 And Steve and Brian, could you turn your video on? And let me know when we're live, we should be live now, I think. You're going back to video? Yeah. We're back to live? Hello? Hello, world? Excellent, right. Well, welcome everybody. My name is Doug Balshaw and I'm joined here by Brian Mathers and Steve Rieger. They'll introduce themselves in a second, but this is the first of a cooperative venture between cooperatives. So we are OpenCorp and EducatorsCorp and we're working together and we thought we'd kick things off by doing a short webinar on why you might want to use badges in your particular context. So I'll let these guys introduce themselves and I'll come back to me. I'm going to be driving most of the presentation stuff today, but I'm going to be indebted to the expertise of these two gentlemen, too. If you've got any questions as we go along, then my able colleagues and also the people who are part of these co-ops, they're just mentioned, will be on hand to answer your questions via the chat on YouTube, but also via the open badges hashtag on Twitter. So I'm going to hand it over to Steve, first of all, to introduce himself and then to Brian. Thank you. So my name is Steve Rieger. I'm with Educators Cooperative and our focus on badging and what we bring in conversation are some examples of practical implementations that we've been working with school districts, particularly in the field of education, including some community college and adult schools. So we're very excited about this partnership and we want to share some free and open tools as well as some best practices. So any questions that you have, we look forward to helping you. That's great, and Brian? Hi there, I'm Brian Mathers. I'm a fault captor. I'm usually just listening in terms of people having conversations around areas that I'm interested in and what those areas will come by this. So I'm interested in today's webinar just to see if there's any sort of discussion going on that I can turn in the picture. A lot of stuff that we've been looking at today is stuff that I've created. Nice to be in the hall. Thanks Brian. So Steve and Brian are going to what's lovely, lovingly called FaceMute while we do this next bit. And I'm going to switch between this screen and Google slide screen, which is going to go through a lot of Brian's images. We've got a back channel. So Steve, if you want to chime in at any point, then please do let me know and I'll switch screens. And please do ask questions, clothe catering questions if you're on this webinar. And if you're viewing this after the fact, if you're viewing the recording, then can I encourage you to ask questions as well? In that mind, I should probably start recording. That would help, wouldn't it, too? As I said, we're just getting used to this. So I'm going to hit the button on present. Now, the majority of these slides, in fact, all of these slides, plus a couple that we've added in, these were all presented at the Mozilla festival. So what happened was I went over to LA and did some work with the school district there, met Steve and Amy from Educators Corp and invited them to put in a proposal for MozFest. They were accepted and we met again in London last month. So this is just a very quick bluffers guide to open badges. Brian and I worked together obviously a lot through the corp and Brian does these wonderful images through his company, Visual Thinkery, which is part of We Are Open Corp. So the first thing to talk about when we kind of zoom out of what we're talking about when we talk about badges, instead of getting diving straight into the technology is realizing that everything we do, all of our experiences, they have value. And the value for that is that we are much, we are more than just our collection of LinkedIn information. We're more than just our job history or more than just our academic credentials. So I've been all the way through the academic system. I'm Dr. Belchor, but I'd like to think that people wouldn't just introduce me as my academic history or the jobs that I've happened to have. I'd hope they'd talk about me in a much more holistic way as a person. And that's the same as true for everyone, whether they're a young person or older as well. Now, when it comes to the way in which we can prove what it is that we've done, we often refer to certificates. So I don't know if you saw in the wall just there before, I had one of my academic certificates. And often when we go to interview, we're asked to present these certificates. We're asked to prove what it is that we can do and what it is that we know. Now, a certificate is great, but actually a certificate isn't as good as an online badge, an open badge, because it hasn't got as much information in there. An open badge, as we'll find out in a moment, has all of this metadata in it. So when people say, oh yeah, you mean open badge is there? A bit like an online certificate? I say, well, no, a certificate is more like an offline badge. It's more like a poor imitation of an online badge. So what are we talking about when we talk about open badges? This image here was taken by Brian up on a mountain last year. Brian, do you want to talk to this one, or shall I? Yeah, I suppose just to say, yeah, family. And you watch this mountain from sort of down by the beach. And it just stacks up the road in the top all the time. And anyway, we took the kids up and once you get to the top and inside the cloud, it's really hard to see where the mountain top was. And you sort