Badge System Design: Working

The Working badge system design is meant to be a complete badge system. It implements everything of the introductory badge system with the addition of a thorough set of dimensions and integration with other learning and credentialing systems. A working badge system is a complete badge system.

a simple working badge system design

The rubric has a number of criteria provided in the left column of the following table. The right column of the table provides the attributes what could be considered a working badge system. I have also added an italicized comment describing what I believe is success when designing a working level badge system. Keep in mind there are also Exemplary, Notable and Introductory performance levels within the rubric.

Criteria	Working
Purpose: What is the purpose of the badge being awarded. is it for a simple task, does it come with recognition (peer or otherwise), or does it represent an equivalent certification.	badge is awarded for completing a significant accomplishment, demonstrating a skill or participating in a community. Success: badge system collectively represents a significant accomplishment requiring effort and display of newly acquired skills and/or knowledge. Could also be awarded with a facilitation or community role where contribution is recognized by peers or community organizers.
Graphical Design: How the individual badges look and are related to one another. Is brand well represented.	Badge design is attractive and comprehensively establishes a brand and curriculum awareness. Earners are attracted to completing the criteria and earning the badge or collection of badges. Success: People are attracted to completing tasks, attending events or participating within a community so they can earn the badge. The badges within the badge system have a common look and graphical appeal attriactive to the earner community. People are wanting to display the badges on their personal profiles.
Organization: How the badge system looks as a whole and is understood as a system. Are levels (if applicable) clearly defined. Is the learning journey and awarding of badges easily understood. Does the badge system hold value within the community it serves?	The badge stands alone or is part of a very small (two to twelve) badge system. badge system is a single level badge hierarchy / network or has a simple parent-child relationship for earning the collection of badges. How the collection of badges relate to one another is easily understood. People are attracted to earning these badges. Success: Badge system is simple and mostly implemented as a flat system or with one level of hierarchy or degree of separation. The journey represented by the badge system is quickly understood.
Criteria: Does each badge stand on its own, or is it a part of a larger learning journey, is this well represented in the badges criteria. Does criteria provide flexibility so a badge can be reused in different learning contexts. Does the badge criteria accommodate for its potential expiration.	Criteria to earn the badge is comprehensive in that it describes different learning approaches associated tasks and outcomes. The criteria has one or more examples or completions for reference. Success: The collective of all the criteria meet the learning or participation objectives of the whole badge system. Each badges criteria can be met in multiples ways. There are available examples (evidence) of what successfully earning the badge looks like.
Technical Integration: How badge system integrates with the hosted learning system.	Badges are issued from either a 3rd party issuing platform or the course, community of practice, or individual is hosting their own OBI platform. Badge meta-data, including criteria and evidence, is hosted to allow flexibility in referring URLs. The ability to verify / assert badge validity has been implemented. Success: Badges are easily issued with the ability to refer to a variety of internet locations and data types for criteria and evidence. Linking to badges for display and organization comes with little effort. Issued badges can be easily moved to the Mozilla open backpack. Badges can be verified after issue.
System Integration: How the badge system integrates with related and similar curriculum and badges systems. Are applicable standards being applied.	Badge system shows consideration to other related communities of practice, curriculum and standards. These related badge systems are easily recognized and referenced. Success: Badges integrate well within their own badge system and also recognize other similar badge systems, curriculum, events, communities, etc. Badge system could begin to share among themselves or badges could be applied to non-badge tasks with little rework. An integration task could be done with little conceptual effort.
Assertion: Does the badge system resolve back to an existing and reputable organization and hosting environment.	Badge assertion refer back to an environment that will continue in perpetuity or until badge expires. Personal accomplishments can be recognized through time. Success: Badges will be hosted until all issued badges have expired. The issuing organization should give attention to its reputation within the community it serves.
Endorsement: Is the badge system recognized by other organizations, communities, individuals and/or systems. Does it fit with previous badging and credentialing systems.	Endorsed by one to five organizations, communities or individuals of unconfirmed reputation. Success: The badge system should have endorsement beyond the institution, community or small group that is issuing the badge(s). This further endorsement should come from a recognized group or organization. Loose affiliations will work as long as recognized by both parties.
Validity: how is the badge determined to be valid. What is considered valid.	Sample of earners of the badge repeatably demonstrate learning required to earn the badge as described in badge criteria. Success: Earners of the badge(s) can demonstrate skills, knowledge and familiarity aquired while participating in the earning of the badge(s). This will work equally well for learning based badges, community based badges, and conference attendance type badges
Development Team: broadness of experience held within the badge system development team.	All skills and knowledge for building the badge system reside within two to seven people. Some team members will possess multiple skills and knowledge. Team requires strong pedagogical and curriculum development skills to evaluate comprehensiveness of badge system, criteria and assessment methods. Success: Focus on having the badge system "curriculum" well designed and reflected in all the criteria attributes of the badges. The team should be able to design and deploy badges and related criteria to meet the desired learning, participation or event outcomes. Team should be more than one so you can discuss and be critical of design.

100 thousand pageviews

It took me almost 10 years of blogging and almost 400 blog posts to reach 100,000 pageviews. Thank-you for all the inspiration, support and readership!

Badge System Design: Introductory

I'm building a rubric to assist people understand badge system design. There are many things to consider when building badge systems and having guidance, ways to assess the system design progress, or prompt your thinking toward badge system design is good. This rubric is also a foundational resource in the P2Pu course on Badge System Design. This post sets out to describe the thinking behind the introductory performance level within the rubric.

Well designed badge

The Introductory badge system design is meant as just the basics of a badge system. The badge system implements just what is needed to provide a basic / introductory badge or small system of badges. The level of knowledge to create an introductory badge system is a minimum.

The rubric has a number of criteria provided in the left column of the following table. The right column of the table provides the attributes what could be considered an introductory badge system. I have also added an italicized comment describing what i believe is success when designing an introductory level badge system. Keep in mind there are also Exemplary, Notable and Working performance levels within the rubric.

