 Okay, welcome everyone. My name is Rachel Gilg. I'm the Projects Manager here at the Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning. That's Coral, located here at the University of Texas at Austin. And I'm Coral Blythe, the Director of Coral. And I want to thank you for joining us for our first session in our Coral Summer Web Seminar series. And today we're going to be talking about digital badges. But before we get into that, we just want to go over some basic information for the session. So many of you have likely used this interface before. This is Adobe Connect. And if not, we want to encourage you to make the session interactive. So go ahead and ask questions. If you have any problems, ask the questions as they arise. On the left, you can ask the questions in the Questions column. So we encourage questions throughout the presentation. We really want this to be conversational and interactive. 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This session and next week's session will go on as planned. However, we had to cancel the third session due to some scheduling issues. That webinar was going to address the use of badges specifically within the foreign language community, but don't worry because we're going to be covering that throughout today's session as well as the next session. We really want to help you put this into the foreign language context. And we also want to invite you to attend a workshop that we have planned for June 27th that you can attend virtually, again via Adobe Connect. The workshop is going to cover the basics of designing and teaching a language course all online. Although it's mainly geared towards higher ed, anyone who is currently teaching an online language course or who plans on teaching one in the future may attend, or even if you're just interested in online learning, you can go ahead and attend. So we have more information about it on the Coral website. Yeah, and this one is the longer. This is actually a three-hour workshop that morning, and we do ask that if you want to attend that you pre-register and you can find that information on our website. All right. Well, please, if you have any questions about the logistics that we just went over, please feel free to ask those questions in the chat. And we'll go ahead and get started with today's presentation. For example, I see Claire's just written in about the June 27th workshop. Will it be archived? Yes, it will. Yeah. Okay. Okay, so let's get started. Okay. So here at Coral, we've been exploring digital badges for a few years now. And actually, last November, some of you may be aware of this, that at the Actful Convention last November, we helped them to pilot their first digital badge, which is the Convention Networker Badge, which we'll talk about that a little bit later. And while we were there at Actful, it seemed there was a lot of interest in the topic. A lot of educators approached us and asked, you know, what is this thing about badges? Are they something that I can use? I just, I've heard of it, but I don't know anything about it. So that's what prompted us to put together this series. And I think we're going to start out by kind of talking about how we came to be interested in badges, and I'm going to turn it over to Carl for that. Yeah. And so I guess what I'd like to say is I noticed already that many of you writing in before we even started were saying, I don't know very much about digital badges. Well, quite frankly, there are very few people who know much about digital badges because it's really a very, we had here, we were hosting, Coral was hosting a symposium on open education. And one of our speakers, Rich Berenick from Rice University, was talking about this new initiative by Mozilla, something called digital badges, and he was very excited about it. So that was actually the first time I had heard anything about it. So it's really pretty brand new, although as Rachel just mentioned, there was quite a buzz at the last actual convention. So in just a matter of a couple of years, people are talking about it. But as director of Coral, I have come to learn a lot more in the past couple of years about professional development of teachers. I've had a lot of contact with teachers in the field and in-service training and so forth. And it surprised me, frankly, a couple of years ago when I was at a conference, a state teachers conference, and at the end of my presentation, teachers came up to me to get my autograph. And of course it really wasn't for my autograph. It was that they needed evidence that they had attended my workshop or my presentation, but they wanted my signature on this piece of paper to take back to some authority at their school district. And I started to think about that this notion of collecting signatures for attendance was really not a very professional way of doing professional development. And yet it's probably the main way that we do it, not just here in Texas but all over the country. So the main idea that I started thinking about is that seat time, and that's essentially what that was an indicator of, that I was sitting in the seat during your talk, really is not an indicator of learning. We all know that as teachers. We do give our students credit for attendance. We give them participation grades or whatever, but that's usually a very small percentage of their overall grade. So I just started thinking, you know, there's got to be a better way, and why are we so enamored of this notion of seat time for professional development? I don't think personally that it has a big impact on any person. And this is a problem not only in foreign languages, but just in general in education. We give lots of different kinds of degrees and diplomas, and oftentimes they're a bit ambiguous, or you're not quite sure what the information means. So let me give you an example. If you get a degree in Spanish, a BA in Spanish, or a BA in French, we assume that you know how to speak Spanish and French. But of course that's not on the credential, the diploma just says you have a BA in those languages. The other thing too is that people who have the same degree from the same