Online Course

It has been almost a year since the 2011 kickoff meeting of the MacArthur Foundation’s Badges for Lifelong Learning Initiative.  What a fascinating year.  It finished off with some really interesting meetings with some of the most innovative minds in education and learning.  I have learned a lot about how digital badges and other new technologies might help assess, motivate, recognize, and evaluate learning.  In the next few posts, I want to share some of the things I learned and discuss some of the issues that have come up.  In this post, I want to consider the potential of digital badges for re-igniting educational videogaming, and reiterate the central affordance of digital badges.  I also want to tell everybody to go see The Art of Videogames at the Smithsonian before it goes on tour.

On July 26^th, I attended a meeting where the groundwork was being laid for a multi-university consortium that would focus on Games for Impact.  The meeting was organized by Constance Steinkuehler of the University of Wisconsin, who is on loan as a senior analyst at the Office of Science and Technology Policy.  It was a fascinating meeting involving 20 university faculty, 40 other collaborators, and perhaps a dozen program officers for DOE, NSF, and elsewhere.   Digital badges were only tangentially related to the meeting, as the educational gaming community faces numerous challenges at this time.  The obvious question for me is how digital badges might help address these challenges, and if so, how that might proceed.

To prepare for the meeting, we read recent papers (Klopfer Osterweil & Salen, 2009, and Mayo, 2011).  These described how the promise of educational CD-ROMs in the late '80s was crushed by the Internet, eliminating a growing revenue stream and a manageable distribution system.  This is a shame because now we know a lot more about how to make good educational games.  As demonstrated by innovators like Kurt Squire, Chris Dede, Sasha Barab, Lucien Vattel, and David Schaffer, learners need to play with the actual knowledge we want them to learn. And they need to play with each other when they do so. 

In addition to the revenue stream and other developmental barriers, the papers raised other barriers we discussed.  These included barriers that keep schools and parents from adopting games (e.g., curriculum requirements, teacher attitudes and training, school schedules, and proof of achievement impact) and barriers to sustaining successful games (e.g., fickle audiences and system maintenance).  Given my many recent conversations with innovators who are taking up digital badges, I suspect there are many ways that digital badges might help.

For example, imagine a game available on the web that supports the development of valued skills. To generate an audience, it should be possible to let players complete the game for free  (like Diner Dash), but have players pay a small fee for the digital badge(s) that formally acknowledge their accomplishment.  The fee could generate a revenue stream for development and maintenance and also cover the cost that might be incurred if a human needs to further validate the success.  With some tweaking, this might even generate useful evidence of learning.  And given the interest in aligning digital badges with Common Core standards, this could generate huge new user-bases; teachers and schools will search for something besides dreary test-prep in response to the impending freak-out over “value-added” tests of the Common Core.  At the OSTP meeting, we never got to discuss these ideas with the whole group, but I had a few side conversations that convinced me this is worth exploring.

When I went back over the Klopfer paper for this post, I realized they cited another set of barriers that digital badges might impact: barriers to innovation.  The paper details barriers to further innovation in educational games, including data, pedagogical paradigms, research, and ambition.  I don’t have space to elaborate here, but there seem to be quite a few ways that digital badges could help innovators gather useful data, explicate and research new design principles, and jump-start truly ambitious gaming agendas.

I may get some insights about these issues at another meeting in DC in September with the National Science Teachers Association.  NSTA executive Al Byer and Penn State prof (and badges guru) Kyle Peck are exploring practices for assessing, motivating, recognizing, and studying learning in the NSTA Online Learning Center.  In particular, they want to offer continuing education credits within their new Teacher Learning Journeys project, and are considering offering digital badges for a modest fee in this context.  In key respects, such professional development resources face some of the same challenges as educational games, and the NSTA is considering ways that badges can help.  At least in the State of Indiana, the process of awardee CEUs is quite chaotic; I assume that is the case elsewhere, too, and that digital badges can help.

Most of the attendees at the Games for Impact meeting seemed aware of digital badges, and many seemed quite interested.  But I got the sense that many of the attendees did not really appreciate the essential function of digital badges. I thought of the point Erin Knight and Carla Casilli made in the close of their excellent EDUCAUSE brief on digital badges:

I explained to several people who asked that when you click on the badge, it will open up to reveal who awarded the badge, what it was for, etc., and that each piece of information could be hotlinked to additional information on the web.  What seems to be lost on people is how simpleit is going to be to do this once the systems are in place.  The example that seemed to get the point across to university-types was that they could easily link the syllabus for the course and the rubric used to assess student artifacts; with a little more work, it should be possible to link to the actual artifacts the badge earner produced. 

This leads me to make the following assertion about digital badges: 

I suspect that many of the initial concerns that people have about badges might be addressed if they appreciated this point.  Once they do, we can begin the conversation about the wicked problems that will emerge when this simplicity makes it possible to award  truly valuable digital badges.  I am going to explore this further in a subsequent post where I will consider David Gibson’s response to this assertion.

Post Script August 14, I just read Carla Casilli's post from July 31 which elaborated on this same concern knowledgeably and in more detail.

Lastly, I just want to tell everybody to find time to see The Art of Videogames at the Smithsonian Portrait Gallery.  We were treated to a private tour by one of the organizers (whose name I did not write down but who was awesome).  I was too busy chatting with folks from the meeting to play all the games and look at all the exhibits.  So I am happy I will get to go back before it leaves for a nationwide tour on September 30th (check out the schedule on their website).