Daniel Pink and Badges, part 3

I listened to Daniel Pink open the TLT Symposium with a presentation that confirmed, for me anyway, much of how I feel. His presentation, though, seemed to serve the needs of a Human Resources climate committee more than the needs of educators. So it was both good and not so good; appropriate and confirming, yet out-of-place and disconnected. Though Pink said that cognitive work didn’t benefit from inducements, he also said that badges as credentials are pretty cool. Was that his safe way of saying badges wouldn’t work as inducements?

I have to think so. It sounded like very specific clarification when he said “as credentials.” Especially with the framework of his other points. Instead of badges as motivation, badges could serve as granular credentials.

Anyone doing any work that took even the most rudimentary cognitive effort would respond to intrinsic motivation. Exactly my thought: I’ll learn what I need to know to do the best job possible in an effort to serve my community. Pink asked what motivated artists to “compose,” then by way of answering described the creative being’s categories of intrinsic motivation:

  • Autonomy- The urge to direct our own lives.
  • Mastery- The desire to get better and better at something that matters.
  • Purpose- The yearning to do what we do in service of something larger than ourselves.

Making progress in meaningful work. That’ll do it. I don’t need any badges. After all, who is certifying the badge grantors and the credit they’re supposed to represent? Accreditation would be the big issue. Why should I care what they think of my skills?

I think we have accreditation wrong. BiSci02 taken through World Campus and BiSci02 in a classroom offer two different learning experiences, yet both give the same credit towards a degree. A degree completed through World Campus will represent one learning experience, one completed at Abington Campus another, one at UP still another. All are certified Penn State Credentials. A Penn State credential is different than a Lock Haven credential. Is a World Campus credential different than a Lock Haven classroom conferred credential? That’s getting fairly granular, but that’s exactly the sort of information I’d need. Will badges improve this credential mire or confuse it?

badges in education, part 2

I have a backpack for my open badge badges through mozilla and I have an account on Credly. I’m learning. One small fact that I learned that changes how I view the actual badge: If it’s standards compliant it will be an image in the PNG format, and by design, PNG allows considerable adaptation. One characteristic is its ability to hold extensive metadata. In the case of a Badge.png, the file will contain information about the owner, information about the grantor, the date it was granted and data to help a third party verify the assertion. There can be more, all right there “baked” into that little image. Can it be hacked with a simple meta data editor? I’m not sure. That’s certainly a question for the IT folks.

A question that certainly is NOT for the IT people is, what should get a badge? What does it take to earn a badge, how is that assessed? And how is value determined between two grantors offering opportunity to earn a badge for what appears to be similar successes: Who accredits the accreditors? What is the value to people seeking confirmation of a skill set’s presence? How do you break learning into badge-able chunks? These are questions that need to be addressed by experts who grant badges, instructional designers and educators. It should not default to IT people.

Here are a few resource links:

MozillaWiki/Badges
The badge section in the Mozilla Wiki.
OpenBadges.Org
The primary site. Good information.
mozillaBackPack
Create an account and save your badges here.
Credly
Some of the folks listed as badge grantors do their granting through Credly.

what I don’t get about badges in education

A sock monkey merit badge.To understand anything, my first step is usually finding similar things I already understand and doing some sort of comparison. I don’t get where badges go, who authorizes them, who determines their value, what they mean to people who wear them, or what they mean to people who view them. I’ve read as much online as I can readily find. That didn’t help clarify very much. So I compared them to what I already understand: merit badges in boy scouts.

I was a boy scout when I was young. I had earned a few merit badges and my father was someone who guided, tested and awarded several different merit badges. To get a badge, you picked what you wanted a badge in, then picked up the merit badge booklet for that badge. The booklets varied a bit in thickness based on the complexity of information, but they were all around 6″ X 8″ and ¼” thick. The book had most of the information that you needed to know, and tips for performing any of the necessary activities. The activities were part of the requirements to get the badge. It was all spelled out pretty clearly, but if you had any questions, you could call the person who tested you. Proctor? Mentor? Counselor? I forget what term was used, but counselor seems right. They were experts in the community with some sort of desire to help the scouts. You could call them and ask questions, or just call them when you were ready to be certified and make an appointment to meet. The counselor was the one who decided if you met all the requirements, and if you did, they signed a card that you submitted to your scout master. The scout master kept records, as did the council that the troop was a part of. They awarded the badge.