institution may have actually taken different courses within that degree. And of course we do have transcripts, but that's not really specified on the degree. So I just started to think, you know, when teachers apply for a job and they put on their resume that they have a degree, it really doesn't tell the employer or the school district what they can do as a teacher. It doesn't tell them what they, the kinds of experiences with the language or their experiences in the classroom. So the notion of specificity is where badges really come in into play. Okay, there's another idea here that's really important and that's the rise of informal learning. So a lot of professional development learning has moved online. And what we're doing right now I think is fairly informal conversation around the notion of digital badges. So more and more people are learning from each other, they're doing it in social networks online. And unfortunately because that's kind of outside the margins of the formal apparatus of education, there wasn't a way for people to show that they were learning all of this content online. So that's again where digital badges comes in. It's a way of credentialing people who were doing all this informal learning online. Okay, so that brings us to badges. And the concept of badges is exactly what you think it is, merit badges. And I really like this picture because it takes us all back. So yes, if that calls to your memory or to your attention, the idea, to your mind, the idea, girl scout badges or boy scout badges, that's exactly right. And so the great thing about a girl scout or a boy scout badge, you can see in this picture they are displaying them and that's a very important concept. We want people to be able to see them and to look at them and know fairly quickly what they represent. So the next slide shows you that badges equals a visual representation of a skill or achievement. So those girl scouts were displaying their representations of skills or achievements. So they got a badge for basket weaving and on their badge it has a picture of a basket. If they did a course, they took a course on water safety, it probably has the icon for the, what is it, that little white cross that they use for lifeguards. And the main point of course is these are icons. And iconic representation means that it should be fairly transparent, fairly easy to recognize. So all of those things are really part of what a badge means and yes, it does go right back to a scouting unit badge. And what's cool is when you take a badge into the digital realm, of course you're going to have much wider visibility than if you were wearing a physical badge. So that's the great affordance of the internet that it opens it up to a wider audience to be able to display your competencies, what things that you have achieved. Yeah, not only can you see, you can distribute it, disseminate it more quickly over the internet to thousands of people, but of course it comes with this magic thing called metadata and we'll talk more about that in just a minute. So badges have been around for a while online, not necessarily in the context of learning or professional development specifically, but they have a history kind of in gaming, little icons that show you leveled up to some particular level in a game. They started to appear in social media sites like Foursquare where you could complete these challenges and then unlock your badges from that and get recognition within the social community. So these types of badges were really just kind of for fun or maybe to promote a website or really just for the enjoyment of the user. And then Mozilla came along and Mozilla, they're the folks that created the Firefox browser and in partnership with the MacArthur Foundation, they started looking at how can we use badges to recognize learning specifically and what do we need in terms of an infrastructure that would let this happen in a way that could be widely distributed across different platforms and different organizations online. So what they call open badges are the specific type of digital batch that we're going to be talking about, although they're not the only kind of batch. You'll see lots of different types of badges out there. So another question that's come up is who's using badges? Are they really just for Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts? And they're really taking off, they're foundations that are using them and they're all kinds of organizations and museums and now universities. And we put together this slide actually to represent kind of the wide range of institutions that are now adopting badges and when last year when we, when Coral was in discussions with Actful, with the Actful Executive Board, one of their main concerns since this was brand new was is this for real? And it seems kind of silly, it seems like these are like merit badges of Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and is this being, should the educational community take this seriously? And in response to that question I showed them, the websites are giving the URLs of the MacArthur Foundation, the Bill and the Linda Gates Foundation, Disney, Smithsonian, NASA, as well as universities, Duke, Ohio State and so forth, to show them yes in fact that this is being widely adopted by very serious educational institutions. So the point is it's gaining credibility and another place to demonstrate to people that it is gaining credibility of course is in the popular press. I've been reading for the past couple of years, ever since I found out about badges, I read the Chronicle of Higher Education and the New York Times Education Pages and it's really quite amazing the past couple of years they've been following the rise of badges, showing your badge and we need some badges and so forth. So in the 21st century, how do you show what you know at the very top there? So if you want to find out more, there are lots of places online to find out who's implementing badges. Okay, so let's dig in a little bit farther and talk about what badges can do or at least what are the things that people are trying to use badges to do. Obviously make learning