of, you follow the path, but it's sort of years off the path to the mountain top. And sure enough, people had to cobble together a bit of massive big arrows. And it just, it was quite a good photograph. But that's not the point. The point is that inside that photograph is actually quite a lot of method data. So you can see from the photograph itself that you can see what type of film I have. I thought on my 11th of April, 2016, I had an iPhone family, you can see what color profile it was, the focal length of the lens, F number, exposure. And even if there's a GPS reference there, I have to pick up the gap. And it struck me that open badges are very like that, where the method data is baked inside the image. And yeah, and it helped me get my head around how that could be with an open badge. So I'll hand back the data there. Okay, and sorry for anyone who I got the levels wrong in terms of the audio there. Brian was basically saying that this image has metadata baked into it. That means data that you can't necessarily see in the image itself, but the data's there when you click on it, when you right click on it, when we look for that on your Mac or your PC or whatever it is that you're using. Okay, so with that in mind, using that as a mental model, then when we talk about open badges, the great thing about them is that they're evidence-based. They're not just something that you can kind of claim that you've done, like on a CV, which is it tends to be a bunch of claims. What an open badge does is it allows you to evidence exactly what it is that you've done. Now all of this, and we'll get into a bit more detail in a moment, all of this is based upon a free and open standard, which was originally created by Mozilla. Mozilla is best known for the Firefox web browser, and I used to work for Mozilla until last year I was on the original open badges team. So the reason why standards are important is that anyone who can remember back in the bad old days of the web when you had to use a certain browser in order to access certain websites, like this website is best viewed in Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer. The reason that we're now in a situation where you can use any browser to access any website and it all just works fine, is because of open internet standards. And open badges is built on a free and open standard that anybody can build upon. In terms of what we're talking about pedagogically, we've often talked about lifelong learning, but we've never really had a way in which to make that real. So when we talk about badges being stackable, what that means is that they're not just siloed. Your credentials from school, university, out of school organizations, voluntary associations, professional bodies can all stack together and work together to build pathways. And the really important thing is that open badges belong to the individual to whom they're issued. So they're transferable. You can move them between different backpacks and different showcases and different portfolios. They're in your possession and your control. They're not locked within a proprietary system. So in terms of the metadata of the open badge, this is the kind of the really important part of what we're talking about here. And if you only, when I used to be a teacher, I used to say to the kids, if you only learn one thing this lesson, this is what you should learn. And it's the same with this webinar. If you go away with one thing, not knowing anything about badges before, this is the thing to realize that an open badge is an image and that's what you see. So you see the nice front end. But behind that, inside the badge in a way that can't be removed from it is the metadata. So the metaphor I often use is that a bit like baking a cake, you can't then take out the flour and the sugar and the eggs afterwards once you bake the cake. You can't take this information out of the badge once you've baked it. They use the same metaphor of baking. So inside this badge are some mandatory things, things you have to include, things like the name of the badge, the description, the criteria, the image obviously, who issued it, when it was issued and who was issued to. But there's also some things that you can choose to add into there. Things like, does it have any tags so it can be discovered easily? Does it align with any standards? So in the states that might be common core, it could be the web literacy map that I helped develop it. Mozilla, it could be vocational qualifications, modules as part of university degrees, anything at all. It could align with a particular standard. Badgers can also expire. So imagine things like first aid certificates, I used to be a lifeguard, that kind of thing. And most importantly, although it's optional, I think that this really differentiates open badges. You can put a link to evidence. And the evidence URL can be anything that you can put on the web. So we're using YouTube live now. We're all familiar with YouTube videos. Let's say that I claim to be able to build a wall. You know, I can build a wall really well. Well, that's great, but really you want proof that I can build that wall. Now, what better proof than a video showing me very clearly building a wall to the best of my ability? And you can imagine that you can put anything else in there as well. It could be a transcript. It could be an order file. Anything that you can put on the web can go inside an open badge, which is a bit of a game changer really. So when it comes down to it, what