Open Badges Interdisciplinary Opportunities

I'm still deeply entrenched in planning my Open Badges curriculum. And all this writing and reflecting has deepened my understanding of the OBI. The other day I took it upon myself to add to the Mozilla wiki page that describes getting started with open badges. This was a lot of fun and shows that my understanding of open badges has come a long way in a short time. That really is the spirit of Agile Instructional Design. Your personal learning begins the moment you commit to learning a subject and can very quickly develop into a deepening understanding.One of the tasks within the planning step of Agile Instructional Design requires some time looking for interdisciplinary opportunities.

To increase and broaden your learning it is also a good idea to bundle your personal learning across subjects you have already personally committed.The idea being that if your learning crosses subject areas it will deepen for the skills and knowledge are being used more broadly and within different contexts. Currently, my ongoing learning covers two main subject domains; folk music and dance, and mobile first web development. In each of these two areas I am currently focused on the following;

1. Folk Music and Dance
• I'll go enlist for the sailor - beautiful tune with a nice dance jig
• Folk style percussion instruments - well almost anything folk that can add rhythm
• Pipe and Tabor - if I had the time, I'd spend two hours a day blowing this whistle
2. Mobile First and related Web Development
• HTML5 - the latest (and most mobile friendly) version of HTML
• CSS - the always improving cascading style sheets
• Advanced PhP - mostly focused on building RESTful API's
• node.js - currently deepening my understanding of this JavaScript framework
• popcorn maker - hacking rich media into stories and music videos

The above list really are the things I spend my free time learning about. Of these I could include the following interdisciplinary opportunities to deepen my learning within open badges;

1. HTML5 and CSS3 to render the User Interface for my badge displayer
2. node.js to build my server side code for the issuer and host the backpack
3. popcorn maker to create some rich media learning resources describing the OBI