visible, that's the whole concept of the merit badge and the physical badges that have been taken into the digital realm. Preparing students for a changing world that using badges does require a certain amount of digital literacy and that's kind of a part of this, you know, building your online persona will help to get to the employment of the future. Showcasing identity, a lot of times badges will demonstrate your part in a community. Of course they can demonstrate mastery of the skill. Creating learning pathways, this again comes from the whole gains context where you can have badges that will step up to different levels. Badges are used to motivate participation, collaboration, recognition of accomplishments. And again, as we're thinking that badges may eventually act as an alternative credential. And basically when you look at badges, they can be divided into two types. There's the performance based types, this is the competency based model where you've successfully demonstrated that you have some skill or knowledge. And then there are a lot of badges that are just effort based, just a participation badge. And so you see both of these in the badge ecosystem, the types of badges that people are designing. I just want to jump in here to say that because this is a new area, educators are thinking about, Rachel just mentioned there are two types of badges, but they're developing more types of taxonomies of badges. So we're discovering different types of badges as we grow these systems. So I think this is going to be an area of research to figure out how we can take a curriculum and badgeify it. So there might be more different kinds of types than just those two, but I do think that's a good place to start to make a distinction between performance and effort. And that makes a lot of sense to most teachers. And what we're hearing from folks like the Director of the Office of Educational Technology at the U.S. Department of Education is that there's a real interest in competency based approaches to learning. And badges fit perfectly in with that type of approach. And I know Carl has talked about this idea that has been around for quite a long time in the language learning. Yeah, it really has. I mean, a lot of people talk about taking their curriculum and thinking about it in terms of competencies as kind of a new idea. But it really is something that in the foreign language community we've been doing for a rather long time. I mean, we've thought about it in terms of our skills, the four skills, speaking and listening and reading and writing and culture. And then drilling down to make those as specific and as measurable as possible. So we can then create badges for all of those specific competencies. Yeah, and of course the whole proficiency movement talking about it in terms of levels too. So I think we are in many ways, our curriculum has been thought out. We just haven't taken the step to create badges for that curriculum. And so open badges gives us a kind of framework to create design badges. And I do want to make the point that this really is an open system so anybody can create a badge. The Mozilla framework, and please jump in if anybody has questions, just kind of about the general idea of digital badges. I'm going to move right now to talking specifically, some of the specifics about open badges and just to give you some understanding of how a badge actually looks and functions in Mozilla's infrastructure. As I mentioned, Mozilla was really hoping to create a way for people to share badges, combine badges so you could earn badges from different places, but you could collect them all in one place and display them in the way that you want. So this is a technical standard that has been developed much in the same way a technical standard was developed for websites, the HTML standard. Well, badges are a different standard that allows organizations and institutions and individuals to share this information about the digital badge. Badges also in Mozilla's system allow you to verify that an achievement was actually made. You have to have the assertion of whoever issued you the badge. So there is that built in technically to the infrastructure. And again, the idea is that you will be able to display the badges in the places where you are online, whether that's social media, a personal website, what have you. And we'll hopefully, we have some diagrams that might show this a little better. Okay, so just to kind of pull back the image, so this is kind of a funny image, but if you see the, you're seeing the skeleton, like what's underneath the badge? So a badge is not just an image, just a flat image, but the badge actually has encoded within it information such as the badge name, the description, what did the earner of the badge do to get this badge? That's the criteria that has to be spelled out by the issuer. What exactly did they do? And this kind of gets to the idea of micro credentials. So this is, can be on a very granular level, what they did, who is the issuer, what is the evidence that they actually accomplished this? And this is a really neat affordance of badges is that you can actually provide a link to the evidence. So if somebody had to, say, create a lesson plan as part of earning that badge, they had to post the lesson plan somewhere, you could actually link to the output, to the actual products that the learner created in order to show that they've earned a badge. So just to take you back, remember that slide we showed you with the Girl Scouts? And Natalie and Rachel said, well that was just, that's a flat piece of fabric. This is different, right? Imagine in that piece of fabric that badge for basket weaving, if you could click on it, it would contain all this information about when the person earned the badge, what the badge is exactly for, what kind of basket did they weave. It gives you all kinds of information so you could verify that in fact you earned that badge. And this is going to be really important when employers want to verify teachers' professional development because right now it's very difficult for anybody, an employer to verify the information that's contained in a