describe their badging system as an automated
system where badges are “earned by achieving a measurable
numeric goal queried out of the site database.” They continue:
“Badges are little bits of digital flair that you earn for almost every
kind of activity on Stack Overflow. The number and type of badges
you’ve earned are displayed together with your username and
reputation score around the site, as part of your usercard”.
The badge system has two specific goals:
• to teach new users how Stack Overflow works, and
• to encourage activities that are positive to the community.
13. Why digital badges?
An Open Badge System Framework, White Paper by Peer
2 Peer University and The Mozilla Foundation (2011).
Learning today is very different - the boundaries are
broken and the walls are down — (connected learning
ecology)
There are new skills and literacies that are important in
modern society. It is no longer adequate to study one
thing and not learn anything else.
The need for ongoing skill-based learning programs.
14. “In the current formal education and accreditation systems, much of
this learning is ignored or missed entirely. Institutions still decide
what types of learning 'count', with little room for innovation, as well
as who gets to have access to that learning”.
Existing systems and traditions make it hard to provide trusted
evidence of achievements and prevent employers from seeing the
human skills that are increasingly important in the workplace
16. Questions:
If anyone can create badges:
Does the source of a given badge (or the issuer) affect users’
motivation to earn that badge? (e.g. a badge from a university
vs. a badge from a random individual)
How important is the source of the badge to an employer or
other interested party wishing to appraise the knowledge/skills
acquired by the learner?
What will it take for badges to gain credibility and status as
credentials among learners and other interested parties?
Open badges for education: what are the implications at the intersection of open systems and badging? By June Ahna,b*, Anthony
Pelliconea and Brian S. Butler
17. To what extent would a badge have different meanings and engender
different motivations on the part of learners, educators and
stakeholders assessing the badge?
If badges are open to diverse interpretation by different stakeholders:
How can learners be confident that the badges
they pursue will be acceptable as a credential to outside stakeholders?
How could different populations and communities re-appropriate and
re-define the meaning of a given badge as credential?
18. Was the One Laptop per
Child Project a success or
a failure? Why?