Tag Archives: badges

Webmaker TLDR Update 03.25.13

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Re-posted from OpenMatt.org.

TLDR = quick summary of what’s up with Mozilla Webmaker this week.

Open Badges 1.0: coverage, reaction and new demos

The Mozilla blog post tells the story. Plus check out:

¡Aye Caramba! SIX new Webmaker projects this week!

  • Swapjack the sound (Popcorn) — experiment with remixing and swapping in new audio to change the meaning and impact of any video
  • Finish the graffiti tag (Thimble) — use CSS to complete the tag
  • Create a six word memoir (Thimble) — the National Writing Project wants you to write a beautiful six-word memoir — while learning the HTML and CSS that goes into making your own page.

Popcorn for your webcam: help test this new feature

What if you could record directly from your web cam straight into Popcorn Maker? Well  guess what — the future is here! Or rather: the future is ready for testing and bug-filing.

Here’s how to play-test it:

  1. Go here
  2. Click the “record from webcam button.” This loads the You Tube uploader tool.
  3. If you aren’t already signed in to a Google account, you’ll be prompted to sign in.
  4. Flash will prompt you for access to your webcam. Click Allow or Deny access and leave the tool.
  5. You should now see your webcam feed. Click Start Recording to begin.
  6. Review what you’ve recorded, or click Upload to upload to You Tube.
  7. Once uploaded, You Tube will take some time processing and converting the video.
  8. Once done, You Tube will give Popcorn Maker the link to your newly uploaded video and added it to your media gallery, ready to be Popcorn-ized!

Report bugs or make suggestions here. More context and a full HOW TO is here.

#teachtheweb

The idea is simple: use the hashtag #teachtheweb to ask for and offer help. For mentors, instructors, and anyone interested in helping to teach digital literacy and webmaking. For example:

“I’m looking for someone to help teach Javascript at a webmaking event in Athens. #teachtheweb”

You can also offer help. Say, for example:

“I work with youth at my hackerspace and am happy to share activities they like. #teachtheweb”

#teachtheweb

It’s not just for event needs or offers — use it for learning resources, inspirational stories, feedback, etc.

Making is Learning: project-based learning in action

It feels efficacious and powerful to make something from nothing. –Chad Sansing, educator

Laura Hilliger made this video about a classroom in Virginia using the project-based approach to teach kids with learning disabilities and difficulty following “traditional” learning paths. Including how they’re using Thimble. Inspiring to see these principles in action.

Planet Webmaker roundup

Global Kids and Hive NYC Badge Design Reflection

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This is a guest post by Daria Ng, a Senior Program Associate at Global Kids. Next week she’ll continue her work with international education as a consultant for UNICEF.

Global Kids has experimented with digital badging in various contexts for the past few years. From badging an afterschool program four years ago at the New York Public Library, to badging the Urban Biodiversity Network program at the American Museum of Natural History, Global Kids has used digital assessment to support youth to recognize, talk about, and demonstrate essential digital literacy skills. Currently, we are consulting with three schools as they develop badging systems for their students, developing our own badging system for all Global Kids youth programs, and supporting Hive NYC and Hive Chicago to build their digital badging systems and infrastructures.

For the past year and a half, Global Kids has been navigating the badge universe. Global Kids has followed the growing interest in badges in both formal and informal learning contexts, and been well aware of the questions, confusion, and opposition towards badging as assessment. One thing Global Kids knows for sure is that badging is an iterative, hands-on process—the only way to learn about badges is through their design and implementation. As an organization, we have learned so much through the introduction of badges to youth. We have learned from the schools we work with, our experience this past summer, and by hearing from others who have implemented badging systems. For example, we are in our second year of a badging system we helped implement at the Epstein School in Atlanta for sixth and seventh graders. And this past summer, we badged Global Kids’ geocaching and virtual video program, Race to the White House.