resume or a CV. Okay, well all of this is a little technical but let's look at this infographic and hopefully this will provide a clear picture of how the badge ecosystem is intended to work. I want to also mention this infographic is available for you. You can download it. It says infographic, how digital badges work as a PDF. We also have it on our website. Yes, in the presentation slide it is a little bit small and I apologize for that but hopefully you'll get the idea. So we have the learner in the center and the learner is going to go to different places. You know, say if it's an educator going to get professional development from various places, they may go to a university. They may go to an event at a professional organization or workshop. They may attend webinars given by language resource centers. They're going to be going to a variety of organizations to do their professional development. Each of those organizations could issue badges. Each one could have a badge system and award those badges for different types of learning that happens in those organizations. The learner would actually be able to collect all of those badges and keep them in what is called a badge backpack. And I'm going to show you what that looks like in just a moment but basically a place where they can store all of their badges. They can organize all of their badges and they can decide how to display the badges. And then finally, the learner can push those badges out or link to them from the various places where they spend their time online, whether that's their LinkedIn profile, a personal website, a school website, a Facebook page. Since this will be an open standard, it will be widespread. Your badge will be very portable. Now I should say that this is the hope of the ecosystem that Mozilla has developed. Since they started working on the left side of this infographic, the right side of the infographic, the displayer functionality is probably less developed. Right now, a lot of organizations have the ability to issue badges but you don't see a lot of places where you can actually display your badges yet. But we're confident that this is coming and you can. There are some workarounds and we'll get into that a little bit more next week when we go into the nuts and bolts of how can you actually issue badges and where can you display them and that sort of thing. Yeah, and I want to say that this infographic shows you then all the bits and pieces of what goes into what we're calling this ecology. So you have the issuers, people who are creating content and then evaluators and then issuers, these organizations like Actful. You have the person, the educator who's collecting the badges and then sending them out. And as Rachel said, all of those parts then have to be organized by some like Mozilla. There is a question I want to respond to by Claire here. She asks about Actful, is it going to become an issuer? Does anyone know anything about whether or not that they'll be issuing things like the OPI badges in the future? That's a great question, one that Natalie just answered but I want to kind of field it. We don't know because I don't think Actful at this point really knows either. It's brand new and they are in discussions about where to draw, where to take badges. And will they then badgify their existing professional development opportunities such as OPI seminars? But that is a big, big question. So Claire, I think the answer to the question is nobody knows including Actful right now. Okay, I do want to talk just a little bit about that badge backpack that I mentioned. If you go to this URL, backpack.openbadges.org, you can set up your own backpack and even earn a badge. They have a Badges 101 quiz that you can take and that will actually give you a badge that you can put into your backpack. Once you're in the backpack and you have a few badges, this is what you'll see. Your badges are all displayed there. In the left side, you can create your own collections and you can name these categories whatever you like and store your badges in those collections. And the idea is that you may want to share different types of badges with different audiences. And so this lets you manage that. And then when you actually click on any of the badges, you get a little pop up here and this shows you all of those things, all of that metadata that we were talking about before when we looked at what's inside a badge. This is going to tell you the name of the badge, what exactly, what were the criteria for the badge, what you did to earn the badge. It may contain a link to the evidence where somebody can go and see what you did to earn the badge. So all of that stuff that's packed inside that image is visible here. And that's really how it will work on any site that displays a badge. That's the way it's intended to work is that you click on this image and you get all this information. So you don't have to click on the image if you just want the overview, but it's all there for somebody who really wants to dig in and know more about what that badge means. So can I just jump in here because I see that Mike has posted a question about physical badges versus digital badges, and of course we're talking primarily about digital badges, but it reminds me of this discussion between is digital replacing print for materials and actually not really, there still is the affordance of the physical object or print. And in fact, the actual badge that or the badge that we helped act will create the convention network of badge. It was a digital badge, but we also gave people real physical badges to wear at the convention because we wanted them to have a physical presence and people to notice it. And we also wanted them to have a digital badge so that they could disseminate it online. So I agree with the discussion going online here in the chat room that, you know, there may be times when you want to pursue having an actual physical icon too. There's another really good question here. Who has the authority to issue badges and who will recognize these sources as being valid? Do you want to take that one? Yeah, that is a big, big question. It is an open