Saturday, September 15, 2012

Open Badges FAQs

Over the last few months I have been working on updating both the General and Technical FAQs for the Mozilla Open Badges project. My process was as follows;
  1. Read all the document sources regarding Open Badges I could find. This included;
    • openbadges.org
    • mozilla open badges wiki
    • github open badges site
    • google group
    • monitoring of social media
    • attending the weekly community calls
    • listening to the Mozilla IRC
  2. With all this reading I began to identify trends in discussion and frequently asked questions
  3. I harvested these trends into the Mozilla wiki as new FAQ entries
  4. I continued my work and moved my work over to general and technical etherpads until I completely reviewed the google group in its entirety.
  5. I then edited these etherpad entries and put them into a staging area for review. Once the review period was over I moved them back out to respective wikis.
  6. These two wikis can be found at the following two links;
  7. Now I look for new FAQ entries as I continue to monitor all the Open Badges community sites and resources.
Highlights and Trends
What do I see as the highlights and trends (or lack thereof) within the discussion around the beta release of Open Badges?
  1. Most technical questions are with implementing the issuer role.
  2. Non-technical people seem to struggle with the technical issues. This would seem obvious, I do believe the Open Badges partners and community are a less technical and a more pedagogical crowd. This should be expected due to Open Badges playing more in the educational space. The technical challenges should also not come as a surprise given the beta release. I have every faith the open badges platform will become easy for the non-technical badge implementer.
  3. Badge integrity and validation (assertion) is important to people.
  4. Badge systems design is important and still at its early stages. I believe this is due to the broad variety of learning situations badges can be issued.
  5. People are wrapping there heads around badges both from a skills and knowledge perspective and a resume, cv and job search perspective.
  6. People are really interested in how open badges are going to work and be displayed within the whole social media landscape.
  7. Life-long learning seems to be the largest consideration for where badges will be utilized and hold most benefit.
  8. Discussion around assessment and alternate accreditation hasn't yet materialized in force.
  9. Project seems to be trending toward higher education and academia. Its an attractive place to play. I'd hope it would stay focused on the more common places of life-long learning.
  10. Not every FAQ entry harvested needs to have an audience, particularly some may disappear due to open badges being beta.