I don’t think I’ve been prouder of receiving any tweet than the one that appeared yesterday from Mark Clarkson:
This blog by @davestacey is making#digitalbadges harder to resist (although the scope of his vision still scares me!).http://is.gd/PY6rU9
No one’s ever been scared by the scope of my vision before! I quite like it…
Anyway, I thought it was time for an update on how my crazy plan might be working out.
It looks as though we’re going to trial it next year with year 7 (one year groups worth of material being (probably) achievable. Three massively not so).
The document that is being developed in house at the moment explaining the rationale behind the change can be found here. You’re welcome to borrow any of it, but it is still a work in progress.
The list of possible future topics can be found here. It’s pretty extensive, and certainly won’t all be available from Sept. Exactly how it will be arranged and what will be compulsory vs optional is still to be decided.
The more I think about it though, the more I think this is the right way to go. It take advantages of the opportunities uniquely offered to students when they’re 1:1, and (hopefully) solves some of the issues that I addressed in the previous post that are more evident in (if not unique to) ICT.
The biggest issue is how to award badges. There were various ideas bandied around on Twitter yesterday. Besides my previous stated ideas of a moodle plug in or Edmodo, @mwclarkson was suggesting using Active Directory to control issuing badges, perhaps to individual desktops, and @infernaldepart tempted us with some forthcoming news about issuing and displaying badges.
Meanwhile the digital studies wiki continue to grow with ideas and resources, and if I have my way all of our resources will be made available under a CC licence (probably via a Moodle Course)
We live in interesting times. And I like it!