 Hi there, folks, and it Ohes quite daunting to follow someone like Audrey Waters but. I can talk about- well. I'll start with those that don't know me movement, My name's Martin Hoxe, I work as a member of staff at the association for learning technology. But I'm actually a Glas memor as well, and my background is learning technology. I started off at Glasgow Caledonian University working with Linda Craner, University of Strath Clyde with Professor David Nicol. Today I'm going to talk about OCTEL, which is ALT's Open Course in Technology Enhanced Learning. It's actually the second iteration of the course that we've run. For this iteration we did something experimental. It was, as Marilyn will tell you, some of it was very last minute. But for those also that came along to Brian Maver's presentation, there's some nice innovation that you can do when you're under pressure and strains. Also a lot of the background of the things I'm talking about is collected in the OCTEL blog, so I'll be talking about some of the technical aspects, and you'll find links to different things for that. You'll also find some of the data. So I'm not going to go into some of the course information, but it's there if you want to have a look at it. After David Cernahan's presentation on day one, I feel I should put this little disclaimer, say these are my views, not the views of the Association of Learning Technology. You'll see why in a second, hopefully. Does anyone know what this is? Yes, this is ARPANET. The network developed in the 60s by the US military to connect data centres. Obviously for those of you that know your internet history, ARPANET was one of the components that facilitated the development of the internet. This was a picture of it in 1990. Obviously it's got a lot bigger and it's expanded. A lot of that early work was done by Paul Bran, and this idea of if you're making a military network, one that's robust, strong, reliable, what sort of shape does it have, and they've gone for the distributed model. I'm quite interested in networks, not just networks of information, but networks of people. Having worked in networks for a while, we can see this distributed model is out there all the time. I think one of the questions we should ask ourselves is educators. If we were to associate education to one of these networks, what would it look like? Are we getting the most out of the experience we're giving to learners by perhaps a lot of institutions or perhaps more to the decentralised approach of learning and teaching, we've got this wonderful weapon of mass distraction that the US government have facilitated in creating that can connect us not just to people, but to knowledge. I think that's something very interesting, which is obviously why we've started looking at that as an aspect of OPDEL. I'm not going to mention the M word, but in 2012 I started looking at what people like George Siemens, Stephen Downs, David Crommery were doing in terms of distributed education and the tools that they were actually using. You'll recognise a lot of these names, these services. It's quite interesting, Dave White and his colleagues have found some very interesting ideas into visitor and residency in different spaces. We're creating data, we're doing stuff in these spaces, but how can we actually use that within learning and teaching? This is something that George Siemens has recently been thinking about. Google have developed the knowledge graph, this idea of nodes of information that can be connected, so it's like the six degrees of separation of Richard Bacon. Is it Richard Bacon? Am I thinking Blue Pea presenters? Someone, six degrees of something to someone. Kevin, thank you. This idea of we're present in different spaces, but that potentially builds the picture of that person. It is about the person, their attributes in terms of things that they already know, the connections that they already have to other people or other information. This was post-reflection on doing octel, how can we start doing some of that within the octel course? The title of the talk indicates Open Badges seems to be a good way to do that. I'll detail some of that in a second. This is just underlying the idea of a personal learning knowledge graph. I think there is implications. I think there are opportunities touched upon that very eloquently this morning about ownership of data, ownership of your profiles in different spaces. That's some of the context in my own thinking around this, so octel. For some more information about octel, it's actually a course that's facilitated by output. It wouldn't be possible without alt members. The wee tutors are alt members. The support tutors are alt members. Any tutors or support tutors? We've got Linda, Tracy Madden. These people are part of the construction. They're developing the materials, and they're helping with the delivery of materials. It wouldn't be possible to run octel without them. This is a general model that we use within octel. If you've been browsing around the conference platform, a lot of what we develop in octel gets put into the conference platform. It's this idea of being able to pull in some of the data from these different spaces. This year we're pulling in slide shares into the conference platform. The reason for doing this is to then, as a very loose collection of people participating in the course, it's redistruting that information back to them so that they can start making their own connections. It's not just connections to new information, but connections to new people. Having a profile is part of that, it's key. Also email is key. We can't get away from email right now, and it's a very good technology for actually pushing back. That's what we're doing. We're sucking information into a site, a WordPress site, and then we're pushing it back out via email or RSS feeds or just coming to the site itself if that's what you want to do. Obviously there's implications with using... I've tripped over the RSS word. I'm not going to go into too much detail about that today, but it's a technology for just moving data around places, and it's a technology that seems to be on the wane, so you should