 Okay, thank you, gosh. Anyway, good afternoon, good evening, good morning. Wherever you might be located in the physical world, we have our technical difficulties corrected, I do believe. I hope you're enjoying this conference. It's just a great one, the first of the Open Simulator platform. I'm Hope Baderbush. I'm serving as moderator and co-presenter of this session. And it's on using digital badging to promote lifelong learning. This is actually an educator track presentation, but they had a overflow problem. So we're here in the research area. So I hope you're in the right place. Let's see, I'm a career educator with the experience in K-12 classroom teaching, college and university, a curriculum designer, program manager, and grant writer all rolled into one. The last five years I've been working in the virtual platform where I designed sponsored virtual projects and professional development training for educators. My projects have been funded through Kansas State University, NOAA, NASA, and the US Department of State. I create professional development programs for educators in the STEAM-X disciplines. That is science, technology, engineering, the arts and mathematics. The X means that I integrate workforce skills into my programs. And I currently have the core of an alternative energy program originally sponsored by the US Department of State set up in Second Life and have trained over 30 teachers so far with this program. So if you have a group that you'd like to go through the program, just contact me. For this project, we plan to offer digital badges in wind energy, electricity and mathematics through James Madison's University Center for Wind Energy and with the help of Penn State University. Before I introduce my co-presenter, I'd like to take a poll of the audience. Please type in chat, yes or no. Have you heard of digital badges before? Digital badges is not a new concept but it's relatively new to education. I don't see anyone typing but I'm going to introduce Chris Gamrat of Penn State University now. And beginning in 2000 May, Chris started working with what he calls the AESP for the Design Development Implementation and Training of Technology to Support Teacher Professional Development. Chris has worked on major technology support projects for AESP, such as the NASA Educators Online Network and Teacher Learning Journeys. Chris's education background includes a BS in Management Information Systems and an ME Master's in Education in Instructional Systems from Penn State. He's currently pursuing his doctorate in Learning, Design and Technology. If you have any questions for Chris, please type them in local chat and we'll get to them as soon as we can. So take it away, Chris. Great, thank you very much. I just want to make sure that everybody can hear me. Well, I can hear you. Okay, I'll take your word for it. So I'm really happy to be here to talk about digital badging. It's something that I've gotten really into and I'm really excited about in the past, probably about two years. We've been really doing a lot of cool things with that at Penn State and I just wanted to jump into the presentation here. So let me know if you see slide two. Okay, so this is just a quick overview of what I plan on talking about today. So first I'm gonna do a discussion on what digital badges are since it's a relatively new thing. I'm going to talk about what's going on in the field. So who's using digital badges, who's interested in them, that sort of thing. And then what I've been working on which will be two different projects that I'm doing here at Penn State. And then I'll also give a tour of teacher learning journeys, which is the national project that I'm working on with NASA. So let's jump on in. Okay, so introduction to digital badges. Digital badges used to be these things that Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts would get. They'd be kind of this sewn patch that would go onto a sash or something like that. And they represented different learning achievements, different participation achievements. So I went to this workshop, I went to this conference, I went to this jamboree. Those are things that they really kind of represented. For example, I learned how to tie knots. And these are representations that badges were really good at. Now badges are becoming digital. So they're becoming this clickable representation of learning achievements or participation in professional development. And so this has really generated a lot of potential in the areas of K-12 education, higher education, additionally in vocational training as well. So really starting to explore a lot of those different options and opportunities. In particular, I'm looking at teacher professional development. Go to the next slide. So I'm looking at teacher professional development specifically in the STEM field. So, and that's really what NASA has a lot of interest in. And so we want to be able to provide resources and workshops and conferences through NASA and be able to kind of create these representations of this professional development. So then teachers can keep track of their activities and then go back to their administration and say, this is what I've done. And these are the advancements that I'm making for my students, for my classroom and that sort of thing. And in the world of teacher professional development, it's also really closely linked to keeping up certifications in terms of every so many years that they'll be required to renew their teaching certification. And it's also linked back to teacher compensation. So those are being able to track this sort of learning was really important to them. It's also useful in student field experiences. So here at Penn State, there are a number of opportunities