Tag Archives: openbadges

Introducing Mozilla Webmaker badges

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A new way to teach, learn and get credentials for digital skills

Mozfest_10Nov_148

Mozilla’s Erin Knight launching Webmaker badges today — with the help of a young webmaker who just earned her first badge.

Today at the Mozilla Festival in London, we’re extremely proud to announce the launch of new Mozilla Webmaker badges.

Webmaker badges are an exciting new way to teach, learn and get credentials for digital skills. They’re free, fun, and part of Mozilla’s non-profit mission to create a more web literate world.

Learning by making

Mozilla’s new Webmaker program makes it easy for anyone to make something amazing on the web, learning skills as they go. Now with Mozilla Webmaker badges, they can earn recognition and public proof for those skills as well.

As users complete projects on Webmaker.org – like creating web pages, animated GIFs, or learning the fundamentals of programming — they can earn digital badges linked to their identity. This provides a lasting record of their skills and achievements, and shows off their new skills to teachers, classmates, peers or future colleges and employers, backed by Mozilla.

The initial set of badges now available through Webmaker.org

Building a new generation of digital creators

“Digital literacy is to the 21st century what reading, writing and math were to the 20th century — vital to creativity, empowerment and economic opportunity,” says Erin Knight, Senior Director of Learning at Mozilla.

“Webmaker badges provide an exciting new way for people to teach and learn these skills, displaying what they know and unlocking opportunities in the real world.”

This first set of Webmaker badges focuses on introductory skills like HTML and CSS. More advanced badges will follow.

Webmaker badges are powered by OpenBadges, Mozilla’s free, open source software that makes it easy for anyone to issue and manage badges across the web.

Get involved

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:

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!

Mozilla’s Open Badges project in the New York Times

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Excerpts from the article:

…the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is putting millions of dollars into a competition to spur interest in a new type of badge — one that people can display not on their clothing but on a Web site, blog or Facebook page while they are looking for a job.

The badges will not replace résumés or transcripts, but they may be a convenient supplement, putting the spotlight on skills that do not necessarily show up in traditional documents — highly specialized computer knowledge, say, or skills learned in the military, in online courses or in after-school programs at museums or libraries.

Prospective employers could click on an e-badge awarded for prowess in Javascript, for example, and see detailed supporting information, including who issued the badge, the criteria and even samples of the work that led to the award.

In preparation for the contest, MacArthur has also given $1 million to the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation to develop a common standard or protocol for the badges.

Developers will use this protocol so that their badges will work across the Web on various platforms, no matter which organization is awarding them, just as e-mail works across the Internet regardless of the particular program used, said Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation in Mountain View, Calif.

“People will be able to take courses at a dozen places, and then put the badges from these different places on their Web site,” he said.

Mr. Surman’s group tested an early version of the badge system this spring at the School of Webcraft at Peer to Peer University, an online school offering free courses organized by peers, said Erin B. Knight, who works on the badge project for the Mozilla Foundation. Students in the pilot program were awarded badges in Javascript, HTML, teamwork, collaboration and other areas.

Many organizations, including NASA, Intel and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, are collaborating with MacArthur in the competition, providing information about their programs and activities that could be the basis for badge awards, said Cathy N. Davidson, a professor at Duke University and co-administrator of the competition.

NASA, for example, has educational programs in robotics for young people that might be suitable content for badges.

Designers have until Jan. 12 to submit their ideas for badge prototypes. Design winners will be paired with content providers to compete for the final awards….