[If you’re reading this via email or RSS you might want to click through to see what I’m talking about]
I came across BadgeWidgetHack.org today. It’s one of those sites that’s necessary now, but won’t be in six months to a year’s time.
Why’s that?
Well, it does one thing and one thing only, generating the code necessary to display already-earned Open Badges in your blog sidebar. Or, indeed, pretty much anywhere online.
You can see it in action in my sidebar to the right. I’ve earned (and am in the process of earning) some badges over at P2PU.org so I’ve chosen to display those.
The process:
- Login at beta.openbadges.org
- Grab your unique user number
- Enter the number at badgewidgethack.org
- Choose which set of badges to display
- Decide on the ‘dynamic’ or ‘static’ option*
And that’s it. Copy and paste the code into your blog sidebar and you’re done!
*It might be just me, but I had a problem in that if you clicked on the displayed badges it took you to a URL that didn’t exist! I got around this by choosing the ‘static’ option and then changing the beginning of each URL to point to P2PU.org.
As I’ve mentioned, I’m dipping into P2PU’s School of Webcraft. I actually know how to do most of the stuff so far asked of me in the tasks, but I really value four things involved in the process.
- The social element (you don’t seem to get this at, for example, Codecademy)
- Filling in gaps in my knowledge (I didn’t learn any of this sequentially; sometimes I’m missing some building blocks)
- Reviewing other people’s work (some people obviously do the bare minimum, others are super-dedicated)
- The opportunity to become a mentor (once you’ve learned something, there’s the opportunity to then teach it)
An example of the second item on my list is the P2PU task Some Tags for You to Meet. I learned about the <time> and the <q> HTML tags, the former being used to provide a machine-readable way of parsing the start of, for example, an event. The latter is used for short quotations that are included within a paragraph of text. Handy.
There’s plenty more of these on the Mozilla Developer Network but, for the time being that’s enough. 🙂
If you’re an educator you should be all over P2PU like a rash. Seriously.
One of the main prompts for my getting started with evangelising Open Badges last year was stumbling across P2PU’s School of Webcraft pilot. It was rough around the edges, but the idea behind it was awesome: peer recognition of skills that can quickly go out of date.
I was delighted, therefore, to discover that not only has the Open Badges website been updated, but so has the School of Webcraft. It’s now possible to earn badges on both sites.
This post is actually part of Webmaking 101.
Why not join me on a quest to find out more about how the Web works?