system, which means that anybody can issue a badge. You could issue a badge for your friend and in return your friend can issue a badge to you. But of course those kinds of badges are not going to have much validity, and it does come to the issue of I want value for this badge. So it's a self-organizing open system, and I think obviously they're going to be just like there are degrees of, let's say, prestige and value associated to all the other kinds of credentials that we already have right now in education such as which university did you go to? People start to rank them. I think you're going to have the same kind of self-organizing system with digital badges. But it is important that it be open. And there may be some overlap, certainly at the beginning, between who's creating a certain kind of badge. Does Coral have the same badge that other LRCs and other universities? So you're right, it's going to be kind of a messy self-organizing ecology. And I do think the ecological metaphor is appropriate because ecology is a kind of messy. Yeah, and I think it really depends on the context. I mean, you can have badges at many different levels. So if you're creating badges for your classroom, I mean, you have to think about, okay, what is the value of the badge to you as the instructor and to your students as the potential earners of the badge? And so those badges might just have value within your class. When we're talking about the larger scope of professional development, obviously we want our badges to have value to the earners, which means they also have to have value to the people that are going to be hiring these earners or who want to know about the performance of the earners of the badges. Yeah, and I also want to say that I notice that when people are posting a question, a general question, I tend to answer it thinking in terms of professional badges. And then Rachel just answered talking in terms more of a badge within a learning context with students. And of course those are very different things. But badges are meant to be that flexible where you really can use them with this set of metadata. All you have to have is a description and the criteria and the evidence, and that really can apply in any learning context. Okay, so this is an image that just shows the idea of associating badges with an individual. Yeah, and this is not just any individual. Some of you may recognize this individual. This is Toni Tyson. Toni is the past president of Actful. So she was at last year's Actful convention. And she's also the 2009 teacher of the year. She's a French teacher at Loveland High School in Colorado. But importantly for our purposes today, she is a badge earner. And in her backpack, she proudly displays these three badges. One from Actful, one from Coral, and one from Lark, and from San Diego State University. Okay, so we're going to move into looking at some concrete examples of some different digital badge systems that are in the foreign language education world. But I do encourage if you have any other questions just generally about badges, please feel free to ask them. If something is unclear, but we'll go ahead and continue on. So last month, Rachel and I were presenting about badges because that's our obsession. We've been talking a lot about them here at Coral and talking to other people about badges. And we put together a panel discussion, and it was great because we learned what other institutions were doing around badges. And one of the speakers was Julio Rodriguez from University of Hawaii. Julio is the director of the NFLRC at the University of Hawaii and also the Center for Language and Technology. And for the faculty at Hawaii, they have a badge series really focused on online learning. So teaching their faculty at Hawaii different technical skills. And you see they give three different badges, a content development badge, an interaction badge, and a technology badge. And yeah, this then I'm not sure if you can actually see very well the specifics of this, but each of these badges has very specific criteria or very specific things that they have to do in order to accomplish the badge. So for example, the content development badge, they were basically training them to find good content for their university courses and to be able to then upload that content into their language management system or learning management system rather at the University of Hawaii. The interaction badge was to teach them to use tools for communication tools or ICT, things like voice thread, message boards, also to interact with their learning management system. And then their technology badge was to teach them all kinds of different skills that they felt their faculty needed to be better teachers in the 21st century, how to use Google Docs, how to edit an image, how to create your own YouTube channel, and so forth. And then this is, actually I should let Rachel talk about this. This is something that she discovered recently. Yeah, just recently I came across the French department at Portland State is issuing badges. And they've got badges for proficiency in the language, but also for things like community engagement and cultural knowledge badges. So this is a part of their program that they're offering to students. I think in this case it might be sort of like a certificate program. I think a lot of universities are looking to badges for that purpose. It's not necessarily a degree program, but it's more of a certificate program. Yeah, and I think another way of thinking about this in for university programs is to have students create a portfolio, a digital portfolio, where they can collect them these kinds of badges. So another one of the LRCs, the one I mentioned at San Diego State LARC, has launched several badging initiatives. And they have one that they've given for online passage rating workshop that is looking at various reading passages and then rating them according to proficiency levels. They have a workshop on using social media and language teaching. And then the one on the right, the California Language Teachers Association, they give a badge for the attendance at that conference. So not