Showing posts with label HASTAC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label HASTAC. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 5, 2013

Design Principles for Motivating Learning with Digital Badges

This post is cross-posted at HASTAC
Katerina Schenke, Cathy Tran, & Daniel Hickey

This post introduces the emerging design principles for motivating learning with digital badges. This is the third of four posts that will introduce the Design Principles Documentation Project’s emerging design principles around recognizing, assessing, motivating and studying learning.

Sunday, June 10, 2012

Digital Badges as “Transformative Assessment”

                                                            By Dan Hickey
               The MacArthur Foundation's Badges for Lifelong Learning competition generated immense
interest in using digital badges to motivate and acknowledge informal and formal learning. The
366 proposals submitted in the first round presented a diverse array of functions for digital
badges. As elaborated in a prior post, the various proposals used badges to accomplish one or
more of the following assessment functions:

               Traditional summative functions. This is using badges to indicate that the earner
               previously did something or knows something. This is what the educational assessment
               community calls assessment of learning.

               Newer formative functions. This is where badges are used to enhance motivation,
               feedback, and discourse for individual badge earners and broader communities of earners.
               This is what is often labeled assessment for learning.

               Groundbreaking transformative functions. This is where badges transform existing
               learning ecosystems or allow new ones to be created. These assessment functions impact
               both badge earners and badge issuers, and may be intentional or incidental. I believe we
               should label this assessment as learning.

This diversity of assessment functions was maintained in the 22 badge content awardees who were
ultimately funded to develop content and issue badges, as well as the various entities associated with HIVE collectives in New York and Chicago, who were funded outside of the competition to help their members develop and issue badges.  These awardees will work with one of the three badging platform awardees who are responsible for creating open (i.e., freely-available) systems for issuing digital badges.
            Along the way, the Badges competition attracted a lot of attention.  It certainly raised some eyebrows that the modestly funded program (initially just $2M) was announced by a cabinet-level official at a kickoff meeting attended by heads of numerous other federal agencies.  The competition and the idea of digital badges were mentioned in articles in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.  This attention in turn led to additional interest and helped rekindle the simmering debate over extrinsic incentives.  This attention also led many observers to ask the obvious question: “Will it work?” 
This post reviews the reasons why I think the various awardees are going to succeed in their stated goals for using digital badges to assess learning.  In doing so I want to unpack what “success” means and suggest that the initiative will provide a useful new definition of “success” for learning initiatives.  I will conclude by suggesting that the initiative has already succeeded because it has fostered broader appreciation of the transformative functions of assessment.

Monday, November 16, 2009

Join this discussion on Grading 2.0

Over at the HASTAC forum, a conversation has begun around the role of assessment in 21st-century classrooms.

The hosts of this discussion, HASTAC scholars John Jones, Dixie Ching, andMatt Straus, explain the impetus for this conversation as follows:
As the educational and cultural climate changes in response to new technologies for creating and sharing information, educators have begun to ask if the current framework for assessing student work, standardized testing, and grading is incompatible with the way these students should be learning and the skills they need to acquire to compete in the information age. Many would agree that its time to expand the current notion of assessment and create new metrics, rubrics, and methods of measurement in order to ensure that all elements of the learning process are keeping pace with the ever-evolving world in which we live. This new framework for assessment might build off of currently accepted strategies and pedagogy, but also take into account new ideas about what learners should know to be successful and confident in all of their endeavors.

Topics within this forum conversation include:
  • Technology & Assessment ("How can educators leverage the affordances of digital media to create more time-efficient, intelligent, and effective assessment models?");
  • Assignments & Pedagogy ("How can we develop assignments, projects, classroom experiences, and syllabi that reflect these changes in technology and skills?");
  • Can everything be graded? ("How important is creativity, and how do we deal with subjective concepts in an objective way, in evaluation?"); and
  • Assessing the assessment strategies ("How do we evaluate the new assessment models that we create?").

The conversation has only just started, but it's already generated hundreds of visits and a dozen or so solid, interesting comments. If you're into technology, assessment and participatory culture, you should take a look. It's worth the gander.

Here's the link again: Grading 2.0: Assessment in the Digital Age.