So a badge was a thing, but it was also an indication that you met the requirements. A certain number of badges, and certain specific badges, were needed to advance to another rank: several badges were needed to make first class, several more to make star scout, more to make life scout, and at least 21 badges (and much service) to make eagle. The process was familiar enough that being an “eagle scout” is a widely accepted symbol of achievement. In scouts, you started out wearing the badges sewn to your uniform sleeveOnce you earned a merit badge, you were awarded the actual stitched patch in a ceremony at one of the monthly troop meetings.

In scouts, you started out wearing the badges sewn to your uniform sleeve. When there was no more room, the badges were moved to a sash that draped over your shoulder when you were in uniform. Here, some of my confusion and much of my prejudice starts: I never put my badges on my uniform. They stayed in a drawer. Other scouts in my troop had sashes filled with badges they were proud of, but I never thought the display was that desirable. I thought it was incidental to the accomplishment, though I didn’t see it as necessarily a negative thing. Just something I wasn’t moved to do. I did, however, wear the gold and silver arrowheads that cubs achieved in cub scouts. By the time I was 11 or 12, that sort of thing lost it’s appeal.

There you go: I associate wearing and displaying badges with a juvenile mentality. It seems badges would be great in education maybe through middle school and somewhat demeaning beyond that. But like I’ve determined, that’s a prejudice on my part. Once past that, I can see real value in vetting more granular skills and knowledge.

I can see real value in vetting more granular skills and knowledgeI’m still not all in though. There’s a few things that gnaw at me. A big part of my negative reaction comes from where the push for badges seems to be coming from. It’s pretty clearly coming from the IT folks, and I don’t get precisely why. I understand part of it- web images are done to a large extent by people who can use and enjoy using graphics applications. After all, that sock monkey merit badge isn’t up there for any reason other than it was fun to think about and render. But other than that obvious attraction, why?

More telling, perhaps, are the media people. Like graphics folks they’re immersed in IT and depend on the tools. Lots of blogs, lots of screen capture videos, lots of social media tracking means lots of engaging work. That’s true. I’ve done my share of tutorial screen shots, and enjoy the different processes. But.

Other than assorted media folks, a number of education technologists are involved with the push, too. I have to cringe because I know that very few people know what the heck an education technologist is. I think it’s someone who knows a bit about both fields: education, and IT. I don’t know why they get a name that calls them out; I’m not a graphics technologist. Friends who do video aren’t media technologists. I’ve been retired for over a year… maybe they are and I’m just out of the loop?

it’s coming from the IT community only because they’ve pretty much been there first and have seen the needAll of these “technologist” flavors have several things in common. They have regular access to the internet. They have at least one device for accessing it. They’re fairly at ease with most regular device maintenance and software use. They regularly include social media in the way they interact with their friends and community. All of that just begins to describe a growing community that sees value in learning small bits in different places to achieve an assumed goal. That’s important to understand. The push to have badges looks like it’s coming from the IT community only because they’ve pretty much been there first and have seen the need.

Got it. Just don’t give me any patches to sew on.

The IT community could do a lot with the knowledge and familiarity with technology that they bring to Education. They get to take so much for granted and just dive in to the work. What does my badge mean to an employer? What does my badge mean to someone with a similar badge from some other granting body? Who vets the badge requirements? Who vets the granting bodies? How are requirements recognized and transferred? Where is the documentation kept? How and by whom is it accessed? Do badges accumulate toward a standard meaningful collection of some sort? What if a student does feel demeaned by a badge – can they opt out? Lots of these questions are actually being answered: check out Mozilla OpenBadges.

A regulation gold star badge.So much to do. Meanwhile, I think this post deserves a gold star.

quick sketch

Flavia de Luce gets Gladys from the bushes.

First thinking-out-loud doodle for Kim. Not so happy with this. I like the odd perspective, but I’m not too happy with Flavia. Rolled up girly jeans made sense to me, especially for riding Gladys- but I can only ever find her in a dress. More doodling required!

black point / white point

From September 2012:

Tones as they approach the white point and black point.