be looking at the work. People like Ken Lane, who was mentioned this morning, are doing in terms of another technology, APIs. Again, I won't go into too much detail about that. The interesting stuff, the badging aspect. Hopefully you're familiar with digital badging. I don't think there needs to be much explanation about it, because I think a lot of people already grasp the idea of what a badge is. A digital badge is exactly the same. It's something that an individual can have. They can display if they want. It's something for them to click. As part of OCTEL, we had a number of badges that participants could collect. The course is structured on a weekly topic basis, and so each week of the six weeks, we had a collection of five different badges that people could achieve, and these were the same types of badges each week. Although the activities associated with those would be related to the week in question, we started off with some very basic badges of checking in. This was a case of coming to the site and clicking a button. Check-in badges, I think, were useful, and you'll see why in a second. This as well is an entry point, getting people used to what they have to do within the system to actually get a badge. We were using weekly webinars, so we had a webinar badge. We used an access code at the end of the webinar and served the people that were coming several weeks soon, worked out that they could scroll to the end of the video and collect the badge if they wanted to, but we didn't get too hung up about that. The final badges on the top row there are a TEL-1 and a TEL Explorer badge. A TEL-1 was one activity. If you do any activity this week, this is the activity you should do and for that we'd asked participants in OCTEL to submit a link to something they've got as evidence of that activity. As part of the OCTEL site, we did include forums, so it might be a link to a forum post that they've made on the site, but the idea was to encourage them to write in their own spaces, so in their own blogs or in their own Google Plus groups and then share that URL. The only stipulation was that the evidence that they were submitting was public so that we could go and see it anywhere else. Browsing the internet could see it as well. Then we had to TEL Explorer badge, which was if you wanted to do more than one thing, you could do two or three or four activities. Same again, submit a link to that. If you did any three of these badges, you automatically got a weekly topic badge. So we did this all within WordPress and the plugin we used was called BadgeOS. It's a free open source plugin. If you're interested in badging as part of courses, I would highly recommend that you go and look at it and I'll highlight some of its features if I have time at the end, but one of the nice features within it is that you could create steps. So, for example, the topic badge, we just created a template step of if you did three things, then you got this badge automatically, which helped a lot with the administration of this. So I mentioned the TEL one and TEL Explorer badges, so this was useful for us in terms of an open course. Even though we've got data collection methods for aggregating activity, if you have a blog registered with the site, we'll pull in the data for it. But not everyone wants to take that step, not everyone has a blog. So the idea of people actually submitting the evidence to us starts filling in some of that personal knowledge graph. So they're declaring bits of information that they want the rest of the world to see that other people on the course might actually find useful. And I think that's quite interesting for us in terms of being the ability to build up a picture of a person. Because we were using a variation of digital badges called Mozilla Open badges, the evidence associated with the work that they were submitting actually gets baked into the badge information. And so when that badge is in the Mozilla backpack, which is a portfolio place where you can store your badges, they've got a link. The person looking at that badge can potentially go back and see the evidence. So we're getting some sort of interoperability here. Another, I mentioned the check-in badge and one of the aspects of that I think we found useful in terms of the personal knowledge graph was one of the features within the system was the ability to show who else had actually earned the badge. So it gives situational awareness, again, in an open course context to actually see who else was active in that week. I think it's very useful for other participants. It can be a very lonely experience. And clicking on the person's avatar if they've been awarded the badge, they can go through to the profile, see the person's profile on the site, see where else they existed in the internet, make those connections off the site. So it's making something that is useful for the individual beyond just the course. I mentioned we were using badge OS plug-in for this and one of the other nice features was its ability for tutors to provide feedback on students' work. So those familiar with the WordPress plug-in platform will recognise some of this interface and it's just using the comments as an opportunity for both the tutor and the learner to actually engage in dialogue around the evidence that they've submitted. For us, this was all in the public. It was a great opportunity for people to make connections or to learn vicariously from what other people are doing. I'm going to skip out. This is some of the features in terms of the badge OS plug-in in terms of creating these stepped procedures that would automatically award the badge, which we found very useful. And because we were integrating a social network aspect with body press, we can actually do things within the community. But again, all these points, these are optional things for people to do. These are optional kind of nodes within the graph that people could start creating for themselves and hopefully start making connections. I think one thing to reflect on is a lot of this isn't particularly new. I'm a member of a community called Stack Overflow, which is for coders. Again, you have this idea