Some time ago, I began a discussion of "Why (Some) People Laugh at Badges."
I would like to ask a different question here. Right now (September, 2013) badges are risible, albeit less and less so, and non-controversial, while discussion of MOOCs is ubiquitous and intensely controversial. Why the difference? What would make discussion of badges more like discussion of MOOCs?
Some reasons that I can think of are that MOOCs clearly appear as a more imminent threat than badges do to faculty livelihoods. MOOCs also appear to some as a threat to cherished values about face to face teaching and learning.
What might make badges controversial? I can think of a few possibilities. One is that they actually "take off," and threaten to displace college and university degrees as labor market credentials, along the lines Kevin Carey has written. But, that is unlikely.
Already much of the work of human resource managers in firms is being computerized, so adding badges to what employers want to know about applicants is not likely to step on HR folks' toes any more than they have already been stepped on by other developments.
If university administrators tried to insist that faculty incorporate badges into their courses, there would be backlash. But, that is unlikely. Right now, badges remain "experimental," undertaken voluntary by individual or small groups of faculty. To generate real faculty concern, I think badges would have to be part of a much broader kind of imposition than standing singly, e.g., as part of mandated competency-based education, crafted for accountability purposes. For the time being, competency-based education in higher education remains experimental, and marginal, e.g., Southern New Hampshire University, University of Wisconsin System's Flex Degree.
If badges ever become as controversial as MOOCs it will be a sign of their success, that they have come to matter consdierably more than they do now.
13 comments
Badges As Non-Controversial
Lest, anyone think that badges might not, at least at some point, pose a threat:
Is this purely an opinion piece?
"Right now (September, 2013) badges are risible, albeit less and less so, and non-controversial, while discussion of MOOCs is ubiquitous and intensely controversial."
Evidence would be awesome.
"If badges ever become as controversial as MOOCs it will be a sign of their success, that they have come to matter consdierably [sic] more than they do now."
Why?
"To generate real faculty concern, I think badges would have to be part of a much broader kind of imposition than standing singly [sic], e.g., as part of mandated competency-based education, crafted for accountability purposes."
Are you saying change can only come top-down? Isn't the whole point of Open Badges that they enable people to bypass the traditional gatekeepers to learning?
<sigh>
Is this purely an opinion piece?
Well, it is speculative.
RE Evidence: If you read my post ""Why (Some) People Laugh at Badges," on HASTAC (http://www.hastac.org/blogs/molneck/2013/07/02/why-do-some-people-laugh-when-they-first-hear-about-badges), you will see anecdotal evidence, and the fact that even Cathy Davidson at first thought badges were frivolous. In her response to my post, she said that it was among educators that badges were met with laughter, not among employers. I would invite others to chime in as to where badges are taken seriously, and where they treated dismissively.
As to evidence about widespread controversy over MOOCs, see the last couple of years of Inside Higher Education, and Chronicle of Higher Education. While there are controversies, debates, and disagreements within the "badges community," I know of no evidence that would suggest they are controversial in the same way as MOOCs are. Anyone know someone who has gotten angry about badges?
RE Why badges would be a "success" if they were controversial: I guess I am using "successful" in the sense of sufficiently "consequential" to excite opposition.
RE: Assumptions about change coming only from the top. Certainly change can be catalyzed from the "bottom." See e.g., ethnic studies, women's studies in late 1960s-1970s, even afterward. I think it is an open question whether badges can take hold broadly in academia through voluntary imitation of early experiments by folks like Alex Halavais at ASU, Bill Watson at Purdue, or Dan Hickey at IU. And, I think that badges will remain uncontroversial unless they are threatened to become mandatory, which I can imagine only as a part of a broader program of accountability associated with mandated competency-based education.
Conceivably, badges could prove so attractive to employers that they would threaten the value of degrees, in which case colleges and universities would have to begin awarding them in order to retain students. In that case, it would be the employers as "gatekeepers" accepting some "currency" in the labor market, rather than other. I do not think a market in badges will erase the power of gatekeepers.
While the intentions, aspirations, and hopes of those developing badges will affect strategies and tactics in promoting their adoption and spread, it will not be those intentions, aspirations, and hopes that will determine the outcome of badges.
Comparing badges with MOOCs
If you think of badges and MOOCs in terms of Gartner's hype cycle, they are at very different phases, making it hard to compare them in the way you suggest.
Comparing badges with MOOCs
Thanks very much, Sheryl.
Badges
Reply to Nabeel
One thought that comes to my mind reading your post is that answering my original question requires asking "controversial among whom?" I think that legislators who see MOOCs as a possible remedy for high costs,e.g., California, will not regard the idea of MOOCs as controversial, but will be concerned about effectiveness. They will treat the issue as a means-ends problem.