that students can engage in their trips where they go to Jamaica or South Africa or trips out onto research vessels and into the sea or to different parts of the world. So those are another really great way of capturing experiences. And it's something that's really not part of a transcript. The other thing is internships. Internships are really difficult to really kind of summarize. You could say, oh, I spent the summer with Microsoft or Xerox or something like that, but what does that really mean to an employer? And also those really great digital badges are also really great for HR sorts of training. So internal training and the tracking of it becomes really powerful and allows for, and allows for not only being able to keep track of what you've learned at a specific job, but also being able to move across an organization and being able to keep track of what you've learned or being able to move out of that organization to another place and still having representation of the skills that you know. So let's jump to, so I'm gonna just dive into the components of a digital badge that I think are really the most important. The first of which is that the metadata is baked in. So what does that mean? It really represents this idea that digital badges have more to them than just this physical thing or just this image. So I'm gonna use the example of interview of physicists, which is one of the ones that we have in teacher learning journeys. So metadata baked in really represents this opportunity to insert all sorts of different information related to that learning experience. I'm not sure if the slides are loading slowly for me if they're loading slowly for everyone. So I'm just trying to put in a little bit of pause in case it's loading slowly for everyone else. I do see your next slide. Yeah. Okay, so this is the one that should have the arrows sticking out from it? Yes. Okay, great. So in this, you can really capture a lot of really valuable information. So first example is issuer. So this is coming from the NASA Aerospace Education Services project that's coming from Penn State University. So those really have a lot of weight to them. In addition to that, it includes a criteria for earning the badge. So it's a detailed explanation of what was involved for somebody to earn this particular badge. Beyond that, there's evidence. So each badge requires certain types of evidence. So sometimes it's a written reflection, sometimes it's an uploaded document, sometimes it's a URL to a video or an audio clip. In addition to that, there's also an assessment piece. So you can actually capture not only what you've, the evident, the artifact of the learning that you've created, but also the evidence of the assessment. So feedback that you received from an expert in the field and as well as data issued and a number of other pieces of metadata associated with it. So this becomes really valuable because as an employer, when somebody comes in with a list of badges, they're then able to see so much more about what the learner has been engaging in and really get a good sense of what they're able to do. So this becomes something that's really kind of enhances, really enhances that access to information and really creates this transparency, which is what I wanna talk about on the next slide if it loads. Here we go, okay. So in transparency, so here's an example. This is actually a subset of my transcript from last fall. So if you can see that it says I took a IST 525 and the name of the course is CSCW. Well, that's not really very meaningful and it doesn't really give me a lot of information. The only thing, the only other piece of information that you might have with that is a letter grade. And if you're, for me to apply to a job, that really doesn't help the employer understand what I know about, what I know about that topic, what I got out of that class are really anything else. So being able to have these associated badges really allows for significant awareness from the perspective of the employer but also from the perspective of the learner as well because it becomes this really great repository of information of all of your accomplishments over time. And that really allows for this sort of ongoing portfolio of lifelong learning. And that's really kind of the idea that's been in the works not only here at Penn State but also at a number of different organizations across the world. For example, Mozilla is working on what they're calling the digital backpack. And the idea is that it's this open structure that allows anybody out there who's creating and issuing badges to be able to upload their badges and put them into this digital backpack. So it becomes not only a portfolio of things that I've earned from Penn State but also things that I've earned directly from NASA, things that I've earned from the Smithsonian and a number of other organizations that offer different learning experiences. So it really becomes this really nice clean way of organizing and keeping track of information. In addition to just being able to import your badges, it also allows you to kind of group them kind of like a Pinterest setup or a folder setup where you can put them into different categories and really assemble them into different types of portfolios. And that really adds a lot of value because then you can direct employers to specific subset portfolios of, these are my learning design badges and I'd really like you to check those out. I have other badges in different things but they're less important to my job and more kind of a hobby. So that's really kind of a nice functionality. So more on the Mozilla is really working to create this opportunity for people to be able to upload issue and display their badges. So this, and in this