When I say “global,” I mean badges intended to connect youth’s learning spaces - badges shared across science institutions or to connect in-school and out-of-school learning. When I say “local,” I mean badges intended for use within a youth’s existing learning space - a classroom, an after-school program, a video game. The second is between a local badging system and a global one. Badging systems can target both types of learners, but their needs, and the ways to meet them, are different. Badges for the latter, for those who struggle to know their interests or how to pursue them, can help youth develop language to describe and identify new areas of interest, perhaps advancing them toward their own interest-driven activities. These self-motivated youth, however, are often the exception. Badges for the former can provide scaffolding for youth to uncover new learning trajectories and support them in their interest-driven activities. The first difference is between interest-driven youth and youth less able to direct their learning. After recently mulling this over, I’ve begun to understand two significant differences that help frame this challenge. Some badge systems are even designed without prioritizing such a need. Yet, often, I hear descriptions of new badge projects designed as if one already exists, as if youth can take their badge from one learning context and find it valued within another. There are many good efforts in this direction, but they are all works in progress. But without such an ecosystem in place, I’d be lying. I want to tell youth in our programs their badges will have value outside our museum, and many even need to hear that as a condition for participation. The problem that concerns me the most is the lack of a broad ecosystem for badges. How can we build solutions unless we start articulating the problems? If not, we will continue to see what needles me month after month, watching well-intentioned efforts around the country reproducing or running into the challenges we know all too well. Instead, we need to start writing to each other about both our successes and failures. It’s time we stop writing in response to potential critics who doubt the validity of our work. But when we - those who are experimenting with digital badges within our own organizations - meet, we talk about what gets left out of our public reports.Įnough. When I read about the excellent efforts going on around the country, I often read the same type of language I’m guilty of having contributed myself: emerging best practices conflated with hopes and potential. What troubles me are the obstacles rarely discussed in the way of badges achieving their theoretical potential. Not concerns about extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation, or whether badges are the right focus for advancing alternative assessment. I am informed by the theoretical but guided by practice, by what I have seen with my own eyes over the past five years.īut, I do harbor concerns. I mean I love them for what I’ve seen them actually achieve: new literacies amongst youth to describe their learning within a Brooklyn after-school program new motivation within an Atlanta private school pride in portfolios within a Bronx library a new understanding of how to use learning technology in a New Orleans day school the emergence of formative assessment within a New York museum. And I don’t mean just for some hoped-for potential to transform the learning landscape. I love badges, digital badges for learning.
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