 Welcome to the last section of today's online discussion. Now we're going to talk about the future of badges. This is where it kind of gets exciting and some of the reasons that you'll want to perhaps adopt badges. Maybe you don't see the opportunities yet, or maybe the opportunities that are available now aren't enough, but the future holds a lot of cool stuff. Again, we're right at the beginning of this whole open digital badges concept. One day, perhaps, digital badges will replace the resume. You know, if I send a piece of paper to somebody, yeah, it's kind of cool. It's a bit of a static thing. They can't really click on it. They can't check things out. And the information on the resume, it's verifiable. I mean, I can call and make some calls and check things, but it doesn't have the metadata and the information that a badge has. So will this happen like this? Will it replace the resume? It might in the future. Something to think about. We can get our students up and rolling and interacting with this type of recognition. Now, think about how cool that is for their future. All right. You can use it for getting credit. So if you're taking one of those MOOCs, those massive open online courses, you know, you don't really have a relationship with a MOOC in the sense that you show up at their building. It's all done online. And these badges are a great way for these groups to show that you've completed courses and that you've earned various skills. Perhaps getting a badge from Coursera saying that you are a level four. Remember, I talked about this Ruby on Rails programmer, or you are a level three psychologist. I don't know whatever you want to call it. Getting that badge with that metadata, putting that on your digital resume, putting that on your website into your LinkedIn account, whatever will help you to get jobs or opportunities in the future. MOOCs will use badges a lot. This becomes a virtual online certificate. It's easy to send somebody a certificate, have them posted, but what do they really do with it? Well, if somebody has achieved something, you can award a certificate. Instead of a certificate, really, you can award a badge. Bads are great. It's proof of skills. So if I'm looking for a programmer, again, I keep using that, but if I'm looking for a programmer or a teacher, I can run through LinkedIn and see what badges people have that are associated with their skills. So I could pull up all the people that are level two visual basic programmers because I need somebody to teach visual basic. And then that narrows it down. And I can say, ah, let's see where they got their badge from. Oh, I see, they got it from MIT. Ah, well, let me make sure that's true. Let me check the metadata. Okay, yeah, it appears to be true. It allows me to do that due diligence. What a great way to go as an employer or an employee looking for a job, right? Set you apart, especially now. Again, we've talked about it. This is the metadata. No need to go over it again ad nauseam, but it does show or lets organizations see where this badge came from. Here's some information, some press releases. The Clinton Global Initiative is starting to use badges to help one million students and one million U.S. workers access opportunities through badges. These are clickable links. If you download the keynote, this keynote from my website, you can click on it. Blackboard, you may have heard of that. They're a large online or learning management system, content management service system for schools and other organizations. They have adopted the Mozilla OpenBatch framework. Big deal for them. And you can see Mozilla Blackboard, WCET, Sage Road Solutions, et cetera. They've adopted badges as well. So it's starting to maybe get some traction. We'll see. See what the future holds. Again, this is all thanks to the Mozilla Foundation. Free, open source. You'd think I work for them and we'll get money from them with the amount of good things I've been saying. But I don't. I do like Firefox though. Maybe you've used that browser. They make it. Here's what I've learned. So every time I do some initiative, I learn a lot of things, mostly from mistakes. So for example, I learned where the eggs should go and where the shells should go. Do you like this picture? Reducing friction. I mentioned this earlier, but the easier you can make things, the better. You want to make it really simple. So you want to be the fish on the right cruising along with everybody helping you. You don't necessarily want to be the fish on the left. You will be in the beginning because you're trying a new idea. But if you can reduce friction and make it easy, then everybody's going to follow you. Or they're more likely to follow you. I think how cool that is. You should get a badge for like getting people to follow your ideas. That'd be a great badge. I expect failures. Embrace them. They're going to happen. If you don't have failures, then you're not trying something new. It's totally normal to get failures. It's building a little time for those failures. Again, that's why you start small with maybe one teacher or one badge if you're an individual teacher already. And then you can scale it up and make it large from there. And then as the failures hit you, it won't have as big an impact because you're working with smaller groups. Embrace resistance. You're going to get resistance to this idea. Every idea that is any good should get resistance. If you don't get resistance, people are saying, oh, that's not going to work. Oh, nobody will ever do this, et cetera, et cetera. Then you're not trying anything new. You've got to embrace resistance. You've got to expect resistance. It's awesome. Actually, it's terrible. But I have to embrace it because then I know I'm on the right track and that people are resisting a new idea and a change, and I'm actually pushing an organization somewhere. Hopefully, the right direction. Not off a cliff or something. Anyway, iterate. In other words, take it step by step. Do a real basic concept, a real basic rollout. Check it out. See what happened. Evaluate it, and then make the next one better and the next one better. It's not fair to roll something out and find out there's some problems and then beat up on yourself and say, it's just not going to work. That was a dumb idea. Rather, you're learning from that iteration. You're looking for ways to improve and make it better. That's why you have version one, version two, version three. In the software world, this is totally normal, and it should be normal in the education world as well. Stay in touch. That's all I've got for you guys. If you want to follow me again on Twitter, autism podcast, you can email me, michaelinnovativepd.com. Check out my LinkedIn. My website's michaelbowl.me. And the podcast where we talk about a lot of exciting stuff at edtech. That's podcast. You like my voice? My podcast voice? Podcast.incordieshanghigh.org. Hope you enjoyed this. Have a great day.