rwh badges

At Global Kids, we have envisioned badge development as an approach to: provide alternative assessment, gamify education, scaffold learning, develop lifelong learning skills, drive digital media and learning, and democratize the learning and credit acquisition process. Read more about each of these six framing guidelines here. Our need to incorporate badges into our learning design, arose out of our observations that youth participants were gaining new skills around leadership, global literacy, digital literacy, and other 21st century learning skills through Global Kids, but when it came time to write resumes, apply for jobs, or draft college essays, they struggled to articulate and identify these new-found skills and instead defaulted to listing their more traditional academic experiences, such as standardized test scores, and report cards. They discounted interest-driven learning, out-of-school experiences and the connected learning that we know to be so important to their academic, civic and professional development.

activist digital advocacy game guru

Funding from The MacArthur Foundation has enabled Global Kids to spend the past year offering in-person professional development workshops to develop digital badging systems for Hive Learning Network members in New York City and Chicago. Trainings consisted of the what and why of badges, incorporating Global Kids’ six framing guidelines in the design process, recommendations for badge integration and workflows, member updates, and use of badge-based learning programs such as BadgeStack. We built a community site and listerv where Hive members doing badging work can post updates and share their work, and where Global Kids can also share resources for everyone to benefit from including reports, case studies, etc.

badge training_chi

In addition to training Hive members, Global Kids has also been supported to develop network-level badges for Hive NYC. These badges will serve as a meta-assessment and incentivization system to help the network share learnings and experiences across organizations, programs, and events. While Hive Chicago began with robust discussions about network-wide badges, Hive NYC has been more focused on organizational and programmatic badges. Global Kids and Hive NYC staff began meeting in October 2012 to design a badge that would serve all participating organizations in Hive Learning Networks.

As Global Kids and Hive HQ began the badge system development process, one of our first design decisions was that cross-network badges for Hive NYC should emphasize the learning pathways that connect youth to the experience and dispositions of a meaningful and fulfilling networked learned experience. We were interested in taking the often abstract rhizomatic learning of the network and translating and visualizing it for Hive NYC’s youth participants.

The goals identified were:

  • Track/model the connected learning experience
  • Motivate cross-network participation
  • Increase participation in Hive network events
  • Acknowledge digital media skills/expertise
  • Demonstrate the Network’s key values and behaviors
  • Identify potential learning pathways and opportunities available through the network

When Global Kids began training Hive members, our strategy included sharing what we knew from our experiences, building the badging community within the network, and incorporating member feedback to develop a relevant system that would work for them. Since badging at the network level was new for everyone, we anticipated that there would be a lot that we wouldn’t know, but that we’d discover through the process. We didn’t know what kinds of social practices and needs would arise when members started using the system and designing badges for their programs. For example, one need that arose from the membership was a desire to badge for the one-time events and incubator projects organized by partnering Hive organizations.

badge training

Hive NYC’s particular focus on pop-ups, learning events and short-term collaborations indicated a need to issue a network-wide, plug and play system that organizations could use to leverage larger thinking and learning pathways within the network. After identifying goals, we turned our focus to our end users—the NYC youth that participate in Hive NYC programs. We developed user stories to encompass a diversity of young people who we’d met through our programs and events.

Hive NYC User Stories

Zakia is a 16-yr old student at Hudson High School. She is an active member of MOUSE and has successfully completed several workshops. Zakia has worked with physical computing, design, and is familiar with HTML and Mozilla’s X-Ray Goggles tool. This summer she was an intern at Hive NYC and increased her HTML and CSS proficiency. She also participated in skill shares with Hive NYC youth from Brooklyn Public Library, Rubin Museum of Art and Summer Code Parties. She has attended Emoti-Con, Maker Faire and a Makerbot workshop at Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum.

Walid is 15 years old. He attended a Summer Code Party event in 2012 with a friend who found out about Hive NYC through Facebook. Walid is into video and loves messing around with YouTube, and had a great time learning about Mozilla’s video remix tools. He’d probably attend more events or would definitely take a workshop—if he knew more about Hive NYC’s focus on youth, making and learning.

