Tag Archives: education

Mozilla Open Badges ships Beta release

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Cross-posted from the Mozilla Blog.

Adding skills and achievements to your online identity

When Mozilla’s Open Badges project began in late 2010, it was little more than a demo and an audaciously big idea: what if we could use the web to create whole new ways to “show what you know?”

Today, that big idea is becoming reality, with impressive partners and new Mozilla Open Badges Beta software coming together to test how digital badges can supercharge learning and identity.

Collaborators building badges on Mozilla software

Mozilla’s Open Badges project now includes leading partners like the MacArthur Foundation, impressive collaborators (including NASA, Intel, Disney-Pixar, 4H and dozens of others now building badge programs using Mozilla tools) and — thanks to today’s new Beta release of Mozilla’s Open Badges Infrastructure — publicly available software for badge issuers and developers to get on board and build with.

Integration with Mozilla Persona = adding skills and achievements to your online identity

The new Beta release includes integration with Mozilla Persona (formerly BrowserID). This opens the door for users to create a single user-centric identity across the web, with tools like Mozilla Open Badges adding a “reputation layer” that provides a complete story about what they know and have achieved. All through an open, standards-based infrastructure that puts user sovereignty, privacy and security first.

Open Badges Beta: what’s new?

Today’s Beta release includes:

  • New tools for badge issuers. A new and improved badge issuer API makes it easier for any organization to award their own digital badges for learning, skills or achievements.
  • New ways for users to manage their badges. Improvements to Mozilla’s “Badge Backpack” make it easier for users to store, manage, import and group badges earned from multiple sites through a single location.
  • New tools for badge displayers. A new displayer API will make it easier to display digital badges across the web, from personal web sites to social networking platforms.
  • New documentation and privacy features. Including an updated privacy policy, terms of use and FAQs for developers.

Learn more and get involved:

Can Mozilla make tools that teach the web to the world?

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Each week, mind-blowing guest speakers join our Mozilla Webmaker Community calls for your questions, rabble-rousing and debate.

Audrey Watters is a prolific education technology writer, researcher and “recovering academic.” She recently kicked off a fascinating research project for Mozilla, aimed at answering:

What’s the best way to teach web-building to anyone? For example, should Mozilla develop a tool to help the world learn HTML5?

Audrey has been asking educators and ed tech developers what they think Mozilla’s role should be, at an educational, philosophical and technological level.

Without exception, everyone I talked to identified a dire need to improve web literacy. Whether it was elementary school teachers, college professors, hobbyists or entrepreneurs, everyone talked about a huge gap in our collective knowledge base around how the web works…. There’s still this sense of the internet as a series of tubes, and the web as a series of documents you can deliver through those tubes. –Audrey Watters

Some key questions and takeaways from the discussion:

  • Learners want to solve real problems and make real stuff. Not feel like beginners/outsiders.
  • There’s a lot of resistance to building a tool that’s de-contextualized or separate from the “real” web.
  • Learners need to make something quickly. With a takeaway that’s personally meaningful to them.

So…

  • What do we really need to build? A community or a curriculum? A product or a process?
  • How can we learn from the successful past examples? Hypercard was arguably one of the most popular, user-oriented entry-level programming tools ever — even though real programmers hated it. Hobbyists and amateurs liked it. The professionals didn’t.

Mozilla’s David Ascher dug into the Hypercard analogy:

What made Hypercard powerful is that normal people were able to use it build really useful things…. The holy grail is something that doesn’t require people to learn the entire stack that “real developers” use, but at the same time, has real utility on a day to day basis. –David Ascher

MIT's "Scratch"

Mark Surman tried to tease out the balance of giving learners access to “real” code — not toys — while still lowering the barriers to entry, providing scaffolding, or useful constraints that help you to make something meaningful quickly:

“The difference between then and today is: we now have a nearly universal platform people can use to consume, create and build: the web. We want to make tools that help people make stuff on the web. They may be scaffolded or supported, but what comes out is still the web.

This is the difference between what we’re trying to build versus Hypercard, Scratch, etc. There may be constraints that make it easier, but what comes out is still “real” code, the real web. –Mark Surman

Stay tuned for some further upcoming fireside chats with Audrey. In the mean time:

MacArthur Foundation competition winners use Mozilla software to supercharge learning

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Cross-posted from the Mozilla Blog

The Badges for Lifelong Learning Competition winners were announced yesterday at the Digital Media and Learning Conference in San Francisco. The winners—awarded grants ranging from $25,000 to $175,000 —will use Mozilla’s new free and open source “Open Badges” software to issue, manage and display digital badges for learning across the Web.