can you use open badges for? Well, they can be used literally by anybody for anything. There's no barrier. If you want to issue a badge as an individual, you can do that. There's nobody saying that you can't issue a badge for this or you can only issue a badge for that. So there's no particular quality assurance around the whole open badges ecosystem. And that's both a good thing and a bad thing. It's a bad thing. Most people think when they come to it from maybe a university context, because they're used to a situation in which somebody else tells them what is an out of scope for the university or the organizing body. But it's a good thing because it allows innovation and 1,000 flowers to bloom. So it allows the most useful badges to float to the top and people to crowd in and try and earn those best badges that have exchanged value within the marketplace. So you can issue badges for on the job training, for online learning, like MOOCs for professional development, lots of badges for that. And that leads to things like job opportunities. It leads to lifelong learning, being able to show that lifelong learning, but also to unlocking new possibilities. Perhaps later on we'll talk about how certain badge systems have deliberately linked badges to guaranteed things like job interviews, that kind of stuff. And of course, you can share your open badges anywhere on the web. You can put them in an online backpack if you want to. You can keep them offline. You can share them on social networks. You can put them anywhere on the web that allows you to embed things. I'm just gonna pause there in case Steve wants to chime in. I think I'm back in the mix here. I don't know if you're hearing me or not. Yes, yes, go ahead. My friend, we love working with you guys. I think also we love the participants. This is our first launch. Any questions or thoughts or connections you can make if you wanna throw those up in the chat session, we can happen to address, happy to address them. The only kind of extension of thinking is I feel like there's a lot of confusion about badges. And I think sometimes people interject their understanding of badges and they maybe use their working definition of stickers or their working definitions of a token economy. So I think one of the parts of the badging conversation as was just presented is helping people rethink their understanding of evidence and their understanding of proficiency and their understanding of what the learning outcomes are. And I think badging drives that conversation in new ways that allows people to think in new ways. So the technical aspects of the badging can actually lead people to think philosophically about what they're rewarding and how they're rewarding it. So I think the broader conversation is around proficiency and competency and badging helps drive that conversation. Thanks, Steve. I think when we get to the Q&A later, I think we'll dive into exactly how people can use them in different contexts. I remember in the early days of badges when I was on the Mozilla team, people would want a case study of their exact context when that's not the point is that this is an open standard which can be used for anything. And certainly I think both Educators Corp and We Are Open Corp have got a lot of experience of holding people's hands and helping them to think through what might be possible with their organization when you take off the shackles, when you take off the blinkers and you can do really innovative things and we'll perhaps dive into some of those in a moment. All right, so in terms of thinking about how the open badges infrastructure or standard works in practice, this is a very simplified overview. So the issuer can be over there on the left-hand side, can be anybody. It could be education providers, after-school classes, websites, organizations, but it can also be you as an individual. You can decide to issue a badge as somebody who's got expertise in a certain area, as somebody who's got standing within a particular community. I know that when we were talking to the guys at Digital Me at MOSFest, they were saying that some of the most popular badges are ones which have got the teacher's face on it, which seems strange from my school experience, but different courses for courses, that kind of thing. So the issuer issues the badge to the recipient and that is usually done via email address, but as we may get on to later, that's changing in terms of different versions of the specification. And the recipient can decide to accept that badge, which they would ordinarily do, I guess, or they can choose to reject it. So let's say that someone earned a badge which somehow was unwanted. Maybe it showed something which was maybe slightly negative or showed something which people didn't really want to show about themselves. It was an unwanted badge. They could reject that. Presuming that they do accept the badge, then they can download that badge and store it offline. But what more likely happens is they choose to store it in an online location. And that is usually known as a backpack or a portfolio as a showcase, as I said before. And usually what would happen within that platform, for example, a Mozilla badge backpack, that would be entirely private. So nobody could see that badge. You've accepted the badge, but nobody else can see it. And then what you can do is you can then choose to put that badge in a collection. And the collection could be just one badge or could be five badges. And you can name that collection