• Hosting the weekly Mozilla Web Literacy standard call.
• Collaborating on three Google Docs outlining the skills underpinning the competencies in each strand of the Web Literacy standard.
• Registering (after being invited) for the EU Digital Agenda Assembly 2013 (Dublin).
• Reading and catching up on longer-form content.
• Attending the Open Badges community call for the first time in ages.
• Thinking. 
• Participating in the Mozilla #teachtheweb MOOC by remixing Joe Wilson’s profile.
• Talking with people (as I do every week!) about Open Badges. This week it was nice not to travel anywhere and do meetings via Skype and Google Hangouts.
• Registering for the PLE Conference (Berlin). Tim Riches and I are running a pre-conference workshop.
• Going through the logistics for next week’s All-Hands.

Next week I’ll be in Toronto for the Mozilla Foundation All-Hands 2013. It’ll be insane but awesome. I’m taking PTO (annual leave/holiday) for the week after that as it’s half-term for my wife and children.

This is likely to be my only blog post of the week (apart from my weeknote) and I’ll be a lot lighter in my use of Twitter / Google+ / Facebook.

If you want to make me smile while I’m ensuring I don’t get burned out, how about donating to #LettingGrow? That would be awesome.

Image CC BY Pink Sherbert Photography

• Taking a day off. It was Bank Holiday on Monday – a national holiday in the UK. I still however spent 4pm-5pm… <drumroll>
• Hosting the weekly Web Literacy standard call. We motored through our first pass of defining the skills under the competencies in the ‘Connecting’ strand.
• Writing a post for Week 1 of the Mozilla #teachtheweb MOOC: How transferable are coding skills to other domains? Why is learning a little code important?
• Responding to enquiries by people and organisations about integrating with the OBI.
• Travelling to and from London to meet with Lord Jim Knight and STiR education about using Open Badges for teacher education in India.
• Enjoying a conversation over lunch London with the ever-enthusiastic Eugenie Teasley from Spark + Mettle.
• Collating questions about Open Badges and then answering them in this blog post.
• Suffering from a migraine on Thursday. I couldn’t see much due to the aura so I called it a day about 10:30am. I lay down and listened to podcasts. The Moral Maze episode on The Ring of Gyges was fascinating.
• Travelling to BBC North in Salford to deliver a session on Open Badges. It went pretty well, but I felt like I wasn’t getting my words out properly or explaining things as well as I usually do. It’s often an issue post-migraine. Slides here.

Next week, after five straight weeks of travelling and hotels, I’m home for the entire week. Woohoo! The week after I’m in Toronto for the Mozilla All-Hands meeting, so plenty to psych myself up for…

Are Open Badges ‘transferable’?

It depends what you mean. Open Badges are issued with a learner’s individual identifier ‘baked’ into it. So if you try and take my badge and put it in your backpack, it’s not going to work. It’ll be rejected.

If, on the other hand, you talking about the ‘portability’ of badges then, absolutely, that’s exactly what we’re aiming for. Multiple badge backpacks, a completely open and decentralised system, and learner sovereignty. The learner earns badges from issuers and then chooses where to host and display them.

Why is Mozilla interested in creating a system for credentialing learning?

We’re a non-profit that believes in the Web. We believe that it’s a fantastic platform for innovation – but only if it’s open, democratic and built upon standards. Because learning today happens anywhere, including on the Web, we want a credentialing system that can bypass the ‘gatekeepers’ to learning. We want better ways to credential experiences, knowledge, interest and skills.

Are all Open Badges public?

What happens if I invest time in Open Badges and then Mozilla pull the plug?

We’re a non-profit who work (radically) in the open alongside the community. The OBI is a Mozilla product, but it’s more of a model where we’re the lead developers and advocates than having something than can be ‘pulled’. We’re committed to OBI for the long-haul, but even if we were all on several planes that crashed the Open Source community could still develop the infrastructure.

