 Alright, welcome everyone and it's great to see new friends and very dear old friends to our keeping badging weird, so I'm glad that this attracted everyone today to bad summit so. Mark and I participate reached out to Doug and Laura and vice versa around thinking about a learning experience around around badging so there's lots of conversations we've all been working on this for I feel like forever. But new people keep blowing in and we had participate I've been focused on building and supporting communities of practice so our current focus is really diving into kind of open recognition and recognition of each other. And understanding how communities of practice work and how badges could kind of play a role in that and so some of that was self serving to work with Doug and Laura to really think about like, how could we design learning experiences that engage a much larger community around badging digital credentials. Eliciting the help of old friends like Carrie and Cheryl and others and helping us really think about this stuff and moving this work sort of forward and so that's why we started this project and then batch summit we had all planned on. Coming anyway and we thought that this would be a really fun way to launch an open learning experience that we would just start here to play around and. Mostly also just to get all of your feedback and really kind of understand where people are coming from and what their interest is in badging what what you hope to achieve with them. And really kind of develop our own little community practice right here even within within the badging community so that's sort of our, our impetus for for bringing you all here to our little breakout session. Doug Laura. Oh, I was going to share a screen. And you know you're very welcome to mute and face mute at any point if you want to and not and also unface mute and unmute anytime as well if you've got any questions. There's no stupid questions, just ask stupid answers as I always say. Yeah. So basically I talked through this slide already so Doug is there anything or Laura anything else on this mark anything here around what we're sort of what our focus has been with with the keeping badges weird community. Well I think the main thing is that we're what we're trying to do with we'll talk about this in a moment but talk about kind of where badges came from we can't go through the whole history lots of you already know this. What we're trying to do is to think about the overlap between open badges digital credentials micro credentials wherever you want to call them today, and communities of practice now I think that lots of people will be quite familiar with one of those, but potentially not with both, and the overlap them is particularly interesting for participate, and we are open. Laura, you want to introduce yourself we are open mark any other words about who we are and then I'll move off this slide pretty quickly. Sure. So I'm going to introduce myself, I am Laura Hiliger from we are open, but I'm actually not going to introduce we are open I'm going to introduce participate because that's what Mark told me to do about 10 minutes ago. So for those of you who have not experienced the super awesomeness that is participate. They are an organization that are really looking at how online learning and one of my personal passions online communities join up. So they, they have a platform but they also work with teachers educators more broadly nonprofits a whole spectrum of different kind of organizations to build the kinds of spaces that brought me into the ed tech community. Over a decade ago I'm sharing my age. And they've been a joy to work with, we are open has been working with participate for a number of years and where we, I am very excited to be part of this keep badges weird project because it feels like a good time to kind of play around with some of the more innovative innovative ways that we can think about badging. Now that badging has kind of got mainstream. Well, I thank you. And I'm just going to change my mind I'm just going to participate again. Just just kidding, of course, as Laura mentioned, you know, our two organizations we are open participate have been, you know, around and working together but it's just been recently that we've had the opportunity to collaborate really deeply with we are open and we're talking about this yesterday it's just absolutely enjoy this organization to work with and so if you are looking for a group of people that a do amazing work and then be are just a blast to work with I think we have more fun on those meetings than we do pretty much anything all week long. So, helping organizations make sure digital transformations, some of the smartest people we've ever worked with and then when it comes to badges, there's really no one better, and then when it comes to like illustrating those Brian, amazing. And so, fantastic, talented group of individuals. All right. Thank you, Mark. So what we're going to do today is we're going to introduce you to kind of what participate call and what we're starting to call LXP so learning experiences. And we're trying to do something a bit different so keeping badges weird now, I could give you a lot of kind of academic background to this dive into the deep history of badges and digital credentials. So instead of doing that instead of going into all of that so we can, you know, go through that another time. We've used that experience to build an LXP, which we think will help people understand badges and communities of practice and how the two intersect. And we've done that in a community which we call keep badges weird. Now, we're going to let you loosen this community in a moment, you're going to be the very first people other than people who work for we are open or participate to go into there. So let's be back as to how you find that. So let me just talk you through a couple of things to begin with. In fact, law is going to talk you through the LXP in a moment. But I'm going to talk you through Brian's badges. Brian, as Mark said is a very talented illustrator, but more than that Brian has a deep understanding, not only of how to represent ideas visually, but all of the abstract ideas behind that having a background in computer science and having built and sold to companies. So these badges, the kinds of ones that you can earn in the keep badges weird community. And we hope that they these not only stimulate discussion, but they also represent you at a distance on social media, wherever you want to represent this and as you can see, it kind of reflects, not only the logo, but also has this kind of whimsy and slightly different from the, the official participate style of guide as it were. So the very first one, which we're hoping that you'll learn today is the one center at the bottom. So the badge at the bottom in the middle, the keep badges weird badge that's going to be the first one that you earn. Some of the rest of them go through as law is about to show in kind of a slightly linear