DLI: Creating Badges with BadgePost

This proposal represents a successor to our very successful Badge Research Sprint last year, taking us from asking the big questions to “action research.” It also draws on the success of one of the most productive sessions in the Badge Lab at Mozilla Drumbeat last winter, which asked participants to create example badges. During this workshop, participants will be introduced to the BadgePost system, and be asked to create a working badge within the system. BadgePost supports the management of the badge earning process, and in the beta version will allow users to create their own badges, with the appropriate visual depiction, criteria for awards, human or automatic endorsement triggers, and the ability to exchange awarded badges with other badge systems via the Open Badge Infrastructure..

Participants in the workshop will leave not only with a badge that they can use in their own teaching, but more importantly with an idea of the kinds of constraints that drive good badge design. A good badge infrastructure can only take us so far, we need a catalog of well designed exemplar badges to help show the way. Not all of the badges resulting from our work during the workshop will result in exemplar badges, of course, but if we can engage in “elegant failures,” this too will serve as an instructive process.

The workshop will consist of a short, practical introduction to the design of badges and how to use BadgePost to create them. Then participants will form small groups, and come up with a working badge design. They will create accounts on BadgePost and set up their new badges. At the end we will come together to discuss what we learned through the process: what the challenges were, how they were overcome, and how the new badges might be integrated into a learning environment.

Organizer(s): 
Alexander Halavais
Participants: 
Alexander Halavais