just participation or seat time, but each one of these badges, if you go to the LARC website, you'll see that they require you to do something to earn the badge. Yeah, and we're going to move into some of Coral's badging initiatives and talking about some of the things that we've tried. But I would also like to ask everyone that's participating today, if you know of any other badge systems that are out there, if anybody's experimented with badges in the classroom or earned a badge from another organization that everyone would be interested in, please, please post it because we are looking for other examples of people that are doing it. Martella just wrote in with a question about Coral or actual pushing the Department of Education to recognize that. Yeah, Martella, that's a great, yeah, good question, good comment. Actually, it's one of, taking in terms of advocacy, I think we need to start to advocate or to take this idea to badges to various, well, I don't know, I mean the Department of Education is an important player, so they play an organizing function among all these different entities. That's one of the reasons why we wanted to go to Actful to take the idea of badges to Actful. We figured that if one of these large institutions got on board with that, it would certainly give it prestige and validity and bring it to the attention of the foreign language community. So I agree that we should be talking to as many players as we possibly can about the idea of badges. But remember this is a self-organizing system, so it's going to take us a while to figure some of these things out, and we don't really have to have it all figured out to at least begin. We don't want to be paralyzed because it seems that it's too big to think about the entire system. We just need to start and see how these, we can start to fit the pieces together. But the slide that we have up right now talks about Coral's Badging Initiatives, and this kind of shows you our chronological arc. The first badge on the left was something that we gave two years ago for a seminar that we gave on open education and foreign language education. And the idea was we were issuing challenges to attendees to not just attend the conference, but to then take back the information that we gave them into their classrooms and do something with it. And one of the challenges was to continue discussion of the ideas around using an OER in classrooms, posting that online and having an online discussion with the other attendees. And we call that a collaborator badge. We've already mentioned a couple of times the Actful badge. We helped Actful with their convention network or badge, and I'll be talking about that. Actually, it should say Actful 2000, was it 2014? It's 2013, wasn't it? And then we're going to be talking about the teacher effectiveness for language learning or TEL. That's our upcoming collaboration between Coral, LARC, and TEL. So the convention network or badge that we did in Orlando, the main idea was really to increase engagement, to increase awareness about what this concept was. What is a digital badge? And as I mentioned, I think we did create quite a buzz. There were a lot of people talking about what a badge was. But the other point was that we wanted to show Actful that around badges are these professional communities because badges themselves can create a network. So if you go to the next slide, this was the interface that we used. And you had to enter some information about who you were as an Actful attendee, what your interests were. And then it created a profile for you. And here's just a snapshot of a couple of people. So you see right in the middle there Colleen Murphy. Colleen is a teacher from Creekside High School in Florida. And it shows that she's interested in American sign language. That's her language. You see the others are interested in Japanese, Spanish, Mandarin, Chinese, and so forth. And then the red tiles there indicate their primary research or pedagogical interest such as instructional technology. And then on the far right, it shows you where you can find them on the Internet. So Facebook or LinkedIn profile or the Actful website itself. So again, these were to create various networks of people, of like-minded people. And the other idea was of course to then post on social media about what you were learning at the convention. So that was the idea of a convention networker. And this gives you a couple of instances, a face of Twitter here with people. Kevin, there's Tony Tyson who's tweeting about something. And then of course we were collecting data on all of this. We had over 600 participants. So that's roughly 10% of the Actful attendees. So I think that was a pretty good level of participation for the first time event. It showed the Actful Executive Committee that there was a real interest in digital badges. And among the participants, the top 10 interests of these convention networkers. The number one, I thought this was kind of interesting. Number one, interest was immersion. Number two, not surprisingly, was technology in language learning. Three, assessment for 21st century skills. Five, bilingualism. Six, study abroad. And seven, open education. And then on the right, the pie chart there just shows you that these networkers had various preferred platforms that they were using at the Actful community. I think, what is it, at the top, Facebook had 26%. So that was just interesting. We were collecting data on who these people were and how they were creating their social networks. Yeah, and this bad really was, since it was mostly an awareness raising effort, you know, it really was about participation. It wasn't really a badge. And we weren't actually measuring, you know, we could have created some criteria like you have to tweet at least 10 times or do something specific. But we just left it really easy. All they had to do was sign up and agree to be a networker. And then they got the badge. So that was our choice. And, you know, it's sort of, you know, badges can be as simple or as complicated as you make them. And, you know, we're still trying to figure out what is the right balance. So here's where