whatever you want. It could be badges that I earned at a particular university. Could be badges that I earned this year. Could be these are my photography badges from different places, whatever it is. And then you can put them wherever you want on the web. And the awkwardly titled consumers, they would be employers, college admissions, anybody who might have an interest in seeing what it is that you know and can do. And those consumers of the badge can click a verification link and see that that person or that organization really did issue that badge. And we can dive more into the technical side of things if you want later on. All right then, so just moving on and thinking about potential use cases. Brian and I spent a long time working with an organization well known in the UK, perhaps not so well known abroad, called City and Guilds. City and Guilds is a 140-year-old organization and they're a vocational issuing, like awarding body, they issue credentials. And they were very interested in open badges for obvious reasons and in fact, recently acquired DigitalMe who we mentioned before. We'll mention other badging platforms. We kind of work in terms of being like a broker. We don't have a vested interest in one particular badging platform but we'll use examples from around the ecosystem. So City and Guilds, we were thinking about all the different ways in which we could issue badges and we came up with four main ways in which that could work. These aren't the only ways, but they were ways in which seemed to make sense for this particular client. So first of all, membership. We thought that sometimes you want to show that you belong to a professional body or an organization. That might be something that you've paid to join. You know, I'm a member of the open rights group for example and I happily pay my monthly fee to show that I support privacy online. There's all different ways in which you might want to show affiliation with a particular group of people. Next thing you might want to do is you might want to show that you've participated in something. So that might be this webinar. It could be an event that you went to, anything at all. You might show that you volunteered for something. Anything which shows that you turned up and got involved. It could be attendance or it could be actually that you've done something which shows that you were active participant in that particular event. Another thing you might want to focus on is capability. That's reaching a defined standard. So things that we've thought about in this regard might be onboarding. So you join an organization and there's certain things that you, there's certain ways in which organizations do things even if you've worked in a similar organization within the sector. There's certain things that you need to know and get up to speed very quickly. So you might, you might badge that. It might be that you're teaching a new subject. It might be that you are getting to grips with something new and you need to reach a defined standard. So capability would be a way of recognizing that. Then another group of badges that you might want to focus on is mastery. So going well beyond mere capability. So you haven't just reached a line and just got over that line, but you've really gone beyond that. So imagine the Michelin star. So you get a Michelin star for being absolutely amazing chef. And it's not like there's a particular line that you're just trying to get over like food safety standards, but this is really demonstrating excellence. You're at the top of your field. You're being recognized by your peers or by the sector or by some professional body saying that you demonstrate excellence. So these are just four ways, four groups of ways in which you might be able to classify or organize your badges. I'm just gonna pause because I can't see the live stream. And so I'm not sure if there's any questions yet either on Twitter or on the live stream. I'll pause just in case there are any clarification questions. I think your brilliance is capturing it so profoundly that we are focused on your explanation. I think you're spot on. Excellent, thanks Steve. Just do chip in if they come up as I go along. Moving on then. So open badges at its core is a metadata specification. So we found out about what metadata was before. Metadata is data about data. The example I didn't give before, which I'll give now is that when you're on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter and it asks you to add a tag like who's in this photo? You're adding metadata to that photo. Or when you go to the library and you use the Dewey Decimal System, that's metadata. That's data about data, that kind of stuff. So the open badges standard as time has gone on has had more things added to it and we're currently at version 1.1 of the specification with version two, a major upgrade due in early 2017. So as things currently stand, there are ways in which open badges platforms adhere to the standard. And sorry, I'm just distracted by a question there. Well, I'll come to that in a minute from John Johnson. Thank you, John. So there's certain ways in which you align with the standard and you saw all of the different things that you have to do in terms of issuing and including the issuer and who was issued to, et cetera. But with version 1.1 of the specification, which came out right at the start of this year, then it has extensions. So you can imagine that you as an organization might have additional needs to what is involved