UAL badges first meeting

DIAL applied and received a small amount of funding to explore badges designs, following our first meeting there seems to be great potential for badges especially with potential use with SEE future work. DIAL will pilot the design and integration of badges on some of the DIAL projects. See UAL badges proposal here. 

To kick off the project the DIAL project designer will be given the task of researching and designing a series of ‘open badge icon images’ for the DIAL project to pilot alongside our current projects and the The Professional Online Identities POI Programme.

One of the key considerations is how to introduce the badge concept at HE level, and potentially to staff and students of all ages. The badge experiment will be mainly trailed to test how it could potentially support employability, hard and soft skills.  Drupal UAL will be our pilot group:

UAL Badges: things to consider:

-      We want this to be a free and fun experiment without too many pre-existing or restrictive requirements.  

-      Governance, how are the badges going to be issued,     displayed and implemented

-       Relevance – what use are the badges?

-       Consistency across projects, design and implementation

-       UAL identity, do we need it on the badge?

-       Different audiences – perspectives

-       How they relate to in-house learning – teaching –PPD

-       ‘Badge’ name should it be called a badge

-       Badge title e.g.  – Drupal UAL – award name – and UAL

-       Standard template required as a starting point for all badges

-       Do we create our own platform and process or use Mozilla Open badges: - http://www.openbadges.org/about/

UAL badges for Drupal UAL I’m not sure badges would work for this group but I’m willing to give it a go, if they were to work they would have to be radically rethought and designed to fit the context. I’d like to avoid the terms beginner, starter, intermediate, master, expert etc. if possible, for the reasons of digital footprint. I am seeing more and more requests for ‘digital recall’ where individuals from the past request certain posts relating to them be removed. If a Drupal participant was to be badged with beginner and they then become an expert Drupal developer they maynot appreciate the old badge showing up in searches?  

Governance, how are the badges going to be issued, displayed and implemented

Who is going to manage the badges and under what rules? It makes sense to have badges managed by the tutor or group leader and to make there relevance meaningful in context of the community and commitment rather than only personal skill progression. The badge would also be associated to work in that community rather than only in Drupal development skills etc. For the below I've referenced my earlier Open University SCORE fellowship work where I looked at types of practice in relation to open practice and also the Visitors and Residents work by Dave White and during the meeting came up with the following badge system (rough ideas). We could also reference and look at how all this could potentially integrate with Mozilla Open badges: - http://www.openbadges.org/about/, although it seems bet to try an trial a small local pilot so we can experiment risk free, locally and freely.  

The below badge list with all names of those associated/given the badge will reside (as evidence) on a special Drupal UAL developers page as part of the resource group. This page has the potential to become very useful for anyone searching for a web developer/s to employ. The badge would also be added to the Drupal UAL site home profile pages and could be copied on to as many other platforms as respondent wishes.   

I've created a temporary placeholder badge (image right) to help structure and visualise how the badges may fit.  

Please tag all related Badges posts with UAL badges