With a prompt from Taz Tally on lynda dot com I created this file to check the printers I use to find their value range. If you retouch images and try to print them, you might find that regardless of your Photoshop skills, the images always seem to print dark or blow out highlights. Printing the TIFF that’s linked to this web image will show you where your light grays are dropping their spots and blowing out and where the spots are filling in to make black. You can set your curves or levels to span that range when you print to that specific printer and get better results.

In our office we have four primary printers: Rider 2 and Rider 3 are the same make and model color printers, while Rider 1 is grayscale. RiderPlot is a color wide format printer. Of the four, the plotter has the widest value gamut. What that means is that the plotter will have more detail in the darks and lights of an image. The plotter is followed closely by Rider 1, a grayscale printer that shows dots, but also spans a decent gamut. Our two clor printers generally do a very good job, but images from them will tend to have darks that fill in and lights that blow out compared to the same images printed on the plotter.

If you’re curious, grab the TIFF linked to the web image and print it to your own printer.

Another use might be getting a sense of your monitor’s range. The light swatches are on white and the dark swatches on black. If you can’t discern the separating line between two swatches that’s the point where your monitor turns things to black. Or white on the light side. On my large display, I can just make out the separated between 96% and 97%, and on the light side, between 2% and 3%. I’d be curious what the Dell displays do with the image.

design hell – from August, 2010

More old stuff. Opinion, no pictures… Perhaps I should’ve stuck with pictures?

My own personal hell would be designing graphics for a committee made up of people who have dabbled a bit themselves with drawing pictures… Socialized art. Socialized design. Shirky describes it in his new book, though he doesn’t use those words. Downplay quality for the sake of wider group involvement.

I ordered Cognitive Surplus as soon as Shirky tweeted it was available. I read less than the first 100 pages and hit a snag that made me set the thing aside. The scenario that had me piqued was a minor one in which Shirky asks us to consider the kitchens portrayed in House Beautiful, those “designed to a fare–thee–well with a place for everything and everything in its place”. Shirky makes a point when he says that if you were a guest at a dinner party, “you likely wouldn’t dare set foot in the House Beautiful kitchen because the design doesn’t exactly scream Come in and help!. [Shirky’s] kitchen on the other hand, does scream that”. You see, I wouldn’t hesitate a moment; I’d love any opportunity to get into a well designed kitchen to try it out and I’d avoid Shirky’s. And I have no desire to make an lolcat. He made assumptions and obviously wasn’t talking to me.

Before reading about how unappealing well designed kitchens are to most normal people there were a few other comments that sent shivers down my spine. Earlier, Shirky says, “Increasing freedom to publish does diminish average quality—how could it not?… …The easier it is for the average person to publish, the more average what gets published becomes.” Socialized literature. What happens to the artist, the author, the musician, the genius? Will there be enough people to honestly appreciate them so their insights can be used by society or will they be discarded by the massive social network of average citizens? If discarded, will average society raise its self up, slowly, but effectively?

In my own thought experiment, I try to first imagine a Sistene Chapel without Michelangelo. Then I wonder where a sense of quality will come from.

This is complex stuff and it’s been debated by much greater minds than mine. Orwell wrote The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, Marx addressed it and so, unfortunately, did the author of Mein Kampf. So I tread slowly with much caution, side reading, and thought. There are many observations I value in Cognitive Surplus, many I’ve highlighted (something I rarely do):

• In a world where opportunity changes little, behavior will change little, but when opportunity changes a lot, behavior will as well, so long as the opportunities appeal to real human motivations.

• if you only pretend to offer an outlet for [their desire for autonomy and competence or generosity and sharing] while actually slotting people into a scripted experience, they may well revolt.

• The ability for community members to speak to one another, out loud and in public, is a huge shift, and one that has value even in the absence of a way to filter for quality.

• When a resource is scarce, the people who manage it often regard it as valuable in itself, without stopping to consider how much of the value is tied to its scarcity.

• When [verbal feedback] is genuine and comes from someone the recipient respects, it becomes an intrinsic reward, because it relies on a sense of connectedness.

We shall see how this all shakes down. I need to see a bit more of people doing for the love of doing instead of the love of praise, connectedness, or money.