I think that faculty who feel threatened with displacement by MOOCs, will use the effectiveness argument against MOOCs, but the "hot buttons" being pressed will be fears about livelihood, and violations of ideal models of education.
Also, some faculty, Mitch Dunier (spelling- ?) in Sociology at Princeton being an example, will be offended by the monetization of MOOCs.
From what we know about how people react to, and account for, blocked social mobility, the ineffectiveness of MOOCs to broaden mobility will probably go unrecognized, and MOOC completers will blame themselves for not completing "real" college.
Another reason for controversy over MOOCs is that they intersect with urgent sources of anxiety, I.e. costs of higher education. If badges were further along, as Sheryl Grant points out, they might intersect with the same anxiety, but for now they are in an earlier phase than are MOOCs.
While I follow your analysis of badges, I am uncertain as to how or why you see them as causing controversy. Can you say some more?
Reply to Michael
But what if badges could give academics what we want?
This is a very thoughtful discussion and I'd like to address one thread of it. Michael writes: "What might make badges controversial? I can think of a few possibilities. One is that they actually "take off," and threaten to displace college and university degrees as labor market credentials, along the lines Kevin Carey has written. But, that is unlikely."
I want to take up the inverse of that: What if university professors embraced badges in order to make their institutions design a form of credentialing (for acceptance, for graduation, for post-graduate entrance) that actually valued what we as professors value, not a terrible system that was designed for the Taylorist, Fordist industrial age---the multiple choice test that, we know, neither measures knowledge nor critical, creative thinking and does so in only a very narrow range of subject matter?
I wrote the "How We Measure" chapter of Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way we Live, Work and Learn (Viking Penguin 2011) in 2009-2010, before badges really existed in any coherent way and before the Finnish had schooled the whole world in the benefits of getting rid of standardized testing and class rankins and in valuing professionalization of teachers over standardized curriculum. My "How We Measure" chapter is Deweyite, connectivist, and advocates real-time formative feedback and is full of research studies.
To write that chapter, I also researched the history of standardized testing, including finding the papers of the inventor of the multiple choice test. The ties between that form of testing (like standard deviation and IQ testing) and the relationship to eugenics and the scientism of measuring and ranking human achievement are clear in 1914. Humans were ranked by "scientific" tests so that white race would rank superior to the non-white races (that included Jews and southern but not northern Italians in 1914 when the Kansas Silent Reading Test was invented. That is a slight oversimplification but not much: Galton (inventor of deviation from the mean), H. H. Goddard (who made the Binet achievement test into a genetic-based IQ test), and Yerkes, head of the new American Psychological Association who used IQ testing to sort out who would lead and who would be cannon fodder in WWI: all were professed, professional eugenicists.
Frederick Kelly (inventor of the test as a doctoral student) himself was quite egalitarian. He was appalled when it was used by those with eugenic or racist inclinations. He was also appalled that it was used after the crisis of a teacher shortage no longer made a "test of lower order thinking" for " the lower orders" a social necessity. He went on to be President of the University of Idaho and tried to be Deweyian and was fired by faculty vote within two years: he'd been made president so he could bring the new science of testing to the university and people felt betrayed.
Kelly was appalled again in 1925 when the Scholastic Aptitude Test adopted his multipe-choice test as the standard for getting into higher education. It was a perversion of purpose and all research since then has shown how much this form of testing reduces the different complexities of the human mind to not just a lowest common denominator but one very narrow version of intellectual ability, narrowly conceived. I do not know any college professor who thinks their university should celebrate SAT scores as the best way to recruit students. They may exist but I don't know them.
The problem with my "How We Measure" chapter is it didn't provide any answers. Against the 100 year history of standardizing standardizing testing, and requiring it as part of the 2002 No Child Left Behind national policy, we have theories. Not a better way that is also fair and machine readable and standardizable and efficient. Without that, we will never have a better way. We will be tyrannizing youth over standardized testing that has a terrible origin that reinforces all kinds of social inequalities.
The more I explore badging, the more I am impressed by a system that, if done properly, requires an instituiton to come up with all the ways it values learning, ideas, achievement, knowledge, thinking, creativity---or whatever it is that it values. A letter grade or a test score is opaque. It "represents" the person's achievement with no other informatioin about that achievement but institutional imprimator (ETS, for example). A badge is also a single representation of achievement but you click on it and its entire etiology is visible: who gave it, for what reason, for what kind of accomplishment, achieved on this date,as certified by whom, what, where, why, when and how. YOu can do the fast version and look at the badge or you can click on it and find all the "meta data"---so much better than the resume with its hyperboles and nuances, the recommendation letter that is fearful of litigation, or the test score that is opaque.