Criteria	Introductory
Purpose: What is the purpose of the badge being awarded. is it for a simple task, does it come with recognition (peer or otherwise), or does it represent an equivalent certification.	badge is awarded for accomplishing a simple task or set of tasks each awarded for a badge within the simple badge system. Success: keep it simple, awarding badge(s) for a task or small set of tasks. Could also be awarded for participation in a conference or maker faire.
Graphical Design: How the individual badges look and are related to one another. Is brand well represented.	Badge has simple design, with little brand or curriculum affiliation. Monocolor badge with simple graphical themes. No integration with other internal or external badge systems. Services the basic graphical needs of a png or svg file. Success: Not too much design effort exerted. Has a simple visual appeal with basic brand and curriculum affiliation.
Organization: How the badge system looks as a whole and is understood as a system. Are levels (if applicable) clearly defined. Is the learning journey and awarding of badges easily understood. Does the badge system hold value within the community it serves?	A single badge system, where the badges are well designed from a graphical perspective and how they can be earned on their own and within another learning journey. Success: Badges are easily understood and the learning journey is clearly articulated in both text and as an image. The badge holds value within the community it is awarded. Value is built through the quality of evidence associated with each awarded badge, the reputation of the community in which the badge is awarded, and the frequency of badges being awarded.
Criteria: Does each badge stand on its own, or is it a part of a larger learning journey, is this well represented in the badges criteria. Does criteria provide flexibility so a badge can be reused in different learning contexts. Does the badge criteria accommodate for its potential expiration.	Criteria to earn the badge is well articulated and easily understood. Criteria attribute within badge meta-data resolves to URL. Success: Each badge has a simple to understand criteria with a well described set of tasks or accomplishments to earn the badge.
Technical Integration: How badge system integrates with the hosted learning system.	Badges are issued from one of the 3rd party public and open badge issuing platforms. Little, to no, integration with the course, community of practice, earner or issuer site(s) are present. Associated URL's resolve back to working and open URL's (no login required). Success: A working badge system has been implemented within one of the 3rd party issuing systems. All criteria and evidence attributes resolve back to working URL's.
System Integration: How the badge system integrates with related and similar curriculum and badges systems. Are applicable standards being applied.	Badge fits well within its own badge system and related curriculum. Standards applied are local to the organization, community of practice, group or an individuals badge system. Success: Badges are well integrated within its badge system and related curriculum, tasks or accomplishments. If standards exist within the issuing organization, community of practice, group or individuals practices; these standards are honoured.
Assertion: Does the badge system resolve back to an existing and reputable organization and hosting environment.	Learner assertions resolve back to valid URL's. Success: assertions resolve back to working URL's, no 404 errors. Hosting environment will remain until all issued badges have expired.
Endorsement: Is the badge system recognized by other organizations, communities, individuals and/or systems. Does it fit with previous badging and credentialing systems.	NA Success: An introductory badge system design does not implement any form of endorsement. Not that endorsement isn't important, its just  that endorsement would move a badge system into a higher performance level.
Validity: how is the badge determined to be valid. What is considered valid.	The evidence of an earned badge represents the learning criteria of the badge. Success: All issued badges have evidence attributes that fulfills the badge criteria.
Development Team: broadness of experience held within the badge system development team.	All skills and knowledge for building the badge system reside within one to three people. Some team members will possess multiple skills and knowledge. Non-team members are available as subject matter experts. Success: There is one or more people who collectively have all the skills and knowledge to create an introductory badge system.

The OnPhD Candidacy Badge System

If you want to earn the OnPhD Candidacy Badge you need to be awarded the following seven micro-badges. Each of these micro-badges are awarded for completing a task within the OnPhD candidacy challenge. All of these badges, with the exception of the Candidate badge, are hosted at the credly site and can be issued by anyone who has already earned the badge. Provided below is a copy of the badge image and the title, description and link to the related tasks from the P2Pu site.

	1. Describe your learning history - This is a cumulative description of all the works (formal and informal) you have completed to be considered toward your candidacy for an ONPhD. https://p2pu.org/en/groups/onphd-candidacy/content/describe-your-academic-history/
	2. Identify your domain of study - View and Discuss The described domain of study should be both broad and focused. This is to allow others to get a sense of both the knowledge domain and your focus. https://p2pu.org/en/groups/onphd-candidacy/content/identify-your-domain-of-study/
	3. Detail your contribution - What of considerable significance are you going to contribute to your chosen subject domain of knowledge? https://p2pu.org/en/groups/onphd-candidacy/content/detail-your-contribution/
	4. Methodology - Completion of a PhD requires a significant reseach project or major contribution to your chosen knowledge domain. https://p2pu.org/en/groups/onphd-candidacy/content/research-methods/
	5. Skills and Knowledge Development - Completion of a PhD level of knowing also requires the development of other related skills and knowledge. https://p2pu.org/en/groups/onphd-candidacy/content/skills-and-knowledge-development/
	6. Engage the community - How are you going to engage the learning community and your learning network. https://p2pu.org/en/groups/onphd-candidacy/content/engage-the-community/
	7. Seek supervision and endorsements - Identify the people in your learning network who are going to assist on your learning journey and help you get to finished. https://p2pu.org/en/groups/onphd-candidacy/content/seek-endorsements/

Context works within the badge system design rubric

I continue to solicit feedback for the badge system design rubric I have created for the P2Pu course under the same name. Last week I had a great (and too short) talk with the P2Pu team during their regular community call. One important idea that came from the discussion was how the rubric applies to different learning (and badging) situations? I.e. does it apply to individuals, communities and institutions equally? Short answer; Yes. After a review, and few changes the rubric could apply equally well to different groups or learning contexts.