structure, there are tools and functionality for creating badges. So it seems as though they're adopting another badge platform that has grown significantly in popularity, it's called badge.usbadg.us. And that's really a platform that has been out for well over a year now and has really grown in popularity. It seems as though that they're taking over because from what I can tell it looked like it was really owned and operated by one person. And to really create a robust system you need to have a number of people working on and being able to incorporate it into that. And I think that that's really going to grow. It also allows for, and that was also one of the first systems, take the link in the chat. Yes, I can do that. Okay, nevermind that backslash. And it also includes a lot of tools for displayers. So in the near future, there's going to be the ability to display earned badges in Facebook, in LinkedIn, in other tools that are out there and it allows you to really kind of incorporate this into your social life. So what's going on with digital badges? So I talked a little bit about Mozilla. Mozilla is heavily involved in the badging platform. They were really looking to share this with the international community. There are a lot of people that are very interested in it. There are a number of people, a number of competitions and grants. They were really trying to advance and trying to against digital badging. So for example, this digital media and learning competition. This happened a little over a year ago and they had awarded about 33 grants to investigate digital badging and a number of different learning opportunities. And they should have a lot of information about that since it's been over a year, I believe the grants were about a year long and so they should be starting to post information about what were the results of those grants. So, and this is a collaboration between Haystack which is an educational group, the MacArthur Foundation, Mozilla and the Bill Melinda Gates Foundation. So there's a lot of really large and very interested groups looking into digital badging from all across, really from all across the United States. So I think that all the participants in this were US institutions. In addition to that, there are also a number of other groups. So this is Smithsonian. We've really started to push out a badging platform which is mostly aimed at children I would say, but I think that they're also trying to include things that are for adults as well. There's the NASA Airspace Education Services Project which is my home project. We've been issuing badges for over a year now and really started to increase the availability for that with teachers. We have probably about 80 some different badges that are available for teachers to earn. And in addition, there's also the Purdue passport. Purdue is really one of the biggest presences in terms of universities offering a badging platform right now. It's also integrated with their course management system and it's really become something that I think is going to quickly gain popularity at Purdue and probably at other universities. And then, so when I say, and soon Penn State. So Penn State is really starting to get their feet wet with this. You can see the very last image is a guy with beard. That's one of the, that's the PI for the Aerospace Education Services Project, Dr. Kyle Peck, and he's really been interested in using digital badges in a number of different applications, both in higher education but also in K-12 platforms as well. And I am also, in addition to working with NASA, I'm also with the PI for the Lifelong Learning Landscape which is a Penn State implementation of digital badging platform. That's something that I think is really going to be interesting. We'll get just about ready to start piloting this platform for the fall semester and I'm hoping that we'll be able to collect a lot of really good data, do some interviews, talk with some faculty and students about how they're interested in using digital badges, what the, what sort of adoption looks like, what's motivation look like, and really start to better understand digital badges from that perspective. So there's a lot of impacts related to digital badges already. There are a number of news articles out there, so US News, CBS, there's just a lot of, a flurry of discussion on it. I would, if digital badges hadn't come out at almost the same time as MOOCs, I would have said that digital badges really, really would have been this story but it seems as though they've been a little bit overshadowed. And I also suspect that they're going to, they're in some places, they're going to converge. I can see a lot of applications for digital badges within the context of MOOCs, and I think that that's something that'll be really interesting to see in the near future. So in hope, I just wanted to check with you, I hope you're keeping an eye on the time because it's hard for me to do that. Yes, Chris, we're just a little after one, we're good. Okay, good. I'm having a really hard time with this podium. I have to click it three or four times for it to advance to the next slide. So who's interested in badges here at Penn State? So first of all, there's a new center here that's called the Center for Online Innovation and Learning and that has become this organization that's really starting to support internal grants here at Penn State across a number of different, number of different digital learning platforms that are really trying to be kind of a, almost kind of like a venture capitalist group for innovations in online learning. It's really something that's helping to support that. The Penn State libraries are really interested in it, being able to support that for every year, thousands