Badges/Research

Badges can help us pave the way for identity and merit based learning incentive systems at the University of Michigan. To learn more about what we were getting ourselves into, we decided to go through an exploratory research phase to both understand how others are approaching badges and how badges would fit within our existing community.

Internal Research
Individual interviews were conducted with seven participants that were picked to represent the previously identified Open.Michigan community categories: published faculty members, student dScribes, event participants, general collaborators, and advocates. The interviews were designed to probe participant opinion on Open.Michigan, the Open.Michigan community, personal and group motivations, badges, and learning.


 * The overall conclusion of this study is that although opinions vary on the merits of badges and the usefulness of a more cohesive OM community, there is a strong need for some of the “increased awareness” efforts about Open.Michigan throughout the university;
 * Recognition for personal work and achievement, benefits that can be provided by a badge system. These needs are:
 * An easily accessible list of other OM participants and their work;
 * A system for measuring the quality of participant contribution.
 * OM participants are less interested in working with a new OM-centered community than they are with having more awareness of OM and recognition for their work within their existing communities.

A record of our affinity diagrams can be found on our Flickr photostream. A detailed report of our interview process conclusions can be found on our public Google Document.

What are badges?
A badge is a symbol of identity, signifying a level of achievement or character, participation in an event or activity, or belonging to a group. Society and individuals have used badges in a wide variety of ways (e.g., educational degrees/certificates/diplomas, scouting awards, military awards, secret societies, sports teams, solidarity events/groups, etc.). Sometimes badges are used as a reward for behavior or an incentive for participation. Sometimes they are strictly a demarcation of achievement or proof of certification. Regardless, badging is a system of recognition, designed to convey to individuals, organizations, and anyone else a characteristic of identity, however closely or loosely tied to the individual in possession.

As the Open Badges Project defines it:

badge [baj]: a special or distinctive mark, token, or device worn as a sign of allegiance, membership, authority, achievement, etc. – Dictionary.com A badge is a symbol or indicator of an accomplishment, skill, quality or interest. From the Boy and Girl Scouts, to PADI diving instruction, to the more recently popular geo-location game, Foursquare, badges have been successfully used to set goals, motivate behaviors, represent achievements and communicate success in many contexts. Badges can support connected learning environments by motivating learning and signaling achievement both within particular communities as well as across communities and institutions.

Mozilla Open Badges Project
A couple U-Mers attended the Mozilla Drumbeat Festival in Barcelona in 2010 and worked on the design of an open badging system. That semi-spontaneous session grew into the Open Badges Project, spearheaded by Mozilla and P2PU. They have continued to develop the concept and even built some rudimentary infrastructure to facilitate badge sharing. Here are the things to read to get caught up on the project/concept:


 * Open Badges Project - Mozilla Foundation and MacArthur Foundation;
 * Digital Media Learning Competition - HASTAC Initiative
 * Badges wiki - Mozilla, P2PU
 * OpenEd proposal - Piet, Open.Michigan
 * Hacking Certification (in education) - Philipp Schmidt
 * Recognition of Learning in Open Education - Schmidt, Geith, Haklev, Thierstein
 * Creating Badges - Erin Knight
 * Open Badge Infrastructure - Erin Knight
 * Certification and Assessment - Erin Knight
 * School of WebCraft pilot and follow-up - P2PU, Erin Knight

Badges as Game Elements
Badges are commonly awarded in games as a way to show mastery or achievement.


 * Gamification of everything - let's not gamify everything
 * Game Mechanics won't save you - motivation needs to be mainly based on intrinsic factors, not extrinsic ones (we know this)
 * Before the G.P.A. - grades didn't matter before, should they now? let's use badges!; Michigan Today, U-M
 * Mindful technology and incentives - let's encourage those who want to share by giving them technology that positively reinforces sharing behavior; Sean Munson
 * Using badges in lieu of grades - Cathy Davidson

Badges in Reputation Systems, Community, and Identity
Badges are one of several ways for people to display their reputation on or offline (others include leaderboards, ratings or special names). If they are properly awarded for mastering or achieving something they can signal to others information like skill-level, dedication, age (newbie or expert) or even friendliness of a user. When thought of in the context of reputation systems, the value of badges to users lies in their ability to solve the problem of information asymmetry.


 * Manifesto for a reputation society, Massum and Zhang (long but a good overview of reputation systems)
 * A Comparison of Reputation, Certification, Warranties, and Information Disclosure as Remedies for Information Asymmetries: Lessons from the On-line Comic Book Market, Ederignton and Dewally
 * The story Consumating's ill-fated point system, by Ben Brown

Badges in Learning and other thoughts

 * DMLBadges and Shifting the Overton Window on Learning, Rafi Santo
 * Badges for Lifelong Learning: Reframing the Debate, Doug Belshaw
 * Mindful Technology vs. Persuasive Technology, Sean Munson
 * Deschooling, Ch.3, Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society ( New York: Harper &amp; Row, 1971)
 * Thoughts on Badges for Learning, Andrea Zellner
 * Digging Out My Sash
 * Welcome to badge world, Alex Reid
 * Episode 39: Have a Badge, DLT Today
 * Drupal skill sets, Heather

Badge Design
Keep badge designs simple and use metadata to describe them. Users should have easy access to information on how and why badges are earned.


 * Designing badges - some good points to keep in mind as we design dScribe badges; Mouly Kumaraswamy (SI grad)
 * Types of Online Reputations, Yahoo! Developer Network (design differences between badges, named levels, numbered levels, scores, identifying labels and rank)
 * Yahoo! Answers Scoring System
 * Creating Badges - Erin Knight

Case Studies

 * 750 words, badges are used in context with social proof and people's real names.
 * DevHub, why gamify devhub by Geoffrey Nuval