• Individual - people or small groups, friendships, self-directed learners, autodidacts, heutagogues.
  Design Impact: Design the system for themselves with reference to existing badges systems or themes within subject domain. Individual or small group has to be responsible for all aspects of badge system.
• Community - community organizations, festivals, conferences, communities of practice, distributed groups.
  Design Impact: Consideration of how badge systems differ for a community of practice or conference. Badges awarded for informal tasks, participation or alternative approaches to learning. System may be considered more celebratory in nature or branding for event or community.
• Institution - traditional educational institutions, large businesses, international organizations.
  Design Impact: Alignment and or extension of existing and traditional (or product based) curriculum. Organizational brand needs to be considered in design. Look for opportunities for badging co-curricular activities or informal learning related to institution / organization,

I believe adding these three contexts as different views into the rubric will make it stronger and more comprehensive.

Flipped assessment implemented

The 301 - Badge System Design course being built for the P2Pu School of Badges will also include flipped assessment. The basic idea of flipped assessment is to have people early on in a shared learning journey assess those who are a few lessons ahead. The thinking behind this is the people most invested in giving and receiving collaborative assessment and peer review are those currently active in a learning journey.


Within the P2Pu Badge System Design course the flipped assessment occurs twice. Once during task 3 where early learners review a badge system design created by someone almost finished the P2Pu course. And again as a peer assessment of another learners compare and contrast task.

The collaboration is supported by both early and later learners having to reach out to each other to complete the challenge. The fun part is how the early learners have to find an open badges quick issuing site to award badges to the later learners for completing the tasks they are reviwing. and without these in-course awards the learner will not achieve overall completion of the P2Pu challenge.

A badge system design rubric

With the amazing assistance and feedback from others I have created a badge system design rubric. The purpose of this rubric is to guide people toward creating a good badge system. The rubric is not meant to evaluate existing badge systems, but to prompt thinking about what is a good badge system design. The goal is for people to create effective and well thought-out badge systems.

A pdf file of the badge system design rubric is available with this link.

The rubric has four levels of performance and nine criteria. The levels of performance are as follows;

1. Introductory - this is meant as just the basics of a badge system. the badge system implements just what is needed to provide a basic / introductory badge system. The level of knowledge to create an introductory badge system is a minimum.
2. Working - this is meant to be a working badge system. It implements everything of the introductory with the addition of a more thorough set of dimensions and integration with other learning and credentialing systems. A working badge system is a complete badge system.
3. Notable - this is meant to be a badge system of note, it should be referred to as a good working system with additional features that should be considered when developing badge systems. It implements everything of the working system with the addition of being recognized (and utilized) by other learning and credentialing systems within the same subject domain.
4. Exemplary - the exemplary badge system is a badge system that most others aspire to be. The exemplary badge system becomes the defacto standard for accrediting a subject domain.

for greater understanding of each level of performance for the badge systems, read each level as a column. Given the depth of detail for the criteria I will be dedicating a blog post to each criteria explaining my thinking, references and rationale. Remember, the badge system design rubric is to guide the development of a badge system not evaluate existing badge systems.

Leveling of OnPhD badges

I have developed the OnPhD candidacy challenge on P2Pu. The purpose of this challenge is to guide people through the tasks of declaring their candidacy as an Open and Networked PhD.  A part of my work towards an OnPhD is to research alternative methods of assessment and accreditation for the self-directed life-long learner... I have the belief that digital and open badges will provide very well for the accreditation part. Therefore, I keep a concious eye toward the open badges movement and have been helping out in building the school of badges on P2Pu. I've taken on the creation of a couple of courses within this school, I am also doing some review of Leah MacVie's outstanding work within the school. One of the courses she has developed is 102 Quick Issuing, and I am working through the course to debug and give feedback. One of the tasks within the 102 Quick Issuing challenge is to describe a badge system you would be issuing badges. The badge system I am developing is to support the OnPhD. This badge system would recognize the accomplishments as a person meets or exceeds the milestones found within a traditional PhD while also allowing a person to be self-directed in defining their own OnPhD.

I have a deep appreciation of the colour themes within martial arts belt system to denote levels of accomplishment. I will use these within the development of the badge system for my OnPhD. Essentially, I will use the respective colours as part of the badge as I progress toward mastery in my chosen subject domain. Completing the OnPhD Candidacy challenge awards the earner a yellow candidate badge, and other tasks or accomplishments within this level would also be awarded a badge with a yellow colour. As the progression toward mastery progresses, so would the colour of the badge, closely matching the belt colours within the martial arts. Given the self-directed (or heutagogical) nature of the OnPhD much of the badge system design should be responsibility of the OnPhD candidate, allowing them to set their own learning directions(s). This would deepen learning and is strongly supported by current research around heutagogy.

Book Review: Buccaneer Scholar

This book hit a home run for me in many ways;

1. it chose a buccaneer (sailing) theme
2. it told a good story with good imagery
3. it challenged the status quo in education with personal evidence
4. it provided a map to the self-directed learner
5. it recognized the importance of organizing your learning goals
6. it offers the adult learner an alternative
7. it shows a life can be great, with amazing achievements, without a formal education
8. it is inspiring to think what James has achieved through self-education

What Buccaneer Scholar did best is got to the root of it all by driving home the point that scholarship is about learning, personal learning. True scholarship is not about the certificates and institutional recognition but about learning new things, deepening your own knowledge, and being able to take on new challenges due to your ability to learn, with little or no guidance. In the end learning is about personal fulfilment, personal commitment, finding a satisfactory way to make a living, and honouring your life's journey!

Thanks James!

Seven Billion Learners

Learning styles was a big part of my graduate studies. And since that time people increasingly shy away, from conversations about VAK (Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic) and other specific learning styles and how they should be applied. Mostly because the research has found that there is no significant difference in teaching to any particular learning style. Don't get me wrong, having a discussion with someone about how they learn and drawing upon previous research regarding learning styles is a great conversation to have. Any conversation that helps a person (or myself) understand how they learn is an important conversation for everyone.