Is badging the answer? I don't know. But having a concrete alternative makes us deconstruct the whole history of the testing that rules the lives of youth and the organization (highly inequal) of our universities today. For that alone, this alternative---tried along with a close reading of Finnish Lessons--is invaluable.
My adage is that we have to come up with a better way to measure that counts what we value---and values what we count. We have a terrible, impoverished system now that feeds rather than erases inequality and has the even worse side-effect of passing itself off as "neutral" or "unbiased" when all research correlates standardized achievement scores, in the US, to income and to educational resources. We need something better. If you actually sit down to think about what your organization might want to value in order to award badges, you find that the levels of questions (all glossed over by current testing systems) is extremely deep and complex. This is why I have my students design a badge system (on paper) and award one another badges--it is about the complex and nuanced evaluation of what one values. This may or may not be the end result of badging. I'm not naive about how systems go astray.
The process could give academics what we say we want: a thoughtful way of understanding all the different kinds of thinking that, together, make intellectual life. At the same time, badging has the potential, on a technical level, to address the issues of standardization and mechanization that are necessary if we want this to be not just a good theory but to actually serve as "what comes next": a practical--and more thought-filled--replacement to the bankrupt system we have now.
Which is more disruptive?
I think defining "controversial" as "most disruptive" is an interesting way to compare the two, but by those standardsthe potential for badges to redefine when and where learning happens, empower learns to be in control of their credentially, is more disruptive than MOOCs, which can become one of the many activities that feed into this new potential for alternative credentially. I also think about the ability to co-opt it, to utilize it within an old framwork and delute or remove the disruptive potential. MOOCs are very easy to not do right, but when wrong they are still sustainable - they look like online discussion, resources and classroom managemenrt tools (all now acccepted) and due to the large numbers will always show success for some. Badges on the other hand, when co-opted, look like gold stars in kindergardens at best or a form of transcript with no audience at worst - neither of which will keep them in use as the learners have to select to participate.
In practical terms, my Museum (of Natural History) started three Courseara this Fall, and the work load was heavy but we had all the skills required in house and could see it as a natural extension of things we already do. Brining is badges, however, is a giant conceptual leap, as it forces us to think about credentially informal learning, which we rarely do, and forces a new bar for measuring educational objectives against actual achievement.
Which is more disruptive?
I think defining "controversial" as "most disruptive" is an interesting way to compare the two, but by those standardsthe potential for badges to redefine when and where learning happens, empower learns to be in control of their credentially, is more disruptive than MOOCs, which can become one of the many activities that feed into this new potential for alternative credentially. I also think about the ability to co-opt it, to utilize it within an old framwork and delute or remove the disruptive potential. MOOCs are very easy to not do right, but when wrong they are still sustainable - they look like online discussion, resources and classroom managemenrt tools (all now acccepted) and due to the large numbers will always show success for some. Badges on the other hand, when co-opted, look like gold stars in kindergardens at best or a form of transcript with no audience at worst - neither of which will keep them in use as the learners have to select to participate.
In practical terms, my Museum (of Natural History) started three Courseara this Fall, and the work load was heavy but we had all the skills required in house and could see it as a natural extension of things we already do. Brining is badges, however, is a giant conceptual leap, as it forces us to think about credentially informal learning, which we rarely do, and forces a new bar for measuring educational objectives against actual achievement.
Reply to Cathy
Role of faculty in badges
In an ideal world, faculty would be part of institutions deciding what to value and what to count, and could award transparent credentials. In fact, now students are often given awards and, if you go back to the original documents and citations, you can find out why. Badges are not much different except, being digital, they carry that information with them as metadata. Sheryl grant defined badges as "image files with stuff in them," the stuff being all the details of who, what, where, why, when, and how. They are transparent and portable--a student who wins an award from a department could be awarded that badge and, in a digital resume, anyone could click on the badge and then find all the supporting documentation. It's more "real" in that way than a resume.
Faculty could easily decide to issue them--and, believe me, the process of defining what content goes in the metadata is a value exercise everyone should go through. That level of detail requires an exercise in introspection that current assessment systems gloss over. Like all things we gloss over, we hide a lot of our assumptions and prejudices beneath the gloss. There is nothing transparent about GREs, SATs, GPAs. We reduce all the complexities of achievement to one representation that, in our hearts, we all know falls short of actually representing the complexitiy of our value judgment. Badges don't solve all the problems but they make the representational aspect of credentialing, assessment, and even simple appreciation of what we value and what we do not something to be thought through, not assumed.
I use paper "mock up" versions in my classes. In the appendix to our student-created Field Guide to 21st Century Literacies, you can find a template I used in one of my classes, supplied as a sample to inspire other versions: http://www.hastac.org/field-notes-21st-century-literacies/field-notes-21...