of badges and people can award badges to other people. So there's already a lot of experience of these types of systems going on. I think one of the questions asked often about badges is, do they actually count? Do they mean anything? And it's quite interesting. It's part of the course that even though we had people at the beginning saying, oh no, I'm not going to do badges, they're not for me. Within week two or three I was getting emails about how can I submit this evidence for the badge? I'm sorry, I've been caught up in this. And I think there's a real ownership here. People, they want to collect things. They like doing that. And so always these badges can count for the individual. They won't display them if they don't mean anything to them. Whether they mean anything to an employer is another question. I'm going to skip over some of the r-bots, but I will point out one thing. There is a wider direction of travel that I'm quite interested in following here. I'm not going to go into too much detail, but you should Google domain of one soon to see what University of Mary Washington are doing in this space, because I think that will be a real eye-opener for you. And Audrey's an advocate of that project. I trust and respect what Audrey says. So if you don't trust me, trust Audrey. There's obviously privacy issues, so I'm just going to throw that up there for a few seconds. Mainly so you know that I know that there are concerns, which maybe you'll ask questions with, and finish with a thank you. Together to ask any questions. Do you have anything to ask is said to wait till the mic gets there, because the only answer to this is can't hear you. Otherwise. So anybody have any questions, please raise your hands, and the mic will travel to you. If you have any questions online, then press the question here, then raise your hand. Thanks. Moira Mayly, hi. Hi. These digital badges flag the beginning of some sort of international cross-platform degrees or qualifications of some sort, and usually standard systems follow those initiatives and they can sort of slow them down and it gets caught up in a bureaucracy. Is that the way you think that badges will go? Or do you think more generic competencies are going to be indicated by them, which could be edited? It's early on. I think a lot of people are, I was talking to Fiona Harvey from University of Southampton who's starting to look at badges as well. And to saying that there's issues. For us, for all, as an organisation, we don't have institutions like the Quality Assurance Agency looking over our shoulder all the time. For institutions like University of Southampton, there's obviously very different implications. And talking to Fiona, I think for them it was trying to tackle it in two different ways. So there would be kind of unofficial badges awarded as part of some of the courses that they're doing, but that might then lead on to a university recognised badge. Whether that slows down the development, I don't know, would probably be my honest answer. I don't know. It's creating those opportunities. So I could start creating my own badges. I could award myself. There's nothing stopping me to do that. So it's the opportunity of people creating badges for them to achieve. I don't know if I answered that. Hi, Martin, that looks fair. Thanks. I get the impression just from the last three days that badges this year, at least for me, are this year's kind of hot topic, whereas moog was last year's hot topic. This year's kind of got creative juices flowing. I noticed that the conference website this year is WordPress and BuddyPress, which seems to be exactly the same as your octel course. I'm wondering if you'd had any discussions with the rest of the association about whether you're going to be awarding badges for next year's conference. It's funny you should say that, but it was a discussion that... It was something we wanted to do, and there were a number of aspects that we could potentially badge in terms of if you're a presenter, if you're an attendee, and aspects of your interaction on the conference as well. So unfortunately we were beaten by time, but I think that's one of the useful things of doing octel is it's an opportunity to experiment with these things and then deploy them in a different context, and that's how our development arc is. Octel, we then put that into the conference site. Then whatever we learn from the conference we'll put back into octel, and at the same time we're looking at thinking about how we can support the wider octel community as well. I think there are a number of aspects that we can start including badging. All has a number of special interest groups. Is there parts of that that we can start badging? So yeah, we've got badges. We've got badge sunglasses on. Everything is badge tinted. So last question from Barbara. So a reflection that it felt there were two distinct levels of badging, what you were showing us was really quite fine grained badging about participation in maybe just a week of the course, which felt great in terms of motivating the learner, et cetera, but feels sort of way too fine grained for example an employer to age with. So I'm wondering if you've sort of thought about aggregating those fine grained badges together to almost automatically feed into higher level badges, or is that very complicated or what? It was very much the reason that we had as well as the more fine grained badges each week, this topic badge. So that would be something. And we had a, at the end of the course as well we actually created some special badges. So if you've got all the topic badges you know we had a gold badge you know octel gold participant badge. So I think that was useful in terms of basically allowing the individual more control over what they wanted to display but also keep that motivation going throughout the course. And I think that's one of the things with badging is it's micro accreditation. And you can, there's some really interesting work in terms of creating different pathways or different collections of badges that actually mean something else. So yeah, I think there's going to be a lot more work in that area. Okay.