in the specification. You might have ways of extending the specification, but instead of then creating a silo and badges which only work within your particular system, the way that the open badges metadata standard works is that it's extensible. You can add things on, which you can then share back with the community. So one, for example, which is quite useful is the geolocation extension. So what this allows you to do is to say where a badge was earned. Now, that's not part of the core specification, but you can add that in as something that you might want to use. Let's say, for example, you're taking people on a field trip or orienteering or whatever, and you want to show exactly where a badge was earned or maybe you've got many different campuses in your organization, then you want to show which campus that was earned. There's lots of different ways and there's lots of different extensions. You can view those at openbadgespec.org. So John Johnson has asked the question, for a badge store, do you need to follow the store collection display model? So by that, what I think you mean, John, is do you have to store your badge first, put them into a collection and then display them? That's certainly the way that you have to do it within the Mozilla badge backpack as it currently stands. Digital Me, who I mentioned before, have got a contract from Mozilla to update the Mozilla badge backpack, which will always be around as the reference badge backpack. And that's the model and the logic and the workflow that's in play there. With other badge systems, so for example, Badger, there's OpenBadgeFactory, there's Credly, they have different workflows. Some of them force you to sign up for an account on their platform before you can collect the badge. So you have to collect it through their platform and others just allow you to, once you've been issued the badge, just right click and store it offline or upload it to wherever you want. So that workflow, that store collection display model, that was the kind of suggested default way that the Mozilla badge backpack works, but you don't have to do that if you're using other badge systems. So just to clarify that. And just to say again, that you can move your badges between different badge systems, they're not locked in a proprietary silo. So there we are. Okay then, just thinking about ways in which you can go beyond thinking about a single and individual badge is thinking about badge pathways. So we mentioned Badger just there from Concentric Sky. What they've been doing is thinking about a separate standard for badge pathways and we'll perhaps run a separate webinar on badge pathways at a future date. But some ways, and this is certainly not all of the ways you can think about badge pathways are in the following examples. So I live in Moorpath in Northumberland in the north of England and we've got a stepping stones across the river once back right now because there's been so much rain, they're flooded over. You can't get across those stepping stones, which is a nice metaphor for the way in which we do courses sometimes. Courses are only available sometimes at education institutions for one particular semester. Sometimes they're unavailable and so on. But when they are available, the usual way in which we do educational development is that it's a very linear way and we stand on one side of the river as the instructor and we pre-define a linear way of having stepping stones through across the river and then people go through the content, get to the side, pass the exams and congratulations, you get the credential. And if you fall off and fall in the river, well, you just have to start again. That's the way that it works. But another way of thinking about that, even if you don't go down the sequential route, if you still want to be prescriptive, you still have to do these things to get this credential. It's to think about kind of a trivial pursuit model. So I think in America, you call these pies, but we tend to call them cheeses, I think. It shows the difference between America and Europe. But this is still a prescriptive model. You still have to do these things, but you can earn them in any order. So that's a different way of just breaking things up. But let's imagine you go to the far end of that spectrum. Let's say that you don't want to be prescriptive. You want learners to find their own way. Well, one way in which you could do that is to create almost like a sky full of badges, a sky full of stars, and then ask learners to go through and connect their dots in their own way. And there might be constellations, just like there are constellations in our sky right now, like the Big Dipper, the Great Bear, ones which are recognised universally. But there's nothing to say that an individual might not find their own way of connecting the dots, which is valuable to them. So recognising those not in a prescriptive way, but in a descriptive way. One way of thinking about the difference between prescriptive pathways and descriptive pathways was captured by Brian quite nicely here. So when we think about a prospectus, a university or college prospectus, it's a kind of a booklet saying, these are the things that you can learn if you come to our organisation. Whereas a descriptive pathway is much more retrospective. It's like an autobiography which says, here's the story of my life. Here's the things that I've done. And so that kind of history acts as a credential. It shows that you've got experience in a particular sector on