How can Mozilla maintain the quality of Open Badges?

‘Quality’ is an interesting word. Another variation of this question is How can Mozilla guarantee equivalency between badges? The short answer is, of course, that we can’t. That’s because we’re the ones developing the technical standard, but not those that are developing all of the badges within the ecosystem.

The OBI is a platform for innovation. We’ve already seen many high-quality badges that have been produced by lots of different organisations. But, of course, there will be poor badges. The value of the badge doesn’t come through how difficult it is to issue them, but upon the rigour of what you have to do to get them, and the evidence they point to. That’s within the metadata in the badge itself.

CC BY Kyle Bowen

One of the newer metadata fields that’s available within the OBI is a field that allows you to enter the URL of which standard you’re aligning to. So whether it’s a badge that aligns with the Common Core or the Web Literacy standard, there’s something you can point to as a common reference point. The ‘endorsement’ functionality that we’re working upon could then allow organisations to endorse certain badges as being good/valid representations of that standard.

What’s the quickest way of getting started issuing Open Badges?

There’s broadly three ways to start issuing badges. The first is to use a third-party badge issuing platform such as badg.us, forallbadges or openbadges.me. This is the easiest, but the URLs in the metadata of the badge point towards that third-party platform over which you have no control.

The second way to issue badges is to use a plugin for a popular Content Management System or learning platform such as WordPress, Drupal or Moodle. Doing this means that you don’t have to do any coding but the URLs in the Open Badges point back to your domain.

The third way is the most complex and involves being (or hiring) a developer and using Mozilla’s onboarding documentation to build your own badge issuing platform or plugin. Apparently it’s not that hard, but I haven’t tried it.

What happens when there’s millions of Open Badges in the ecosystem and everyone has thousands of them?

Well, first of all that will be awesome! The great thing about Open Badges is that the learner is always in control. That means you can choose which badges to display for what purpose. So, if you want to show all of your gamer and photography badges on Facebook and your professional badges on your online portfolio, you can.

The other thing to remember is that an Open Badge does not stand alone, but is part of a wider ecosystem of value. One of the best ways of imagining this is through badge-based learning pathways. In the same way that you collect cheeses/pies in Trivial Pursuit, so badges can work together to unlock a larger, meta-level badge. Once you’ve unlocked your competency-level badge, it would point back to the five skill-level badges of which it’s comprised.

How can we trust an Open Badge? How do I know someone hasn’t just bought one?

Both very good questions. A combination of the Criteria URL and the Evidence URL should help with this, I think. The (compulsory) Criteria URL states what the earner had to do in order to be issued the badge, and the (optional, but to my mind very important) Evidence URL points to work done in order to get the badge. This is anything that can be displayed on the Web – images, text, videos, etc.

Do people buy qualifications now? Of course they do. Will people attempt to (and sometimes be successful in purchasing) Open Badges? Almost definitely. But the difference between traditional qualifications and credentials, and Open Badges is that the latter leave a breadcrumb trail of evidence. My Great Uncle built his entire adult life on a the claim that he attended Oxford University. After his death we found this to be false. That wouldn’t really have been possible in a badge-based system. He would have been found out very quickly!

Why are Open Badges any more than stickers? Aren’t they just extrinsic motivators?

As stated above, the value of an Open Badge comes through the metadata contained. Learning design is the hard part of creating an ecosystem of badges; it’s the 90% of the iceberg you don’t see. So, of course Open Badges can be used to extrinsically motivate. But, like all credentialing systems, if designed well then they can also promote intrinsic motivation.*

*My rejection of intrinsic/extrinsic motivation as a binary will have to wait for another blog post…

How can issuers ensure their badges are taken as seriously as possible by institutions/employers?

An Open Badge is a metadata-infused credential. Whether badges are taken seriously depends on how trustworthy, relevant and useful they are to others. That’s a function of the reputation of the badge issuer but also on the rigour of the Criteria URL. What did the individual have to do to get the badge? Was that worth doing? Is there an Evidence URL pointing to what that individual actually did?