of students come into the libraries to learn how to use it, to learn to really understand how to access not only the thousands of books that they have, but also all of the journals and all of the other online resources. And so that really becomes a great training opportunity which can be used in digital badges. The Alumni Career Services is very fascinated about it because they're looking at it from the perspective of future employers and really being able to help sell Penn State students to other employers once they graduate. And we're also looking at it from the perspective of continuing education. There's a lot of opportunity for learning once you leave college. I know that I've been learning ever since I left and I feel like that's not going to stop anytime soon. So being able to capture that sort of learning is I think is going to be really important. In addition to that, there's just a lot of other organizations here at Penn State that they're very interested in. And I think that those applications are not Penn State specific. I mean, a lot of universities, a lot of K-12 institutions and I think even a lot of corporate organizations are going to be interested in very similar applications to badges. And in particular, this is really what I'm interested in is looking at the diversity of adoptions and implementations and trying to better understand that. Okay, just notice there's some chat here. Yeah. Okay, Ruby wants to talk, so okay. No, Chris, she's just chatting with Beth. Go ahead. Okay, so there's a couple of things that I'm looking at right now that are really kind of related to some of the research that I'm doing with badges. So the first is individualization or personalization. So often in classrooms and professional development training, really there's, one size doesn't fit all. And I just noticed that there's too many apostrophes and teas on that slide. So I apologize for that. One size really doesn't fit all. It really, sometimes you need to specialize and there needs to be a lot of the ability for people to just make decisions about their learning and take ownership of it. There's a lot of literature that says that by having more ownership and having no responsibility allows for greater engagement. And I would hesitate to say results in more learning but I feel like that it probably does. And right now I'm looking at a lot of personalization literature. I'm really trying to dig into a lot of what we've been capturing and looking at related to how people are using their professional development time. It also means kind of this opportunity for this Goldilocks style of professional development. So in traditional professional development somebody comes in, they do a workshop and for a small number of people it's just right. It's exactly what they need. But there are a lot of people on either end that are saying that this is way too much. I just started, I need to figure out how to get my lesson plans together. I'm not ready for this sort of workshop and then there's some people who have been around for a long time. They're really incredible teachers and it's just not enough for them. They're left bored counting down the minutes until they can leave. So it really makes sense to be able to offer individualized professional development especially for educators because just their needs are so different and being able to utilize their time which is really stretched already really allows for some significant benefits. So teachers can really get what they need and be able to utilize it for their students in their classroom rather than sitting in a conference room or sitting in an auditorium and hoping that they can get one or two things out of the workshop that they're sitting through. So at this point I'm going to stop and see if there are any questions and if not I will start on the teacher learning journeys tour. If anyone has any questions, you can type them in chat but I also have a few from other people, Chris, if our audience doesn't have any. Okay. Or we can always, if there aren't any questions now from the audience, we can always save them for later. Yeah, I just go ahead. Okay. So a teacher learning journey. About 10 minutes, Chris. Okay, so I'll speed through this pretty quick. Teacher Learning Journeys was a collaboration between the Aerospace Education Services Project and the NSTA, the National Science Teachers Association. You know, I just saw a whole bunch of chat go by and then it disappeared. So I have no idea what was being said. So I hope you're, I hope we are able to read that. Yes, I'm reading it. They're just pretty much chatting. It's okay. Okay. So we designed it. We decided to create this system and really give it the idea of a journey feel. So a lot of our analogies are kind of based on travel, on a travel metaphor. So Teacher Learning Journeys has different aspects such as an itinerary where you're able to kind of plot out your activities, a log book where you're able to capture and retrieve reflections from different activities that you've completed. And we also decided that the badge metaphor made a lot of sense because oftentimes you're picking up, it's not as common anymore, but a lot of people used to get those stickers on their luggage that would say like London or Paris and Cairo, that sort of thing. And you'd accumulate those, but you also accumulated this idea of these stamps. So like on a passport, you'd go through, you'd go through a country, you get your passport stamped and then you really kind of get that sort of recognition of you made it through. And really we kind of wanted to be able to create that in Teacher Learning Journeys. And so we broke some more to come on that. We also wanted them to create this goal-setting step. So that allowed