different area. One question that's coming through from Amy, thank you Amy, is can you share the definition of open badges? What does that mean versus closed badges? So one thing which I think is quite unhelpful in the badges ecosystem is that open badges and digital badges, those two terms seem to be used interchangeably. Now the way that I, and we'll kind of link to a community course where you can find out more at the end of this webinar. And one of the particular questions which you can answer to get a badge is what is the difference between an open badge and a digital badge? So listen carefully. A digital badge doesn't have to be based on the open badges standard. So a digital badge can literally be just an image with no metadata in. And if you think about that, that's a pretty poor situation to be in. Because all you would have to do to copy that badge is just to right click, download it and pass that thing off as your own. And the thing about open badges is that it has the metadata baked into it. And that's the difference. Open badges have metadata baked into them in a way that just normal digital badges just represented by images don't. So I can check, for example, Amy, you asked the question. Let's say that Amy's earned a badge and it's a digital badge. Well, I could just go along and right click on that and pass that badge off as my own. But let's say that Amy's earned an open badge. Well, if I tried to copy that and pass that off as my own, well, anybody could check that actually that badge was issued to Amy and not me. And they could very easily verify that I was just fortunate and I was trying to pass off someone else's learning as my own. Okay, let's pause there in case Steve or Brian wants to chime in. And Brian's saying no. Okay, so one of the great things about open badges and some of the things which were expected when open badges were created and some of the things which weren't expected when open badges were created were things like it changes the nature of hiring and it changes the nature of how you show what you know. And I really liked and Brian really liked this thought from Kerry North who works for O2 which is a mobile phone provider in the UK mobile telephony services that part of Telefonica. And what she was saying is that with open badges you're no longer just interviewing the extroverts because open badges can tell a much more holistic story about who this person in front of you is. So instead of it just being a collection of academic credentials and maybe for young people it might not even be their job history. Instead, you can imagine situations where someone's got an open badge for creating and publishing a web comic. I know Brian once hired somebody because they solved Rubik's Cube in under a minute and he saw that as latent talent for maybe being able to be a programmer. Maybe it's sharing a Raspberry Pi project and all of these things in their own right might not say that much and you might not get a job based off just one of these. But altogether when you start sharing these you start to get a view of who this person is. And when it comes to interview I'm sure lots of people listening and watching this will have interviewed people before. It can be very difficult to find out what's going on. You're trying to draw out conversations you're trying to find out more about this person. And really once somebody gets through the door and into the interview you're trying to get them you're trying to find stories trying to find out if they'll be a good fit. And especially when it comes to people who are less extrovert then a great place to start is their experience their credentials which can be represented by open badges. So I think that badging even very small things very granular things is worthwhile because they serve as places to start storytelling either by yourself or people telling the story in their own head about who you are and why you might be a good fit at an organization. So open badges paint a much more detailed picture of who we are as people. And that's what really drew me to open badges as an educator. What we tend to get is this model where everybody has the same credentials and because of grade inflation because of teaching to the test and all of the things which we incentivize to do within education institutions we end up with the picture on the left where it's difficult to tell the difference between young people because we've just got this very grainy black and white ink drawing. Whereas with open badges I think we can have a much more holistic picture you can see what this person is about and that's the picture on the right. One, when you talk about open badges with some people they think that this is going to be some kind of huge revolution in education meaning that we kick out the old school credentials and we bring in the new school credentials but actually I don't think that's true but I think we still need the old school credentials as some kind of first pass filter. And if you think about those being large stones in a jar the great thing about open badges and being able to credential really granular things is that these serve as new school credentials little pebbles that fill in the gaps around the large pebbles filling up the jar so that you can see much more about this person. So you still have the big rocks but you have the little pebbles as well. And I think that's a nice metaphor and way of explaining it rather than hey, let's blow up the system which was some of the early rhetoric. I