 

Some background
I am currently involved in the Learn Creative Learning MOOC with MIT and P2Pu. We are into the fourth week and the theme of the readings is Big Powerful Ideas. The weekly readings are fantastic and really get into self-directed learning and how we learn as kids... etc., etc... please read for yourself;

• Alan Kay - http://www.campbells.org/Rant+Rave/r+r_PowerfulIdeas.html
• Seymour Papert - http://llk.media.mit.edu/courses/readings/Papert-Big-Idea.pdf
• Resnick & Silverman - http://web.media.mit.edu/~mres/papers/IDC-2005.pdf

The weekly reflection was to discuss a personal big idea. One that you could drive a life's work upon.

The powerful idea
My powerful idea has been building for years and is well articulated in the statement that there are seven billion learning styles. What I mean by this is that every person on the planet has their own personal learning style, and our learning and education systems need to be built around this. I come to this from a collection of personal understandings, supported by a whole bunch of research and proven theories;

• Learning builds upon itself where people build knowing through sequential learning (cognitivism).
• People construct knowledge (or learn) based on their previous knowledge. Sense is made by related current learning upon previous learning and experiences (constructivism).
• People learn best by making things "outside" of the learning environment. Constructing things is important to deepening learning (constructionism).
• The idea that people can learn things in many different ways, with many different approaches, with many different senses (learning styles).
• Humans are social animals and learning is a social activity. All knowledge is connected via the objects or nodes within our lives (the objects are also our friends and social network) (connectivism)
• People can be self-directed learners outside of the institution (Heutagogy or Autodidacticism)

The idea isn't that big or powerful?
Well if everyone has there own learning style then our education systems should focus on teaching people to identify and leverage their own personal learning style. People could be given the skills, knowledge and personalized approaches to learn whatever they want with an approach best suited to them. I believe we now have the knowledge, technology and openness to create learning environments that can be customized to each learner, and these learning environments will honour each persons learning style (all seven billion). I believe people have the ability to develop these skills and abilities, early in their lives, with focus toward their teen years for solidifying their personal approaches. So the big idea I continue to work toward is to inspire adult learners to recognize they can learn whatever they want (within reason) on their own with the support of the people and objects around them. And they don't have to go to school to do this. This doesn't mean school isn't a useful part of their personal learning environment.

How I am implementing the powerful idea?

1. Develop an approach to inspire people to teach themselves. I call this Agile Learner Design (ALD), but in the end it is kinda my own personalized learning methodology. I believe everyone could also develop their own learning methodology. I believe ALD can be reused by others...
2. Encourage people to map out their own learning journeys, and assist people in finding ways to travel on these journeys.
3. Open up accreditation, and assessment will follow... I have believed that Open Access Accreditation is as important as Open Educational Resources. Digital and Open Badges are some of the initiatives that opens up accreditation. I am an active contributor to the digital and open badges movement.
4. Be an example: I believe so much that people can teach themselves that I am wanting to serve as a documented example. I am involved with the Open and Networked PhD program, which endeavours to have people recognized (and accredited) in having a PhD level of knowing without having attended a traditional university to accomplish this goal. References to this journey, include;
• http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Doctor_of_Philosophy
• https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups#!forum/open-and-networked-phds
• http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/User:Peterrawsthorne/PhD
• https://p2pu.org/en/groups/onphd-candidacy/
5. Blog extensively about my belief, activities, and learning journey.

Target Technology Stack

To support my work in completing my Open and Networked PhD one of my major tasks will be developing software. My current thinking is I will be developing an internet portal to allow people to bring together their digital badges. I want to provide people a way to bring together all their validated learning accomplishments into one place for display and supporting analytics.

For software development I need to choose a technology stack, or the server software and programming language(s) I will use for development. This will be a LAMP stack for the following reasons;

1. I have already been developing on LAMP for a number of years. So any additional learning curve for this project will be shallow.
2. I see LAMP to be the technologies of;
   • Linux (or Ubuntu)
   • Apache (Web Server)
   • MongoDB (Database) - this replaces MySQL as it is now owned by Oracle and can no longer be considered non-proprietary.
   • PhP - used with HTML5 and CSS3 in an MVC pattern
3. I want to choose an open and popular platform currently used within the education technology space.This stack, with the exception of MongoDB, is used by WikiMedia, Moodle, Drupal, and Wordpress. Pretty much all the major players in the Open Education space.
4. I will host all this on rackspace... because I've used them for a number of years, for a number of clients, and they totally rock!!!
5. I seriously considered node.js and it may become a part of the project as I more deeply explore the openbadges infrastructure... this would add to my learning curve.
6. I will most likely use github for source code librarianship... but I wonder about the best approach and schedule to releasing my work into the open. Mostly, I think about working for free and releasing my work at the correct time.

OnPhD: Detail your contribution

This is the blog post describing completion of the third task of the OnPhD candidacy challenge. In this post I detail what I am going to do as my contribution to furthering human knowledge.

My contribution will fall within the intersection of education technology, systems architecture and heutagogy. My current thinking toward this area of focus will be to create a badge clustering portal that will allow people to gather and create badges from the different non-obi compliant badges systems. The benefit of this would be to support my thesis that we need a way of collecting together peoples learning to provide validation and recognition. My working thesis is;

The ability to validate and cluster all the events of life-long learning, regardless of their origin, will provide the required alternative to emancipate the self-directed learner from the limits of traditional accreditation. This shift will enable every learner, regardless of approach, to pursue learning with the same level of recognition as learners in traditional institutions.