we want to go. This is one of our initiatives here at Coral's to work with Tel. That's, remember, it's teacher effectiveness for language learning. And this is a nonprofit group that is a really of world language supervisors that has started this kind of grassroots effort to train other supervisors in what is a model, what is effectiveness look like in the language teaching profession. And the idea then is to build on their framework, which is fairly elaborate, but what's so nice is that it's written in the discourse of teachers. Teachers understand that it's very transparent to them. And we then want to partner with Tel using their framework and turn that into badges so that language supervisors at local school districts can use that for professional development. Because I started out by saying I was frustrated by the kind of haphazard in random nature of professional development where people were coming up to me at state conventions and, you know, the professional development scheme based on primarily seek time. So this is our way of trying to add, I think, more professionalism to professional development. And we hope to be in a pilot phase starting next year with Austin Independent School District and Tina Dong. I see her in the chat room. She give a shout out to Tina and Thomas Sauer. And we also are then doing the same thing in hopefully in San Diego schools and in Los Angeles schools with the National Heritage Language Resource Center. And that gives you this next, this is a nice slide of the Tel framework. Tel breaks it into these kinds of three columns. A successful, effective teacher prepares for student learning. So what they do in preparation and preparing the environment for kind of a safe and comfortable learning environment and planning for the lesson. The next column is advancing student learning. What do you do during learning, performance and feedback, choice of learning tools and so forth. And then supporting the student learning really, I would say, refers to the larger ecosystem of going outside your classroom, collaborating with other stakeholders in education, professional development is something that you do primarily on your own time outside of the classroom. But this, again, each one of these are areas and they have all kinds of competencies, so it's fairly granular as a framework. Okay, I do want to point out that we have a website that is dedicated to the topic of open badges for foreign language education. You'll find that at open badges.coral.utexas.edu. And we're trying to keep that up to date when we find new articles of interest. It's an exciting time right now because badges have been around for a couple years and there was a lot of funding a couple years ago, a lot of institutions and organizations were given grants to create batch systems. And we're at the point now where a lot of the research, there's research and results of how those batch systems work, that is all starting to come out. So it's a good time to kind of jump into this because there are people that have started from scratch and figured out a lot of things and that's what we're going to be talking about more next week. Next week we're going to be talking about how to not only the nuts and bolts of creating and issuing badges, but some of the new thoughts around batch system design and considerations for how do you design badges. Yeah, and I just want to say that this short, very brief webinar is meant to pique your curiosity about badges so that if you do get excited or interested, this is the place to go. We built this website for foreign language teachers to give them a lot more concrete exemplars about how language teachers and teacher trainers are grabbing hold of the idea and really working with it. So please take a look at it, you'll find lots of really great information. And if you do have any suggestions for stuff we can post on the website, please let us know. I see some good links coming through on the chat that we might want to add to that site. Yeah. And share this URL with your colleagues of course, send it out to people. So now let's get to you. I mean since this is a webinar on badges, we're going to give you a badge assignment. So Rachel. Okay, well this is a challenge for you. I hope that you will accept it. We have a template that I'm going to show you in just a second that has been adapted from another organization who's done a lot of badge workshops and we've actually used this template as well. But it will help you think through all of the pieces that are needed to create a digital badge. And so we'd like for you to develop a badge concept that would work in whatever context you are in or you're thinking about. So it could be a badge for your classroom. It could be a professional development badge. It could be really anything you want. But we just want to kind of go through this exercise and also get ideas from you about what types of badges you think would be really useful in a given context. So the idea is that the assignment is or challenge is to develop the concept using the template provided and you can download that from that file share window. We would like you to submit your concept hopefully by Monday June 16th prior to the next webinar because we would like to share some of these in the next webinar. So we'd like some time. But this is really easy everybody so you should do it. It's not that hard. And it'll really help I think just doing it on paper thinking about your concept on paper. It'll make them next session much more relevant when we talk about how do you actually create this badge. So again you've already thought through the concept. Right. So we're trying to practice what we preach. This isn't just a webinar where we give you lots of information and then you go away and forget it. We want you to do a little something just a little something with it so that it makes all of this make more sense for you. Right. And so then you will also you know if you do this assignment you will send you a badge. You don't have a backpack yet. If you've never earned a badge this is a really great opportunity to see how that whole process works. And again I'll explain