It’s a fact of life that people like (and trust) good-looking things so it’s worth spending some time on the visual design of the badge. But that’s the tip of the iceberg: it’s the learning design, the partnerships and the thinking through how individuals can ‘level up’ that’s important. DigitalMe have a great CC-licensed badge canvas resource to help you think through some of these things.

Finally, it’s worth having a useful way to display badges to institutions and employers. Purdue University, for example, have an iPad app that students can use to show their badges at interview. Badges can also be displayed on pretty much any kind of website, including e-portfolios and wikis.

Why would I want an Open Badge instead of a degree?

This is the $64,000 question, but one that misses the point in the short term. Often when a new technology comes along we think in terms of either/or. In practice, however, it’s more and/and/and. How can we use Open Badges to credential those things that we think are important but we don’t currently have a way of capturing? How can we make credentialing more granular? How can we make learning more personalised through badge-based ‘playlists’ or ‘pathways’? These are the questions which interest us a lot more than ‘Can X replace Y?’

Have you got any more questions? Ask away below! (or on Twitter / Facebook / Google+) If I get enough I’ll probably do another one of these in a few weeks’ time.

Header image CC BY Bilal Kamoon

There’s a tendency that we all at various times either demonstrate or resist. In ascertaining the value of other people’s thoughts, innovations or opinions we ask for evidence of impact. But when it comes to our own thoughts, innovations or opinions, we believe evidence to be unnecessary because it’s self-evident.

So it is with learning new skills. Those without the skills ask questions about the value of obtaining them (“where’s the evidence?”), while to those with the skills it just seems obvious. And then there’s the perennial question about ‘transferability’. Just what counts as something being a ‘transferable skill’ anyway?*

To me, innovation comes at the overlap of two or more circles of a Venn diagram. It stands to reason, therefore, that the more circles there are on your Venn diagram, the more chances there are for overlap.

Learning a new language is like making your Venn diagram of skills three-dimensional. And by ‘a new language’ I mean things like HTML, JavaScript and Python just as much as French, Spanish and Chinese. These languages are new conceptual tools, new ways of looking at the world. Learning to play a musical instrument and understand mathematical abstraction/notation also falls into this camp, I reckon.

As a Pragmatist, I like the description William James gives of the world as a “bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion”. There is no way that we can have an objective or neutral view of the world, so the more lenses we can use to view it, the better.**

I’m (at best) currently an average wrangler of HTML and CSS, and a beginner with JavaScript. But the computational thinking I’ve developed through learning these from a reasonably young age (and before that messing about with a BBC Micro) have stood me in good stead for seeing the world differently.***

Why do we need to see the world differently? Well, because the problems that we face as a society are increasingly complex. We need people who speak many languages – including those of machines – to be able to solve them. We don’t need a society of pure programmers any more than we need a society of pure linguists or musicians. What we do need are people who know a bit of each.

That’s why I think learning a little code is important.

* I kind of discussed this in this blog post.

** I love the HTML Hunting in the World Around You challenge in P2PU’s School of Webcraft as an example of this.

*** I’m currently re-learning French through Duolingo.

• Helping kids hack their school websites at Maker Faire (using X-Ray Goggles) with my Mozilla / Make Things Do Stuff colleagues.
• Hosting the weekly Web Literacy standard call.
• Talking to people via Skype and in person about integrating with the Open Badges Infrastructure (OBI). I had my closest meeting yet – just 5 miles away! Also, excitingly, it looks like CoderDojo might be badgifying their belts!
• Starting planning an Open Badges workshop focusing on assessment at the Mozilla London office in June. I then had to postpone/cancel it as I’ve been invited to an EU summit on the same date.
• Sharing the first draft of Mozilla’s Web Literacy standard with the Webmaker community on the weekly call.
• Participating in the first week of the Mozilla #teachtheweb MOOC.
• Talking with Vinay Gupta about an idea about a ‘Firecloud’ evolution of the Firefox web browser that we’re considering submitting to the Mozilla Labs Hatchery.
• Setting a date in July for an Open Badges workshop at the University of Hull.
• Helping judge a Technology Strategy Board funding round including some work around Open Badges.
• Presenting and answering questions at an Open Badges briefing session for Leicester schools, organised by Josie Fraser. My slides are here.

