It has been almost a year
since the 2011 kickoff
meeting of the MacArthur Foundation’s Badges for
Lifelong Learning Initiative. What a fascinating year. It finished off
with some really interesting meetings with some of the most innovative minds
in education and learning. I have
learned a lot about how digital badges and other new technologies might help
assess, motivate, recognize, and evaluate learning. In the next few posts, I want to share some of
the things I learned and discuss some of the issues that have come up. In this post, I want to consider the potential
of digital badges for re-igniting educational videogaming, and reiterate the
central affordance of digital badges. I
also want to tell everybody to go see The Art
of Videogames at the Smithsonian before it goes on tour.
White House OSTP Meeting on Games for Impact
 |
| Constance Steinkuehler and OSTP Leaders at Games for Impact Meeting |
On July 26th,
I attended a meeting where the groundwork was being laid for a multi-university
consortium that would focus on Games for Impact. The meeting was organized by Constance
Steinkuehler of the University of Wisconsin, who is on loan as a senior analyst
at the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
It was a fascinating meeting involving 20 university faculty, 40
other collaborators, and perhaps a dozen program officers for DOE, NSF, and
elsewhere. Digital badges were only tangentially related
to the meeting, as the educational gaming community faces numerous challenges
at this time. The obvious question for
me is how digital badges might help address these challenges, and if so, how
that might proceed.
Posts
