Today I’ve been frustrated by Open Badges issuing platforms. Instead of getting philosophical about it, or bemoaning the state of the world (as I usually would!) I’ve decided to be more practical. If you’re a developer, I’m hoping this might tempt you into a side project…
That’s because, while I haven’t got the skills to create a badge issuing platform myself, I do know what it is that I and other people want. I’ve been in and around badges for the past 11 years, and I know Open Recognition can only flourish if it’s easy to issue and earn badges by claiming them.
Today, in my case, it was related to people completing activities as part of the email-based courses that WAO offer. But there are many other use cases.
I’m sure there’s other things that need to be in the mix, such as CAPTCHA codes, to prevent spam, and a simple admin interface. However, at its core, this is a really simple process.
Step 1: enter claim code
As badge claimant, I want to be presented with an extremely simple box in which to paste a claim code I’ve copied from an email, chat message, or somewhere on the web.
(if I’ve come to this page by accident, or don’t recognise the term ‘claim code’ I want a link/tooltip to show me what this means)
Step 2: fill in essential details
On the next screen, all I want to do is to fill in a form to tell the platform my name and email address. I then want the ability to enter words in a text box and/or upload a file providing evidence in support of my application.
Note that I’m not creating an account here. The badge issuing platform literally issues badges to the email address I’ve entered, if my submission is approved.
(if I don’t know what is meant by ‘evidence’ or what is required then I want to be able to click on a question mark icon for a link/tooltip to explain this )
Step 3: confirmation of submission
Once I’ve submitted my name, email address, and evidence, I want confirmation that the platform has received my application, and what will happen next. That’s it. Done.
There we go! This would require some kind of admin interface on the backend, but for an MVP this could literally be a spreadsheet. Who’s going to give this a try as a side project and make the world a better place? Here’s the Open Badges v2.1 specification if I can tempt anyone…
The work I do is at the intersection of learning, technology, and community. That’s taken lots of different shapes, from formal education, to working for a global non-profit like the Mozilla Foundation, to building a resource-sharing social network for educators with Moodle. More recently, though, I’ve been working with the Bonfire team, as well as collaborating with my WAO colleagues in helping out organisations like Participate and LocalGov Drupal.
One thing that seems to be a thread that runs through all of this work is how to engender a sense of belonging within a community. WAO use an Architecture of Participation approach which I’ve most recently written about many times to help with that. But there’s another angle I also want to explore, which I suppose sits more under the heading of ‘information architecture’.
Communities these days, even if they meet up in person regularly, are technologically-mediated. Take a sports team or a community choir, for example: they will interact at the very least through a chat app to keep everyone up-to-date with what’s going on. Then, at the other end of the spectrum, are communities where most of the people involved will probably never meet in person — an online gaming group, for example, or people who come together for a few short weeks to do an online course.
Usually, the people facilitating the community only consider the people they’re dealing with in the single dimension of that particular group or course. Most of us, however, are part of many different communities and, in addition, have direct message conversations with friends and colleagues to keep up with.
So we end up with the problem usually referred to as ‘information overload’ but I prefer to call notification literacy. As I say in the linked post, there are preventative measures and mitigating actions you can take as an individual to help ‘increase your notification literacy’. There are also ways of facilitating communities that can help, for example if the platform you’re using has threaded comments, insisting that people use instead of a confusing, undifferentiated stream of messages. You can also ensure you have a separate chat or channel just for important announcements.
However, there are UX decisions that can be made at a platform level which can help with this. I’ve already mentioned threads, which to my mind is absolutely basic — even chat apps like WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal should have these, I think. Going beyond this, it’s worth considering how to scaffold the attention of people returning to a social networking app after some time away. This might be just overnight while they were sleeping, or after several days, weeks, or months away, for various reasons.
Big Tech’s centralised, proprietary platforms deal with this through algorithmic timelines. That is to say, instead of a simple reverse chronological timeline with one update after another, they show you ‘things you may have missed’ and otherwise curate your experience for you. This is extremely effective at sucking people into spending more time on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. But it’s not a great way of preventing civilisational collapse due to us all having no short-term memory or attention.
This is why I’ve been thinking about what a healthy, sustainable, informative ‘home’ screen might be like for community-focused platforms such as LocalGov Drupal, Participate, and Bonfire. This is particularly germane for the latter two, as they are building platforms to allow people to create community spaces for learning and solidarity. I don’t think a ‘notifications’ tab is enough in this day and age to allow people to make sense of what’s going on; it involves too much context-switching and can absolutely destroy our attention.