After developing about five user stories, we were able to identify several big design questions:

  1. How does youth participation in Hive NYC member programs connect and inform the larger network badge system?
  2. How can we incentivize participation and connected learning while and keep badges meaningful (ie avoid over badging)?
  3. What is the user experience, the look and feel of the Hive NYC badge?
  4. What are the trajectories for badge awards? And how do we make these awards relevant to youth in the network?
  5. What network behaviors should be encouraged?

As we tackled these big questions, the work of Ruth Schmidt, a Senior Designer at Doblin who helped Hive Chicago develop their thinking about the badge process, became very useful for us in NYC. Schmidt’s framework for thinking about badge construction, became a core element and inspiration for our work.

We went through each of the identified steps for badge construction—analyzing each one and determining its relevance for our design process. All of this helped inform our next and most challenging (and time-consuming step): brainstorming, developing, and detailing the youth activities and “challenges” to assess and badge.

Since we know we want the Hive NYC badge system to help youth experience the city and various Hive NYC programs, we decided to use location-based activities to structure the learning pathways of the badges. In its current design, a user must complete an activity or set of challenges either online or during a face-to-face event and submit evidence (a link, blog post, video or document) in order to earn a badge. As a learning laboratory with an emphasis on open, reflective, hands-on making, we felt that tying the badges to specific activities and products was crucial to our approach. So far, each badge and challenge has a youth-facing description. Although the titles have not been user-tested with youth the basic challenges are developed. For example:
HiveologistRecruiterFirestarter

Hive-ologist Badge
Can you represent Hive NYC and explain its who, what, when, why, and how?

Hive-ologist Challenges:

  • Present at a public event and speak about Hive NYC
  • Send in the website links of least 5 Hive NYC organizations
  • Name at least 10 organizations in Hive NYC

Recruiter Badge
You’ve discovered the innate beauty of Hive NYC. You’ve met Hivers and attended Hive NYC events all over the city. Now your job is to convince a friend to take a ride on the Hive NYC crazy train. Caution: learning and making ahead!

Recruiter Challenges:

  • Post a picture or photo of you and your friend at a Hive NYC event
  • Collect a comment of what your friend thought of the event
  • Submit documentation of something your friend made at the event

Currently, we have developed 14 Hive NYC badges and associated challenges, but our work is far from over. Our next steps include:

  • Choosing the right platform for Hive NYC badges
  • Finalizing the badge icons
  • Testing Hive NYC badges at an upcoming event (see below)
  • Gathering feedback from youth and educators

explore create badgeshare

In the spirit of learning by doing, we are testing out Hive NYC badges using the Credly platform at the Level Up Teen Game Jam that concluded yesterday. Hosted by the Museum of Moving Image, the event is held in conjunction with IndieCade East, the National STEM Video Game Challenge, Mozilla’s Game_On competition and Institute of Play’s Gamekit launch. Typical of Hive’s cross-network and interdisciplinary approach, teens will meet professional game designers, play indie and vintage video games, then build their own analog and digital game prototypes, earning digital badges and stickers to mark the achievement of new skills. We’ll be using the event’s focus on prototyping and sharing to assess three skills that are critical to the Hive NYC DNA—exploring, creating and sharing. We’ll be reporting back with more details of how our beta-test and pilot experiences go.

Design Feedback for Badge Systems

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This is a guest post by Mozilla’s Jess Klein and was cross-posted on her blog. It’s also the second in a series of posts about digital badges in education.

Last week I participated in a workshop for Digital Media and Learning grantees. Everyone at the workshop presented their progress on creating open badge systems for their organization. It was my role during the workshop to act as a design expert, to give feedback on the projects and help facilitate a conversation about the design elements of their work.  Over the course of 2 days, I listened to detailed presentations about badge system design, learning theory and communication plans and realized that some themes were emerging. For today’s post, I thought that I would share my 5 most common bits of feedback that I gave out to the grantees.