fashion, but other ones are ones that you can dip in and out of so I'll hand it over to Laura to go through the learning experience. So as Julie mentioned at the beginning of our breakout session here. What we're trying to do is talk about the intersection of open badges and communities of practice. So it's, it's sort of meta. When you start thinking about this but what we're doing with this community is we have a community of practice that is focused on learning the, the sort of academics and theoretical frameworks and insights around a community of practice, as well as open badges so it's kind of a sort of thing so we broke the learning into two separate parts on the little, I guess it's left my left. It's collaboration so this is participation in the keep badges weird community. And as you are just being a everyday community member you're going to be doing things that are actually earning you badges around the theory and the practice of communities of practice. So, as you join the community when you introduce yourself when you interact with other people you're actually doing something that's creating value for other people, which is part of what a community of practice does at a theoretical level so you're as you do those things you're able to earn badges that shows that you understand how you're creating value within a community. And then there's a secondary part that's sort of the more theoretical part where you can self study to learn what are those values, value cycles in a community of practice what does that actually mean. What does it mean to be in cycle one or cycle to how they mingle together. And there's a another component of that earning is learning which is about self study. And, or sorry self study about badges, which a lot of you in this room probably know a lot of the basics that are there but you can actually earn a badge. It's something that you understand what that what open badges are what it actually means to award badges and there's also a designing badge component so if you've never made a badge before you can learn that in this community as well. And part of what we're doing with both of these things is trying to push people to the edge of this community but also make a leap into other communities because where the value cycles really come into play is where there's crossover and communities. So that's kind of complicated to look out really quickly, but this this graphic becomes quite simple and clear when you get into the community yourself, which is what we're going to do next. Can I take over from you. I can but I also dug I know you wanted to do a little activity it'd be great to know who's here we have a small enough group did you want to start that first in the chat did you want to do that. We could do or we could just get straight in and let people and choose themselves, those in the discussion that'd be great. Okay, all right, I will stop sharing and go ahead Laura. So, if one of my co facilitators would be kind enough to put the link into the zoom chat. I did. Does everybody see that. Did everybody see it. Yeah, you're good. So, so when you go to the link you're going to enter the community and in the upper left hand corner there's a joint community button. But you can also click on the get started by introducing yourself button. And when you do that it's going to ask you to log in or sign up. So if you've been in other participate communities you probably already have an account. So if you don't, if you just click the login you can log in with a social. And so that's pretty quick and easy. And so what we were going to do today is essentially get you to create an account and then dive into the community and we're here to ask questions. This is my other tab. And we wanted to get you to earn that very first keep badges weird badge which is very cool looking. Thank you Brian. By simply introducing yourself in the community. Tell us why you're here, maybe a little bit of a weird tidbit. You're very welcome to have some fun with your introduction, but you just write it in here and then we will get to know who is in the room. And once you've done that you're very welcome to have a look around and see what else is here. And then we'll have some time at the end it's quite a short session today but we'll have some time for some q&a. Some of you who have been around the badges space for ages might want to kind of talk more at a metal level like I'm always talking about before. Some of you who are new to badges might want to talk about the basics of badges all and any and all questions are welcome here. So, yeah, why don't you, why don't you get started to do what law has just shown. And we can, we can troubleshoot as and when you go along. That sounds great. And then, you know, for those who, you know, if you don't want to sign up or give us, it's totally fine to you can also just explore the community without joining, and you can introduce yourself in the chat. So I just want to give everyone the option of doing whatever you want. But it, and I'm just curious just thoughts here will just pause and as you are like working on stuff. Just some thoughts about anybody wants to chat, or we can just go silent for a couple minutes. Any questions so far. Just one little clarification from from me just on this screen that you're on. If you haven't signed in to participate before do the sign up. As opposed to log in. Yes, and then I just signed up with Twitter and it was dead easy. Okay, yeah, just make sure you are on sign up if you are new to us. And again, if you just want to go back to the prior length that Doug and I shared. You can just have a poke around. But we're curious. Yeah. I'm on the floor if you want to go back to the. Yeah, so, yeah. So even if you're not a member of the community or if you don't want to create account log in you can still see the kinds of things that that you can learn in the community so we have a couple of courses that were the earning is learning part of the learning and the badge curious is kind of like it's not exactly badges 101 it's like badges 102 and 103 as well. And then the communities of practice curious really gets into deepening your knowledge around communities of practice so there's a lot of good content there if you've never built a badge before this is a great place to learn. If you put in a badge, how do you actually award a badge to someone. So there's content there as well. And then under the, the resources. There's more ways to get started there's more ways to interact and there are ways that you can actually immediately enact some of those value cycles that are part of the community of practice and earn badges along the way. The community has lots of content. And, and as we said at the beginning, you guys are the first people to see this so we would love for you to have a poke around and just tell us all the things that are broken. All of your thoughts about them you guys are, there's a lot of experts here around badging and we would really love to just have your candid feedback.