Next week it’s Bank Holiday (woo!) then I’m in London on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning for a meeting with Lord Jim Knight. Then on Friday I’m in Salford to talk to the BBC about Open Badges for their CPD programme(s).

I believe education to be public good, as something that profits the children’s mind, body and soul – not as something that should lead to financial profit for large corporates. I want teachers to do things in the classroom with an eye on my children’s learning and development, not on making sure they can pass a performance review in order to meet their mortgage payments.

Schools can, and probably should, be run in line with some business principles. But allowing schools to ‘go to the wall’ (as has been suggested in some quarters) because of the vagaries of the market sounds horrendous. Schools are places where human interactions should take place, not financial transactions.

Read the post in full here: Profit: the purpose of education?

Many thanks to Lucy for the invitation to contribute!

I sold or tossed a ton of stuff I didn’t need, use or wear. I stopped wearing all those free startup shirts I gathered over the years and moved on to button-ups. I use Laundry Locker to deal with ironing them so I don’t spend my Sundays doing this. I buy toothpaste, shampoo and the like in bulk on Amazon so I don’t have to remember to make monthly errands. I moved to a slimmer wallet and carry less stuff with me everywhere. I cancelled unnecessary monthly billed services so there’s less to think about when I see my statements.

This is great. This is something I’ve tried to do. This is something to which I aspire. But the trouble is that it requires money to do this. And I’m guessing Stammy’s new found outlook on life is helped by the fact he’s probably not earning peanuts at Twitter.

Here’s Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It’s not perfect, but let’s use it as a convenient hypocrisy:

People don’t need money to be happy, certainly not. But there’s a level of financial security that allows you to say “screw you” to the world. It’s easy to forget just how soul-crushing money worries can be. Indeed, it’s one of the biggest causes of strife in relationships.

The trouble with minimalism, as others have pointed out, isn’t the message but the messenger. It’s rich, successful (mainly white) males saying “I don’t need all of this stuff to be happy!”. That’s great, but we should be mindful that people not so well-off sometimes need stuff as a just-in-case. They haven’t got the financial resources to just go and buy whatever they need there and then.

I completely accept Leo Babauta’s point about minimalism being a constant critique/mindset rather than a lifestyle. It’s just that two seem to be rather conflated at this point in time. For rich people a spartan aesthetic means iPhones and white furniture. For less well-off people minimalism looks very much like poverty.

Image from Wikimedia Commons

As a lover of Dropbox, I’m investigating Bittorrent Sync as a way to augment the way I currently sync files across machines.* I mentioned above that there’s no Web component involved. Instead, files are synced directly from machine to machine via a secure and encrypted process that isn’t available to other Bittorrent users – just the people with whom you’ve shared a ‘secret key’.

If you’d like to give it a try, download the software for your computer and enter this ‘secret’ key, giving read-only access to my BTSync folder: RCFZPEYBNV4MGZTQEO2ITOANGEZNF42WF

Of course, it’ll only work when I (or someone else who has synced the files) is online! There must be a way to install the software on a server so it can act as a node?

* This would be an awesome way of sharing learning and teaching resources en masse!

If the Storify embed doesn’t appear below, the full conversation (including tangents) can be found in my Flickr photostream or on the Internet Archive.

I welcome the pushback to the work I’m doing that’s implicit in the conversation above. It’s always good to keep stuff like this in mind!