 1.    Get to know your end-user
 Take the time to think through your user persona and user flows. Remember that you have a specific human using your product and they are receiving the badges that you create. Get really specific here and come up with a user story and test that against your designs.
For example: My user’s name is Adrian, he is 18 years old and enjoys reading Science Fiction books, riding his bike and exploring New York City. He is participating in this after school program because he has a passion for math and has felt relatively uninspired by his in-school options. He does this program on Wednesdays after school and has already earned badges for peer mentoring, leadership and problem solving. These are particularly meaningful for him because he wants his peers to know that he is not only a smart guy, but really has street cred in the math community. He posts his badges both in his school LMS and on his personal Facebook page.
From my example, we can already learn a few things that will help inform some design decisions. We know he is doing this work as an extracurricular activity, so we want to frame the work as informal and we know that he is more interested in the social capital that he gains from this experience outside of the classroom and school community, so he is invested in the badges being flexible and shareable.
You probably will have 3 or 4 types of users for any given product. Embrace that and come up with unique user stories that are based on real life use cases.
2.    Badges and identity
Think about how your badges communicate or enhance an end-users identity. This might seem like an obvious one, but it’s crucial to think about how the end-user relates to the badge on a personal level and how that might inform their identity, both within the context of your tool or badge system design and outside of that framework in the real world. On a simple level, think about how might be naming the badges and ask yourself – does this have resonance with the badge recipient? What is more appealing “CSS 101 badge” or “CSS Super Styler”? Think about how this relates to the visual design as well, are you offering something that would have more significance to your organizational brand than to your users brand or identity? If so, then I would recommend reviewing the design and iterating.
3.    Badge design 
 It’s important to remember that 90% of the badge system design is not visual. Take the time to go and think through all of the touchpoints for badges and ask yourself “are they meaningful experiences?” and if they are meaningful – who are they meaningful for? Once you past that test, then you can move on to visual design. I gave a webinar on this about a month ago and put the slides up on a Google Doc here.
The top level things to consider are legibility, scale and typography. Open badges are relatively small graphics, so think about that when you are designing them. Reduce the amount of graphic complexity as much as humanly possible. Ask yourself if you even need to incorporate text into the badge – because this adds an additional layer of content that a user needs to digest. I pull this point out separately because I don’t think that text is needed because the backpack and/or system distribution could include that information alongside the badge, giving you the opportunity to free up your design. Badges are like icons, you need to attempt to communicate as much as possible with the fewest elements as possible.
 4.    User Testing 
How can you engage your community in user testing and analysis? Can you think of ways to work in a more agile way- incorporating feedback and testing so that you are putting out releases that build on your learning and findings from fieldwork and testing?  All of the questions that you have about your design will be acknowledged the second that you have someone who is unfamiliar with your project review your work.
And, as part of the DML/ MacArthur/ HASTAC / Mozilla community- you can ask us for help. Yeah you have a grant deliverable, but you have a community right here who are asking themselves the same design questions and are a perfect user tester. That said, I would take the time to mix up your user tests – have friends and family, but also include complete strangers.
Remember, user testing can be as informal as throwing two badge designs in front of a user and asking them which one they prefer and why. Don’t be intimidated by the term user testing – in reality, what is more intimidating is putting out a product that will be used by hundreds of people that has not been tested.
5.    Metrics and dashboard Data
My final bit of feedback has to do with how you are valuing success but more importantly about how your end user values success, learning and skill acquisition. Many of the dashboard type tools that I saw were actually speaking to how an institution or organization values success within a Learning Management System (or badge system, or tool etc.) but not how the end – user values success. So for example, the tool was designed for the high school teacher instead of the high school student. Remember that success and metrics is something that can be shared and communicated to users as part of their experience within the product offering and it is an opportunity to help a user challenge themselves to level up or exceed both your and their expectations. In terms of design, this might mean that you should consider surfacing some of this data.
Design needs to constantly be iterated upon, however, if done correctly it will be a huge contributor to the success of your badge system design. So go forth, and design with courage. Use this top 5 list as tools in your arsenal to help you craft a meaningful user experience.
Related reading from our series on badges: