Keep Badges Weird…
at the Badge Summit
Clay Shirky wrote:
“Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.”
Ten years on, badges have become mainstream, and we’re thinking around how we can continue to innovate with badges. We’ve been working with Participate on a project lovingly titled “Keep Badges Weird”.
Keep Badges Weird is a social learning approach revolving around Open Badges (“badges”) in Communities of Practice (“CoP”). This week, at the 2021 Badge Summit, we are “officially” launching the project with a participatory session. We’ll give a brief overview of the project, and then invite people to explore what recognition inside of a CoP looks like.
Community Content
Our aim is to help people learn about both badges as well as how CoPs have activities that provide value to others. Our “CoP Curious” course explores value cycles and our “Badge Curious” course goes through the ins and outs of open badges and digital credentialing.
Although the theory and practice of badges and CoPs play central roles in our community content, it is the people who join a community who shape that community’s culture and direction. We’re excited to discover how this experiment breeds new value for social learners of all stripes. We’re eager to learn how we can support someone who is trying to get an organisation to start thinking about upskilling in a non-traditional way. We’re hopeful that we can deliver a better understanding of how CoPs actually function while showing how badges can work to build trust through recognition.
Landscapes of Practice
As many other CoPs exist on Participate’s platform, it feels like an excellent place to Keep Badges Weird and see how recognition can motivate and encourage people in what are called “Landscapes of Practice” (LoP).
“[I]n landscapes, practitioners actively find their way through a complex geography of local practices, and by doing so they gradually discover which practices matter to them the most as social spaces for developing their competence.” (Wenger-Trayner et al., 2014)
Participants can contribute by:
- Participating — in more than one community
- Creating — something of value to others
- Reflecting — on what they have learned
There are loads of other communities on the Participate platform — from communities organised around teaching the Sustainable Development Goals to communities looking at project based learning, game design or improving remote learning offerings. We will use a LoP approach to help learners create intersections and pathways to other communities that might be of interest to them.
And of course the Badges
“Motivation and peer and self assessment are great reasons to put badges into practice.” Dr. Wayne Gibbons
We have a new suite of badges to encourage participation, create value for others, and reflect on that experience. Participants will be able to both earn AND award badges, so they’ll have a chance to prove that they’ve understood the theory surrounding CoPs and badges as well as put those theories into practice.
We’ve made the community discoverable on the Participate platform, and you can already join the learning experience. You can also come meet We Are Open and Participate collaborators at the Badge Summit this Wednesday! With your feedback, we will continue to iterate this learning experience for all the other CoP-curious folk and Badge Champions out there.