that process more in the next webinar. So you know don't worry if you don't know what to do with the badge yet. We'll get into that next time. So let's look at an example. We have an example of a template for you. And Carl's going to talk for you. You can see the blue fields are what Carl wrote in. This is his idea for a badge. Yeah. So Rachel gave me this badge literally two days ago and said here's your assignment. And then I went home that night and thought a little bit about it. So this is my badge. The name of my badge is Language Partner. And so I had in mind a French class. I teach French here at the University of Texas. And in our lower division French classes I thought wouldn't it be great if I could have our language students, have our American students have a French language partner or a Francophone language partner. And I actually know of an OER, an open educational resource that is produced by Todd Bryant at Dickinson College. That's perfect for this. And it's called the mixer. It's an M-I-X-X-E-R. So you can go online and find it. The mixer and the whole point of the mixer is you have a place where you can write, you can fill out a profile of and you put your profile on the site and it gets matched with somebody else who is looking for the language that you speak. In other words, I'm an English speaker and I want to learn French. Then I matched up with a French speaker who wants to learn English. And you can actually go and look over profiles of the speakers of the language that you're interested in and contact the person. And then you have what you interact using Skype. And all of this is a nice interface. It's fairly easy to use. And Todd at Dickinson College is actually using this in his MOOCs that he's developed for French and Spanish and Chinese. So the idea is to register. In order to get the badge, you have to register on the mixer and complete three Skype interviews with a Francophone partner. In other words, you're going to interview the person in French and then they will turn around and interview you in English. That's the whole idea of an exchange. And I said from my exchange, I wanted the students to use question sets that are at the end of each chapter of our textbook. You can make up your own or you can adapt them. You can give them a particular kind of interview set, whatever you want to do. And then the evidence would be the mixer keeps an activity log so that I could see that in fact you did sign up for it. And in fact, you do have a profile. And I also wanted the student to give me the transcribed answers of their exchange partner. If you wanted you, you could follow up with an interview and ask the student questions about their exchange. How did it go and what happened and so forth. But I wanted this to be fairly low stakes. I kind of was envisioning this as something that was supplemental to my class that they would actually start to create, I don't know, a relationship with a Francophone student. Research shows that if students are just thrown into a chat room and say go speak, that it falls apart after a little while. So I wanted to have some kind of a scaffold, a little bit of a framework. And that of course is what I've tried to do with these different question sets. So what is the value? Well, if they can do this, it starts to show them that they have the ability to communicate with a real true native speaker. And that of course is the whole point of the classroom. So hopefully that gave you a little bit of a sense of what these different categories mean, the name of the badge, the users, the criteria. The criteria and the evidence are really the heart of the badge. The criteria really defines the badge. What can you do or what did you do? I do want to say this template was intended to be a paper and pencil template. So that's why you have these ideas for badge shapes. And if you want to go ahead and print it out and draw a badge shape, that would be great, but it's not required. If you don't want to add an image, just put some ideas. What were your ideas for maybe an icon or it could stand in for this badge concept? And by the way, I stole this image right from the Mixer's website itself. They have these two people talking, which I thought captured nicely the idea of an exchange with your foreign students. But literally, this did not take me very long. So if you go through the steps and then give it to us, we will say, yes, you deserve a badge. And we'll probably try to share some of those badge ideas then on the next webinar. All right. So we're coming to the end here. But just a reminder, we do have the next webinar on June 18. And we will really be digging in then on some real practical ways of creating and issuing badges and then also talking about badge systems a little bit more. And before we close, I do see in the chat room there have been a number of people who said they've been unable to download the files, the template, and so forth, because if you're interested in doing the assignment, how do you do it about the template? So Natalie has written everybody and said that we will definitely post the files on the website probably by tomorrow. And where will they be on the website? It will under the event link. Okay. The event link being the link for the webinar. Yes. Yeah. Okay. So we'll have that up by tomorrow, hopefully. And yeah. So we're sorry about the problems with some of the download. That's just one of the problems with Adobe Connect and doing the magic of webinars. Again, the infographic and some of this content is also available on the Open Badges website that we told you about. That's available right on the website, of course, website. So thank you all very much for attending. And I hope you come back for our second webinar in a week. Yes. And we'll leave this open for a few minutes just in case you're still downloading something. Feel free to send us an email if you have any follow-up questions or are still having trouble getting access to the files. Natalie can put our email address in there. And just to let us know your reaction to this. Yeah. I'm glad that you attended. Yeah. Yes, please. We'll see you next time. Thanks. Bye-bye.