1. Detail your ideas around a significant contribution. (remember this can be altered as your knowledge of the domain of study deepens, it is an iterative process)
   Build a web portal, with support for mobile devices, which allows a user to consolidate there badges from many non-obi compliant badge systems.
   • The technology platform will utilize a MVC approach using HTML5, CSS3, PhP and MondoDB. Rationalization of this technology stack will be in a follow-up blog post.
   • Solution architecture will be focused around open platforms and standards. A strong service orientation using RESTful type approaches for integration.
   • Features will always look toward assisting the self-directed learner in consolidating thier accreditations.
2. How are you going to publish?
   I will publish frequently on my blog with papers written for major project milestones and upon completion of significant design elements. I will publish in two primary locations; first, utilize online open journals and second, pubish on wikiversity.
3. Where will you engage your network of peers and mentors?
   Online! I will communicate regularly with my peers and mentors, both directly and via online communities. I will seek feedback with all my regular blog posts and provide more formal engagement processes with all major publishing events. If engagement requires discussion I will ask to publish the video or audio chat. I will be very transparent through all my engagements. Peers and mentors will be aware of this before they are asked to engage.
4. How is your work going to be peer reviewed?
   Peer review will come via my publishing in the open, my regular and frequent engagements, and through blind peer review via the journals I utilize to publish my major works.
5. How are your findings and data going to be published in the open?
   All documents and data will be published in the open. People can request complete data sets and open API's will be made available. Note: privacy policies will be put in place regarding participant data.
6. Describe how you know you are finished.
   When users badge clusters are successfully rendered and shared from their user page within the web portal.

OnPhD: Identify your domain of study

This is the blog post describing completion of the second task of the OnPhD candidacy challenge. In this post I describe my domain of study and provide a potential PhD thesis statement.

This sentence and slide stack (with audio) should answer questions 1 thru 6.
My domain of study is the union and intersection of the educational technologist, the solution architect and the self-directed adult learner (heutagogue). The intersection of these three topics encourages the study of personal learning ecologies, the technology stack and distributed computing that supports personal learning, and the devices and user experience that best suits the self-directed learner.

Domains of study from Peter Rawsthorne

These two sentences provide a potential PhD thesis statement.
The ability to validate and cluster all the events of life-long learning, regardless of their origin, will provide the required alternative to emancipate the self-directed learner from the limits of traditional accreditation. This shift will enable every learner, regardless of approach, to pursue learning with the same level of recognition as learners in traditional institutions.

To do: The completion of this task exposed a gap in my knowledge. I need to do a bunch of research on Heutagogy. From this reseach I will build another concept map, but this work will become a part of my OnPhD.

Course Design Sprint

Outstanding!!! Early last year I wrote a post playing with the idea of a course design sprint. The main idea being the development of a full online course in a reduced amount of time. less than five days, or some low number of days like that. In my post I dreamt of having the time to execute on the idea to see if it would work.

Agile Instructional Design Sprint

Well it turns out my friend Billy Meinke ran a course sprint this past weekend.  The course was developed as a launch course for the School of Open during Open Education Week (Mar 11-15). I really don't want to take the wind out of their sails... so you can read about all there great work yourself. I'm just so flipped out they proved this idea out! Kudos to everyone involved, particularly Billy!

• http://billymeinke.wordpress.com/2013/02/11/open-science-course-sprint-an-education-hackathon-for-open-data-day/
• http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/36600
• http://blogs.plos.org/scied/2013/02/21/guest-post-open-data-day-sprint-courses-and-hackathons/
• http://onlinelearninginsights.wordpress.com/2013/02/26/a-course-design-sprint-my-experience-in-an-education-hackathon/

The Solution Architect

This concept map is a compliment to the previously posted "Educational Technologist" post. These two concept maps together provide the visuals for my identified domain of study as I work through the P2Pu challenge to declare my OnPhD candidacy. This concept map contains the two related concepts of Solution Architect and Information Technology (IT) Architect. Many of the skills and knowledge for the solution architect are a part of the overarching role of IT Architect. It is my intention to seek a research domain that occurs within the intersection of Education Technologist and Solution Architect. I believe bringing greater architectural discipline to the educational technologist role will assist greatly in growing this important role within the rapidly innovating educational space.

Teach people to teach themselves

What stands out for me most is that we need to teach people to teach themselves. Everyone needs to design and develop their own learning methodology and implement for the rest of their lives. This methodology needs to include and recognize other people as places where your knowledge resides. People also need to alter the methodology through time, but it is still their own learning design methodology customized and upgraded for them and by them. I believe people can begin to get meta-cognitive during their teens. I think this timing would be different with everyone. But when a person is ready they need to develop (with rigor) their own learning approach.

The Educational Technologist

Peter Rawsthorne's Career Narrative

Family on Quiniscoe Summit, 2551 m

I really do love to build and integrate software solutions, particularly internet solutions. And the more information sources and distribution, the better. I am truly invigorated when building solutions that take the complexity of a well thought out business strategy and create kicking customer facing internet portals. I also get jazzed when the solution directly supports the business' back-end processes so the business can be smarter and more nimble. If there is uncertainty around strategy due to the project being a start-up idea (or wild-ass dream), I can proceed with experience using agile and lean approaches. I can create a project heartbeat where we ship regularly with focus on customer need and successes. This is all fun for me, and if all this falls within the knowledge management or adult education domain, all the better.

Over the last 23 years I have occupied almost every role within the development of information technology software and internet solutions; I've worked as a programmer, a database administrator and solutions architect, through to manager of information technology. I have been successful in large organizations, in small internet start-ups, and many organizations in between. I feel it is a great accomplishment that I can bring projects to completion regardless of when I join the project and within any technical or leadership capacity. I believe it is important to finish the things we start.

I am excited about opportunities with medium sized organizations and consulting firms who are looking to innovate their business through information and internet technology or assist others in improving their business through technology innovation. My experience and education would have me in the role of senior solutions architect, consultant, or director of information technology.

If you have an interest in working together please do not hesitate to contact me; peter AT rawsthorne DOT org.

If you want to view my career history my linked in profile is a great place to start; http://www.linkedin.com/in/prawsthorne

Gears of my childhood

I am involved in the current running of Learning Creative Learning with MIT and P2Pu. A fantastic online course which is prompting much reflection and confirming much of what I am doing with inspiring adult learners. I am definately on the right road!