The competition brought together Web developers, designers and technologists with educators, online learning innovators and collaborators that range from NASA, the U.S. Department of Education and the Girl Scouts of America to Intel, Disney-Pixar and Motorola.

The goal: explore how digital badges can provide learners of all ages new ways to gain 21st century skills, harness the full educational power of the Internet, and unlock career and learning opportunities in the real world.

And the winners are…

The Competition was held in collaboration with the Mozilla, and is part of the Digital Media and Learning Competition supported by the MacArthur Foundation and administered by HASTAC. Winners include:

  • NASA’s Robotics and Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) System will engage learners in exploring new STEM topics and create digital badges for learners of all ages.
  • The Disney-Pixar Wilderness Explorers badges will engage youth in nature-based explorations, offering ways to learn about and become advocates for wildlife and wild places.
  • The Manufacturing Institute’s National Manufacturing badges will recognize the range of skills and achievements workers need to be competitive in today’s advanced manufacturing workplace.
  • The Young Adult Library Services Association’s Badge Program will help librarians develop the skills they need to meet the needs of 21st century teens.
  • A complete list of all 30 competition winners is available here

Why digital badges for learning?

Learning today happens everywhere and at every age. But its often difficult to get recognition for learning that happens online or outside of school.
“We believe digital badges have the power to unlock the full educational potential of the Web,” said Mark Surman, Executive Director of Mozilla.

“Our goal is to provide a free and open infrastructure that today’s award winners—and any organization or community in the world—can use to easily issue and share badges across the web. This will empower learners to take charge of their online identity and reputation, gathering badges from any site on the Internet, and combining them into a single story about what they know and what they have achieved.”

Learn more about Mozilla Open Badges for learning

Mozilla seeks designers to supercharge learning in digital badges competition

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Design digital badges for NASA, Intel, Disney-Pixar, the U.S. Department of Education and other leading organizations in the “Badges for Learning” competition. Deadline for entries is January 17.

Help the world level up with NASA, the MacArthur Foundation and Mozilla

Mozilla is seeking designers and developers to participate in the $2 million “Badges for Learning” competition. Participants will have the chance to design digital badges for more than 60 different leading organizations, all aimed at providing recognition for learning that happens on the web or outside of school.

Winners will receive funding from the MacArthur Foundation to make their designs a reality, plus the opportunity to collaborate with Mozilla and other leading organizations in education, industry and government.

The goal: supercharge 21st century learning by building a free, open source badge system that helps people around the world use the web to gain new skills and level up in their life and work.

Why digital badges for learning?

The web provides revolutionary new ways for people to learn, but it’s often difficult to get recognition for learning that happens outside of school.

Mozilla’s Open Badges project aims to help solve this problem, providing software that makes it easy for any organization to award digital badges for learning and achievements that happen online, outside the classroom, or just about anywhere.

Organized by the MacArthur Foundation and HASTAC, the “Badges for Learning” competition provides an ideal opportunity to test this software and approach in the wild, gathering leading organizations, designers and technologists to build badge systems together, all using Mozilla’s free and open source Open Badges Infrastructure.

Collaborators in the "Badges for Learning" competition

From robotics and digital literacy to botany and the environment

As part of the competition, more than 60 badges for learning projects are now open for your design and technical ideas on the competition web site. For example:

Design digital "Robotics Badges" for NASA

Who should enter?

Anyone with an interest in design. Graphic designers, web designers, product or industrial designers, educational technologists, digital humanities majors. What’s important at this stage of the competition is visual and conceptual creativity.

All of the badge projects will ultimately plug into Mozilla’s Open Badges Infrastructure, but it’s not necessary to possess the technical chops to implement at this stage.

All you need is to provide some early visual designs, plus a written description of how your badges will help participating organizations meet their requirements. Visual representations can include a video, diagram, screenshots, napkin sketches or anything that helps get your ideas across. (See the competition web site for complete details.)

Design "Wilderness Explorers" badges for Disney-Pixar

How to get involved

  • Choose a badge project from this list on the competition web site. (These are “Stage 1″ winners and collaborators seeking your ideas for the “Stage 2″ design and tech portion of the competition.)
  • Then submit your proposal here, with early visual ideas and a written description of how you’d tackle it.

You’re free to enter as many proposals as you’d like — but act quickly. The deadline for submissions is January 17, 2012. Winners will be announced March 2, 2012. Good luck!