them to really define their goals and say what they wanted to get out of this particular journey. A lot of teachers were very interested in that idea and it really helped them to kind of focus on their professional development and get exactly what they needed for a particular school year or semester, whatever the case may be. So they can go ahead and set that. And then we asked them to search for different activities. So we have a number of different content areas. We have five different strands of content in there right now and hoping to add more in the near future. We also have a number of different hours. So a lot of teachers will be able to say like, okay, well, we have like a free Friday because there's no schools. So I've got some time to do some PD, what can I do? So I've got, let's say six hours that I can, so teachers can go into the system and really select things that make sense for their needs. So in terms of both hours and content area, and that really adds for a lot of nice flexibility. When teachers find what they, yes? Chris, can I just jump in a minute? Sure. We have a question from the Ustream group. These are people watching online rather than in world. Angelique Global Coach has asked, will MOOCs offer these badges as well? I have heard of several MOOCs that are looking into that. I know Penn State is offering, Penn State right now has set up five different MOOCs that they're offering, two of which have completed, but I know that they're looking into the possibility of incorporating MOOCs into some of the future ones. I know that there's a climate change one that I've had some preliminary conversations with. So I do see that as a definite possibility in probably the near future. I can't think of any off the top of my head that are doing it right now, but I wouldn't be surprised at all. Thanks, Chris. So back to the tour, were there any other questions? Well, we have some other questions, but you have about 10, maybe five more minutes. Okay, so teachers are able to incorporate all their learning activity goals into this itinerary, which they can then click on, which then they can look at and decide on when they want to get started. It also provides a lot of really nice scaffolding in this getting started section, which really lays out the description and the tasks involved in being able to get recognition for a particular activity. And so once they're ready to get started, they can go out and do the activity, which is typically watch a video, engage in different websites or activities, go and create something in the classroom, work with different people out in the field, and then we ask them to go and create a log. And the log for the activity typically is a reflection of the activity and oftentimes something, some sort of additional media associated with it. So that might be a lesson plan. It might be a video. It might be some sort of like audio stream. It might be screen captures of using different sorts of tools, but it really gives them a lot of supporting evidence for their participation in learning professional development. So once they complete the logs, they can request these stamps and badges. And at this point, the stamps really represent kind of a lower level of recognition, so it's really something that's just kind of that paragraph-worthy reflection of, I thought this was good and I think I might use it. Badges really represent this, a much more practice-changing media creation sorts of activities. And finally, we offer the ability for them to create reports, and this allows them to pull out all sorts of different information, which includes an executive summary, which totals a number of hours completed, number of badges awarded, and different types of badges in addition, also ones that are under review, and all of these badges are currently being reviewed by NASA education experts, so they also get very high quality feedback. And then finally, we give them the opportunity to generate PDF versions of certificates, which they can then print out. So this is really high-level summary, it includes just a number of badges and stamps, it includes the date that they access that sort of information. And I believe that we've reached the time, so I have a few questions if you'd like me to answer these, or if there are other questions from the audience, I'd be happy to answer those. So I'd like to answer questions from the audience first, I'll give you the, because I think that's the most interesting. Okay, if you'll type your questions in the local chat, we'd appreciate that, otherwise we do have a few questions from other people, from Ustream and other sources. I noticed that there was some discussion about how our librarians in the audience were going to use digital badging in their programs during the school year, so that's a great application, I believe. And one of the questions that was asked is, is this, are badges a threat to higher ed, the grading system in higher ed? Do you think, Chris? I suspect that digital badges are not a threat to grading in higher ed, and I attended a recent presentation by Kyle Bowen, who is a badging advocate over at Purdue, and really the person responsible for creating the wonderful Purdue passport system. And he really pointed out that grades kind of are badges already, they provide a small amount of metadata associated with this learning activity, and that's really what badges are. I think the benefit to badges is really that it's kind of an enhancement of the existing transcripts concept. So I really see them actually becoming kind of more merged than anything else. Oh, that's an excellent point, definitely. Along that line, what do you say to the people who are skeptics about digital badging? So, a lot of difference, I have had