This weeks activity is to;
Read Seymour Papert’s essay on the “Gears of My Childhood” and write about an object from your childhood that interested and influenced you.

I struggled with this. I didn't have an object like Papert had, something that I grew my learning around, something I would use to visualize or conceptualize my learning. Something I did have, and still have... is the bicycle. I rode my bicycle everywhere, to school, from school, to the park, just up and down our dead-end road. My social life was around the bicycle for many years, we had a bike club on our street. Every day and every weekend we would meet-up and do things, the bicycle was a constant.   I didn't think about the bicycle in direct relationship with my learning. It never was a gear to my learning. I would rather see is as a foundation to most of what I did, and played a big part of forming who I am today.

• The bicycle provided a freedom to travel great distances, unsupervised. Today, I love to travel.
• The bicycle provided me access to a number of different social circles and friendships. Today, I know many people and socialize across social and economic domains.
• The bicycle provided me travel to many different events. Today, my interests and studies are broad.
• The bicycle allowed me to escape the restraints of what was expected of me. Today, I seek (with confidence) alternate routes to desired outcomes.
• The bicycle was easy to take apart and put back together. Today, I am constantly taking things apart and putting them back together, often improving them along the way.
• The bicycle caused me injury, but I always made it home. Today, I pick myself up on bad days and have persistence to keep going.
• The bicycle took me places I could not have otherwise gone. Today, I am still curious and follow thoughts, ideas and inspirations to places I would not have otherwise gone.

I know that the bicycle isn't the same as the gear as described by Papert. I never used the bicycle as an analogy or image to base my learning. The bicycle provided me a freedom to become an autodidactic.

Badge System Design: Task 1

This is my work toward completing the first task of the badge system design challenge on P2Pu. This post is exactly the same as the comment I entered as completion of the task.

1. Please introduce yourself. And include information about your experience with badges (both traditional and digital) and what you are wanting to learn specifically about badge systems design.
   • My name is Peter Rawsthorne. I am creating this Badge System Design Challenge for P2Pu. The best way to get a sense of who I am is to view my blog and related links; http://criticaltechnology.blogspot.ca/ Particularly, the connect with me links top of the right column.
   • I have been involved with badges most of my life. I was a scout, I participated in a number of programs with the YMCA, I was a Canadian Sailing Association participant, and a number of other merit badge issuing organizations. The depth of my early experiences with badges is well described in my confessions of a badge addict post.
   • I have also been developing learning resources for the Open Badges project since Q2 of 2012. A summary of this work can be found in this post about agile learning and open badges.
   • My focus in creating this course and with badge system design in general is to deepen my understanding in how best to design a system of badges and to what granularity of criteria for each badge.
     
     
2. Describe your experience with course and curriculum design. Don't be shy, tell us about a small lesson you created for yourself or a complete degree program. Or any possible descriptions of works in between.
   • I have been creating courses and curriculum for over 20 years. I have worked in small computer stores providing digital literacy workshops for parents, I have worked for Universities and created faculty workshops, courses and curriculum for students. I have built many online courses and curriculum. I enjoy building learning materials and most recently have enjoyed creating Open Educational Resources (OER).
   • Most recently I created a two week seminar series about badge systems design. The seminars were a combination of directed online discussion and two 1 hour lunch-and-learn screencasts. The wiki containing the all the artifacts from this seminar series can be found on the SCoPE site; http://scope.bccampus.ca/mod/wiki/view.php?id=9011
     
     
3. Tell a story about rubrics or learning outcomes. And if or how you have you used them? and within what context? Do you know what a rubric or learning outcome is? And how they would apply to learning. If you don't know what a rubric or learning outcome is, describe a badge (traditional or digital) you have earned or someone you know has earned. Describe the requirements to earn the badge.
   • I have created rubrics for many different courses and learning tasks. One of my favourite experiences in building rubrics was when teaching into a B.Ed program at Memorial University. All the students collaborated and built a rubric for evaluating other students educational blog posts and their strategy for using blogging as a learning tool with K7 students. I believe rubrics are an excellent way of focusing the tasks along a learning journey.
   • I have used learning outcomes only a few times, and they were a part of a course description. The idea was to describe what the student would know or what they would accomplish through the course. It was a description of the outcomes of the course.
   • I believe rubrics and learning outcomes fit well, as a proven educational approach, when creating the criteria for an open badge.
     
     
4. Consider your commitment to this challenge. Do you want to just complete each task within the challenge or do you want to contribute to creating each task within the challenge. Building this challenge as collaborative effort will make it way better. Either way, engage, contribute, enjoy...
   • I am committed to creating this challenge end-to-end. I will create a few tasks within the challenge and then complete each task as if I am also a learner taking the task.
   • I'd like to encourage others assist in creating this challenge and would enjoy working with other badge system designers in building this challenge. I believe we would all learn more, and create a better product, if we worked together.
   • I am wanting to implement a flipped assessment approach within this challenge. I see flipped assessment as an experiment. And P2Pu is the right place to conduct this experiment.
     

Learning theories, frameworks, and approaches

So I'm building a concept map for my application of candidacy for the Open and Networked PhD program with Wikiversity and P2Pu. The related P2Pu challenge requests a creative work that describes your area of study. My areas of study are self-directed life-long learning approaches (Heutagogy) and software architecture. One of the concept maps I am creating attempts to answer the question "what is life-long learning?" I started to visualize the terms;  pedagogy, andragogy, heutagogy, behaviorism, cognitivism, constructivism, and connectivism. I began to struggle with how these terms relate to each other within a concept map... so this micro learning journey began and inspired this blog post. How best do I visualize the connections and relationships among all these terms?

I read, I reflected, and I settled upon two main categories for the following reasons;

1. Approaches to teaching and learning
This set of terms describe ways of teaching and learning. And they describe how a person can learn and provides ways to plan and conduct learning.