don't think this image has been used before in a presentation. Brian has recently redone this drawing and this shows the workforce pipeline. So this shows different ways in which the open badge can be used in different situations. So maybe it's a skills showcase that gets you into the organization. These badges are enough to get you an interview. You pass the interview and you get in through the door. And then maybe there's some onboarding. Maybe badges are used for that. And maybe as a year down the line you start doing some professional development and you're working towards badges in project management or leadership. And then perhaps you're putting together a team and yes, of course you're looking for diversity of opinions and roles and genders and ethnicity within that particular team. But perhaps you're looking for particular skill sets within that team as well. And badges are a great way in which you can show that too. If you want to find out more about open badges then a great place to start with this would be at badges.thinkoutloudclub.com. So I mentioned the work that Brian and I had done for City and Guilds before. City and Guilds are very keen to help other people know about what open badges were for. And so we spun up a course under one of their sub brands which is the thinkoutloudclub. Hashtag for that is OB101. And if you go there, you can click through, you can find out more about why you'd want to use badges. You can find out more about what they are. And you can find links to further reading if you want it. We've tried to cover lots of different sectors. We tried to cover lots of different scenarios and situations, but you can dive into some of the more detailed stuff there. I can see some more detailed questions coming in here. I know John who knows way more about the technical side of things than I do. Talking about EXIF data and securing open badges and that kind of stuff. And in terms of the technical implementation that I would encourage people like John to go to the, I think it's a weekly now standard working group call. It's every Tuesday I believe and they talk about the more technical issues. And if you really want to dive into how the technical side of things work on securing the badge, then I encourage you to go there. This is more of a general introduction. Another question that I can see from Graham Steele. Where do you go to see if someone has open badges on their CV? Yes, it's a bit of a chicken and egg situation here. There are people who are putting badges on their CVs on their websites and that kind of stuff. Employers obviously will start looking for those as soon as they see evidence of people talking about them and using them. I would say that there's more people doing that in the US than the UK. Partly because there's been more funding and partly because the US is a big place. So yes, you would go to see if someone had open badges on their CV. They can embed them on there, but also they might share with you the link to their portfolio which might be provided by one of the badge issuing providers. Another question from Graham on us the same question being asked by Steve as well. Okay, I'm going to switch back just to see if there's any questions that people want to answer now. We've got some additional slides which we could go through in case people want to dive into particular examples or some other stuff. But I'm just going to pause there and switch back to my other screen if I can. Not exactly seamless, but there we go. There we go. Good, so you should be able to see my smiling face now and Brian as well. I think Steve's had to drop off. One of the things you can do in a period is to see who's knocking at the door. Steve's knocking at the door. I'm going to let him in. There you go. Steve, I'll let you back in. Brian, do you want to turn your video back on? Unless you see if you've got any more questions and if there's anything else we feel like we've missed and then we can go from there. Brian, is there anything else you want to add? I think I was very comprehensive, Doug. I applaud your reverting back to teacher mode there. I was, wasn't I? Yes. Yeah, you are. You're pretty smooth, pretty smooth. I think Paul Martin just raised a good point there about some CVs are text-only, for example, the HM government. And listen, it's the bane of my life. Some of you talk through pictures, especially when I've been applying for funding and stuff like that, we get placed with a text-only form or it's fairly clamped down because the first thing they're trying to do is to get rid of as many applicants as possible. So just on that, actually, just on that, I think that one of the things that open badges can do is to reimagine what we mean by HR. So for example, exactly what you've just said there, one of the things we're trying to do is we're trying, if you get 500 applicants for one single job, of course, you're going to have to have some pretty broad brushstroke thing to reject. And often we do it on like, oh, well, they didn't get a good enough degree or they haven't got their high school diploma, whatever it is, big chunky credentials. But of course, what you can do with open badges is you can go out and search and you can find out, I'm thinking about some kind of badge utopia where you can say, well, I'm going to let people through the door, I've got this badge, this badge, or this badge, that kind of thing. Of course, you can hack a text CV by just putting a URL into it. And if people are interested enough, they can just