I was particularly interested in Chris Aldrich’s observation that knowledge workers tend to talk in spatial terms about their work, especially if distracted.
Following interruptions by colleagues or phone calls at work, people may frequently ask themselves “where was I?” more frequently than “what was I doing?” This colloquialism isn’t surprising as our memories for visual items and location are much stronger than actions. Knowledge workers will look around at their environments for contextual clues for what they were doing and find them in piles of paper on their desks, tabs in their computer browser, or even documents (physical or virtual) on their desktops.
What are the contextual cues we can use in community spaces to help people understand what’s going on? I don’t think a mere notifications tab is going to cut it. Instead, I perhaps we need more advanced conversational visualisation tools such as Chartodon, and even the ability for people to colour-code and tag discussions.
There are plenty of issues with Slack for workplace chat, but one thing I find invaluable is the ability for it to remind me to be reminded about a message after a specified amount of time. It seems like such a simple thing for a social network or other community-focused platform to implement, but I haven’t seen it anywhere else.
Another thing, of course, that most chat apps have is a status icon showing whether that person is online. This has been around for decades, ever since the days of MSN and AOL Messengers, and probably before that. Knowing whether someone is (choosing to show that they’re) online can make a difference to how I reply, as well as the speed of my reply.
Ideally, to take a metaphor from WordPress, I want to separate out my ‘home’ page on a community platform from the the feed. So instead of logging-on and being presented with a firehose, instead I have something which I can immediately understand.
(I haven’t used a forum for years, and don’t even really use my Reddit account, but I seem to remember that when I logged into forums back in the day, there would be a ‘dashboard’ where I could see which threads had been updated and how many messages there were. I kind of miss that, I have to say.)
I’m very much thinking out loud in this post, which is why I haven’t included screenshots and mock-ups. However, perhaps it might be worth thinking further using some visual tools about how this could look. I’d like to get some other brains involved as well, so if you’re interested perhaps we could have a chat?
I took three Covid tests this week. All of them were negative, but can you really, truly trust a lateral flow test? I’ve felt run-down but still able to work. Not as bad as when I know that I had Covid back in January, but still bad enough to not exercise for three days.
Now, nobody likes a whinger, but this is my blog so I’ll do what I like. The particular problem I have, as someone who suffers from migraines, is that I have to balance my life just so in order not to get them regularly. Some of that balance involves diet, some the amount of time I spend on screens, but a major part is doing exercise every day. So when I can’t exercise for two or more days as I’m feeling run-down, I get migraines. FML, as they say.
What I’ve learned over my 41 years on this earth is that when I feel weaker physically, I feel weaker psychologically. And vice-versa. This link is usually enough to keep me on the straight-and-narrow, but when things out of my control affect that, it can throw me for a bit of a loop. So I’ve also felt a bit useless this week in a wondering-what-I’m-doing-with-my-life sense. It will pass.
I worked fewer hours this week, partly due to the above, but partly because I took time off to go away to York last Sunday night with my wife, Hannah. It was fantastic. There’s something magical about going away on a train for 24 hours and cramming in wonderful food and experiences. Also, York is a wonderful place with beautiful buildings and lots of history.
It’s only three weeks until I go to the US for the Badge Summit, so I made sure I got my ESTA. I can remember the very first time I went there in 2010 and immigration asked me to place my fingerprints on the scanner. I was so shocked that I almost turned around and went home. These days, we use fingerprints to unlock our smartphones. Times change.
I’m still working on the same four projects that I’ve been working on for the past few weeks, and I think we’ll have some capacity to fit in more / different work from September. I’m no longer using LinkedIn, which is usually where I’d “provide the market with signals” (as it were) so feel free to share my availability and link to the WAO website.
Talking of the website, this week I hit publish on a page advertising a course we’ll start creating soon called How to Unf*ck Your Organisation. The title is deliberately provocative, although if it proves to be too much, we might resort to something along the lines of ‘untangling spaghetti’. That’s less punchy, though. I’ve been working on an updated, slimmed-down version of our What We Talk About When We Talk About Open course for Sport England organisations this week. I’ve also given Anne feedback on her ‘Feminist Pedagogy for Educators’ course that will be going on the site soon!
Like everyone else in the UK, I followed the ‘clownfall’ of Boris Johnson over the course of the week. I’m just pleased that we’re rid of him. Let’s get rid of the whole Tory government next, please.
Next week: more of the same, although Hannah’s down in London for three days for work and then do the Mighty Hike for which she’s been preparing. So I’ll be working, keeping the lights on, and getting that kitchen radiator painted that I’ve neglected for too long…
Photo of the roof of York train station taken by me on Monday.