1. Behaviorism - a large amount of repetition to achieve the desired action.
2. Cognitivism - sequenced learning. Learning is a determined journey, that with direction desired learning can be achieved.
3. Constructivism - a persons learning is built upon previous learnings and knowledge. New learning are put into place based on this previous knowledge.
4. Connectivism - knowledge is stored in your friends, the information appliances and the objects around you.
5. Others - there are many other approaches, but I see the above four as the most generalized set
6. Inquiry - I'd also include inquiry based approaches, cause they work really well... IMO.

2. How I perceive the learning theories
All of the theories are about how humans learn (or can be taught, depending on your perspective). I believe the biggest factor in applying learning theory is age. I do believe children learn differently than adults. I also believe adults can learn a lot from how children learn.

1. Pedagogy - how kids are educated [taught or learned (let's say K12... could overlap into higher education and before kindergarten)]
2. Andragogy - directed education strategies for adults
3. Heutagogy - self-directed learning by adults (strategies for the adult to learn without the direction of others)

So there you have it, three theories and six approaches... I do believe that all six approaches can be used within each of the three theories (with varying degrees of success). All this reading and reflection influenced the organization of my concept map to look as follows; more on this to come...

DRAFT Knowledge Domain for the Educational Technologist v0.2



Flipping assessment

I've been exploring the idea of flipping assessment for a while. It started with my work as a TA during my M.Ed graduate studies, also explored it during my time with WikiEducator, it was confirmed as I reflected upon my graduate studies and every community of practice since, and I designed it into a language learning portal I architected a while back. Why do we have people who have already completed the work (and possibly long since forgotten the details) assess those currently working on building their understanding. Why not have the cohort of learners most current with the subject provide the bulk of the assessment. Why not flip the assessment and have the novice learners assess those a few steps ahead on the same learning journey? I believe the cohort of novice learners (working with master learners) would be the most motivated to develop understanding and invest the most time in the assessment of another learners work. Particularly, if the assessment event is a formative event and just a part of the overall assessment.

This is what I envision for flipping assessment. This wouldn't be a complete flip, where novice learners do all of the assessment, but they would have an increased role in the assessment of the learning cohort. As I see it the elements of the diagram are as follows;

• Working from left to right a person masters a subject.
• A subject within a knowledge domain is exactly that, a complete subject that fits within a larger domain of knowledge. An example would be baking bread is a subject within the food preparation (or cooking, or baking) knowledge domain. And the subject of bread baking is large enough to be considered a subject within itself where someone would develop an expertise.
• An Interested learner is a person with an interest in the subject, who never actually studies the subject, but they will read about it and not shy away from a discussion.
• A Novice learner is a person committed to learning a subject. They actively seek out information, read and consume information about the subject. They participate in learning events (online and otherwise) to increase their understanding. They would even take a course from a traditional institution.
• A Master learner is someone nearing completion of their studies of a subject. They could be considered to have "almost" mastered the subject.
• Teaching assistants are people who are rewarded for providing mentorship to learners. This role is a part of traditional institutional learning, and plays a role in helping learners master a subject. Teaching assistants are often much closer to a subject than a professor as their learning was more recent and, given their role, they are closer to the learning cohort due to their frequency of personal interaction with the learners.
• A Seasoned learner is someone who has mastered a subject, and is not actively involved in learning the subject. They do continue to read about the subject and actively seek out new and related information. They are members of communities of practice regarding a subject and occasionally engage and/or contribute to the community. They are very current with the subject and provide feedback and guidance to other community members.
• The Professors are well, professors. They are most often people with Ph.D`s who are very active in furthering and adding to a domain of knowledge. Their focus is not always on teaching or the details of a specific subject within their chosen domain of knowledge, unless that is their area of research. I guess what I want to say is that a professor won`t be focused on the subject matter (and the learners study) of an undergraduate level course and its specific subjects. This is not to say professors can`t be an amazing resource for someone learning a new subject. A professors time should be used very wisely, but finding ways to encourage their engagement is good.
• The Experts are people who, through a number of different methods, have become experts in a subject. They continue to be experts by ongoing reading, personal research tasks, and involvement with online communities. They sometimes lurk (even engage) in online learning communities. Getting experts to contribute to assessment would be great, and finding ways to include them is time well spent.

My plan to implement flipped assessment
I want to experiment with the idea of having novice learners assess the work of master learners. Both the novice and master learners need to be active within the same learning journey, where the master learner is only a few lessons (or tasks) ahead of the novice. The idea being the novice is beginning their study of the subject and the master is almost finished.  I want the novice learners to read and understand the work of a master learner and give it an assessment. If the novice has questions, they ask them of the master learner. The master learner also has to encourage the novice learners to assess their work. Without this assessment neither the novice or the master will progress to completion. If novice learners want to team up to assess a master learners work, they can. This flipped assessment will not be the only assessment the learners will receive as a peer based summative assessment will occur when a learner has finished their study of the subject.

I plan to implement this flipped assessment in the Badge System Design challenge I am creating in P2Pu. The design of the challenge is iterative in that we will be covering the topics more than once with increasing depth as the challenge progresses. This iterative approach allows for a task earlier in the challenge to include the assessment of another learners completed works later in the challenge. Essentially, a novice learner is assessing the work of a master learner. Flipped Assessment.

If you are interested in the previous background chat discussing this idea it can be found in Google+.

Challenge 301 - Badge System Design

So I'm starting the development of the Badge Systems Design challenge for the School of Badges at P2Pu. In time we hope this challenge will become a part of the larger School of Badges, but a bunch of things have to happen for that to manifest.

I've been working with Badge System Design for a while now and have been involved in a number of discussions and learning communities. All of this taught me a few things about badge system design. What stands out for me is that I perceive three aspects to badge systems design;

1. The graphical look of the badges within the whole system. This includes things like colour scheme, branding, graphics and icons, the text to display, how badges graphically relate to each other, how levelling is recognized, and a few other attributes.
2. The network, hierarchy, or system of badges and how the badges relate to the learning or curriculum. There may be some kind of a rubric that identifies the tasks, knowledge or learning represented by each badge and the badge system as a whole.
3. Where the badge system is going to be hosted. Is an existing free and open system going to be utilized or are you going to build your own issuing capability. This is important for you may decide that the badge system design has specific attributes toward how the badges relate to each other, or how the badge criteria and evidence needs to be hosted. Some of the attributes of your badge systems design may be restrained by how you decide to host your badge system.