follow that thing. Well, again, I think what people like Boutou are doing and I think universities in the States as well, using badges as a way of starting a relationship with a potential member or employee or person. I think that's quite clever in terms of, well, what makes us, well, let's create badges in and around that. And as people step into that, well, that allows us to have a relationship or even at a distance with those people. And they might be a good place to start if we're looking to fill out graduate position, for example. I think that kind of proactive role in HR is increasingly becoming the case with big corporates because it means that they can have a talent pool to go into whenever they need to, rather than starting from scratch, put the advert out, trying to filter unknown people, that kind of thing. Much more having the relationship with potential people. I was, as lots of people started doing open badges, I was up the road with school recently and they were talking about badging their values. So instantiating their values. I know at MosFest, at the Mozilla Festival, we were talking to the Scottish Social Services Council who were talking about badging huge reports, so that the actionable parts of reports, taking those and seeing how they were being used in the sector. So lots of different ways in which they could be used there. Steve, do you want to? I would just jump in on that. I think this is exactly the conversation about, once we understand the technical potentials, what could you do with badges? I think that's where implementation really starts to, to get creative. And we see some people doing co-creation of badges with the learner, particularly in schools, so that kids, but also teachers, can better understand what is proficiency, what does competency look like? Rather than someone else telling you how to earn a badge, engaging the badge applier to say, well, what would you be willing to do? And how can we bake that evidence into the badge? So I think there's a lot of potential, I think it's raw. I think there's a lot of creativity. As much as badges on the surface might seem like to an outsider or someone just becoming familiar with it, they might see it as glorified certificates, glorified stickers, token economy, moved online. But I think those are superficial interpretations. I think once you get your head around the potential, badges are more flexible, more transferable, more stackable, more manipulative, manipulatable. It's not a security, I'm an American, I'm not a security, I'm not a security. But the idea is that you can do more, and I think there's more flexibility in how you could implement. And I think that's part of what I think this partnership between our two co-ops as well as this conversation is trying to engage deep thinkers around potentialities. What could we do here? And it's very involved, it's very new. Just really starting to tap into mainstream kind of ecosystems. And I think a superficial understanding will lead to superficial implementation. I think people who think of it as a sticker will treat it like a sticker. People who think of it as a glorified certificate will treat it as glorified certificate. And I think once it's launched into that ecosystem, then it'll be a retraining or an undoing process to launch it again. So I think really what Doug and Brian bring in terms of technical expertise, as well as out of the box thinking, can push organizations to use badges in new ways, not simply replicate old systems with digital tools. So I think it's very important if you're interested in this webinar and you're following this chat or you're part of the community to help spread the word and help show open source and open applications so we can drive innovative applications, not just reconfiguring old systems with digital tools. So I really thank you and I want to applaud that we are open co-op for really pushing the thinking and pushing the conversation. And thank you for your explanations. I feel like it always challenges me to think more deeply about what we're doing. And I just want to say thanks again for that. And anyone that's listening to this, anyone who's plugged into the dialogue, let's keep the conversation going. Ask your questions and let's think about implementations that go outside of the box. Great, thanks Steve. We're going to wrap up now, but what I'd like to encourage people to do is to first of all follow Educators Co-op and We Are Open Co-op on Twitter. If you've got follow-up questions, then please do send them to webinars at weareopen.co and we'll make sure they get to the right place. All of these visual images have been taken from the now Treasure Trove, which is available at visualthinkery.com. That's all of Brian's images around open badges and more. So please do feel free to use those under Creative Commons license. We're going to stop now. We're going to make this recording available in case you want to share it with other people. This has been the first time we've used YouTube live, so we'll be very much glad to hear your feedback in terms of what worked, what didn't work, when you could hear people, when you couldn't, whether the use of appearing, which was the webinar showing our faces, worked or not. Love to hear that, love to hear your questions, love to hear any opportunities you've got for us to work together, and thank you again, Steve and Amy and everyone from Educators Co-op and also to Brian and we're just going to hit pause there until next time. Thank you.