some skeptics in college, in across the university here at Penn State, and a lot of them have really said, I get it for professional development, I get it for these different outside of class sorts of recognition, but I don't really see what the value is to coursework. And so I think that it's important to really represent, say that it does represent a lot more to students, to employers, than really the transcripts currently provide. There's just very little information in transcripts, and it's, I think that any benefit that a job seeker can really kind of make themselves unique to an employer, I think has value. And I think that that's really where the badges are going to kind of find their place in the sun. I really think that that value, that additional information is really going to help help employers separate out who they're looking for and who they want to interview, and I think that that additional information is going to do it. Yeah, I would agree with you, and that's why I incorporate workforce skills into my professional development, where digital badging will fit quite nicely there. Ruby, in our audience has asked, do you know of virtual worlds that are using a badge or stamp applications? What I like about this is that the badge grade is more meaningful to everyone, including parents who forget the assignments and only remembered the grade. And she has a frowny face there. Well, I know just from my perspective, Ruby, that I am going to be offering digital badging, and Chris is going to help with that. But what's your response, Chris? I haven't heard of too much in terms of virtual worlds using digital badging. Although, I can't say that there's not, in some perspectives, there's not a big difference between digital badges and other sorts of like in-game or gamification types of achievements. I know that that's actually really common in different sorts of simulations and games. Although, I will say that there is an important distinction in some aspects, gamification and badges are kind of the same thing, but I'll also point out that there's really kind of this learning representation, which I think is the, a lot of people like to call microcredentialing. And the microcredentials really are what's representing the learning achievements. There are a lot of other achievements, like you unlock this character or you were able to get this certain score. Those aren't really necessarily kind of like skill acquisition or learning knowledge acquisition types of badges. And I think that it's important to kind of separate them out sometimes. So I do see it happening, but I don't, in virtual worlds and games and that sort of thing, but I don't see that sort of microcredentialing going on yet. Interesting. Along the skeptical area question, we have aren't badges just another educational fad? What do you think? So I'm gonna go back and point to the comment I made earlier about how I think that they're really going to end up merging with transcripts. And badges, even from the perspective of Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, I mean badges have lasted for a really long time. Nobody said, no one has come up with an idea to replace that. And from that perspective, I feel like that sort of representation seems to make sense. People get it, you know, there's sort of kind of this weight to it. And I think that higher ed has this really interesting capability of incorporating new ideas and new technologies into the way it works. And I think that that's mostly what's likely to happen with badging. I think it's going to be incorporated into transcripts, into e-portfolios, which is something that's become really popular in education. And I think that that's really kind of where it's going to live from the perspective of higher education. I think probably the same, something similar will be true in K-12 as well. Okay, great. And our final question is, are there standards that exist for digital badges? Have any standards been set? Yes, in fact, the Mozilla group is working with a number of different interested stakeholders and parties in setting standards for this. And while it's fairly limited right now, so description, date, issuer, evidence, criteria, that sort of thing, it is starting to grow and they're also starting to include a couple of really interesting ideas like badging levels. So I'm not exactly sure what sorts of applications or if these levels are going to be across all badges, but the idea of being able to say, and I think we kind of captured that a little bit in teacher learning journeys, that this badge is not worth as much as this other badge. I think that that's a really interesting and probably an important distinction because at some point that's going to be important for employers when they're looking at badges, it's easy for them to become very overwhelmed with potentially hundreds or thousands of badges. So how do you kind of eliminate that? Well, I think that both these levels and into some respect, it's going to be important for the badge earner to really be able to weed out and display what's most important to them and what they think is most likely to get them that next job. Well, Chris, that was really fascinating. I'm on board for badges and I hope other people, as they learn about them, will be as well. It's time to wrap up our session. I'd like to remind the audience and those people on Ustream that there's conference break coming up next. They're recommending that you close out your computers, clear your cash, and then come back in later. We thank you for listening and thank you for your time and enjoy the rest of the conference. The schedule can be found at conference.opensimulator.org. Thanks so much and thank you, Chris. Thank you for attending, everyone.