Once you have all this considered and have begun to dive deeper into each of these aspects of badge system design you are going to need to loop around to that first task and see if the restraints from one of these aspects don't change the design of another aspect (as an example; the chosen hosting system doesn't support the evidence attribute of the badge). I'm looking forward to developing this challenge for the School of Badges over the next while. If you want to help out, let me know; it could be fun. Stay tuned I'll post here as things proceed and new challenge tasks are developed... to see the beginings of this challenge visit this link; https://p2pu.org/en/groups/badge-system-design/

Mozilla, Agile Learning Design, and Everything else

It was an active year for my reading, research and writing (106 blog posts in 2012). I feel I learned a whole lot. I particularly like that I had an opportunity to deep dive into open and digital badges. I believe my year of learning can be broken into three main themes; First, my work with Mozilla Open Badges and Badge systems in general; Second, my further proving out an Agile Learner Design methodology; and Third, everything else I thought about.

Mozilla Foundation

Its difficult to express the gratitude I have for the time I spent on contract with the Mozilla Foundation. In the six months I spent with Mozilla I did a whole lot, and I learned a whole lot;

• Created a lot of learning resources for on-boarding the newbie open badges user / implementer
• Completely updated the Open Badges FAQs by reading through the related google group end-to-end
• Went deep into Webmaking with my kids and some of the youth on Bowen Island
• Engaged in a number of discussions on curriculum design and building communities of practice
• Dug into some emerging open technologies like WebGL, WebRTC... and how they fit within an virtually unlimited bandwidth network
• Played with popcorn.js and wrapped learning resources to highlight formative and summative learning events
• Deepened my understanding in using distributed technologies to facilitate meetings and collaborative efforts. With a good understanding of the nature of the engagement the appropriate technologies and approaches can facilitate a very collaborative effort and keep a comprehensive record of the event. These records can be indexed (and therefore searchable) and used for later reference or as resources for subsequent events. All done with open and free technologies and approaches. Mozilla is very good at all this!

Agile Learner Design

My focus on an Agile Learner Design methodology for creating and determining your own curriculum got a renewed focus this year. It all started with my last post of 2011 where I revisited and summarized Agile Instructional Design. I have come to the conclusion that what I am doing isn't focused on instruction, but upon the self-directed learner. Therefore, what I am doing is developing an Agile Learner Design methodology, not an Agile Instructional Design methodology. An important distinction in the fundamental focus of the methodology. To build upon my last post of 2011 I kicked off the year by looking at some of the existing research and approaches to self-directed learning. And looked at some of the approaches that I would consider similar to ALD. I also considered some of the people and approaches within my inspired learner series of posts, because it is these inspired learners that drive me to further develop ALD.

The Agile Learner Design (ALD) Methodology

• Envisioning your curriculum
• Planning the learning journey
• Apply the sprint approach

ALD Reference Materials

• New image for progressive inquiry
• Personal Curriculum Mapping
• Narcissism and Presentism
• Agile Instructional Design References

ALD Examples and Inspirations

• Mobile learning concept map
• Agile Instructional Design in Practice
• Social Artistry
• Learning in the Open
• Example implementations 
• Mitch Resnick and Progressive Inquiry
• Inspired Learners  

Everything else
Outside of these two main themes for last years postings came everything else. And if there were any themes they would have been either community building or mobile web development.So here is a list of the other learnings / explorations I had from last year.

Online learning communities

• Creating online learning communities
• Inquire, Paraphrase, Acknowledge, Advocate

School of Badges 

• School of Open Badges

Learning Approaches

• Emersive and transformative learning
• OER Assessment

Screencasting

• Lighting for video capture
• Screencasting Guildelines

Mobile Web Development

• Mobile First
• Mobile web pages in HTML5 part 1
• Mobile web pages in HTML5 part 2
• Explaining CSS as a skin
• Tighten up lists for the mobile web
• Book Review: HTML5, Mark Pilgrim

Polling for posts

• Half finished blog posts
• Let my readers decide
• My readers have chosen

So there you have it. My 2012 in review. What I'm looking forward too in 2013;

• Further developing learning materials for digital badges at the P2PU School of Badges
• Officially starting my OnPhD by achieving Wikiversity / P2Pu OnPhD candidacy
• Start coding the aggregation for disparate badge systems to create and display badge clusters

P2Pu School of Badges

Thanks to the amazing graphic design work by Leah MacVie I will be taking a lot of the Mozilla Open Badges resources I have created over the last year to lead the development of a couple of challenges within P2Pu.

P2Pu School of Badges Curriculum

I will start by focusing my efforts on the 301 challenge which will have the learner explore badge system design. I will draw heavily on the materials and discussion that were a part of the two week seminar series I facilitated at the end of last year. I'd also like to encourage any and all badge system designers to help out or provide suggestions or a critical eye.

Responsibilities of Institutions

Over the last few days there has been a bunch of work taking place to describe the rights and principles of network learners. The original document was drafted by an amazing group of people, for whom I have a great deal of respect. I also have a great deal of respect for everyone who commented on and contributed to the rights and principles of networked learners. The one disappointment I have with this document is that it was written by this amazing group from the perspective of the learner (or student), and didn't focus more on the responsibilities of the institution. Don't get me wrong, I think this is an amazing piece of work and I am very happy it has been started. Given the influence this group would have, it would be great if they would also write the responsibilities of institutions and then advocated for them to be adopted by the institutions for which they work or are affiliated. If we were to have this activity from both the learner and institutional perspectives, then we would really have something!