AECT-OTP Webinar: Digital Badges and Micro-Credentials for the Workplace
Time: Mar 27, 2017 1:00 PM Central Time (US and Canada)
Learn how to implement digital badges in learning environments. Digital badges and micro-credentials offer an entirely new way of recognizing achievements, knowledge, skills, experiences, and competencies that can be earned in formal and informal learning environments. They are an opportunity to recognize such achievements through credible organizations that can be integrated in traditional educational programs but can also represent experience in informal contexts or community engagement. Three guiding questions will be discussed in this webinar: (1) digital badges’ impact on learning and assessment, (2) digital badges within instructional design and technological frameworks, and (3) the importance of stakeholders for the implementation of digital badges.
Dirk Ifenthaler is Professor and Chair of Learning, Design and Technology at University of Mannheim, Germany and Adjunct Professor at Curtin University, Australia. His previous roles include Professor and Director, Centre for Research in Digital Learning at Deakin University, Australia, Manager of Applied Research and Learning Analytics at Open Universities, Australia, and Professor for Applied Teaching and Learning Research at the University of Potsdam, Germany. He was a 2012 Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence at the Jeannine Rainbolt College of Education, at the University of Oklahoma, USA
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Each student learns differently and assessment is not linear. Learning for different students can be a longer or shorter path.
representation graph:
assessment comes before badges
what are credentials:
how well i can show my credentials: can i find it, can i translate it, issuer, earner, achievement description, date issued.
the potential to become an alternative credentialing system to link directly via metadata to validating evidence of educational achievements.
DB is not an assessment, it is the ability to demonstrate the assessment.
They are a motivational mechanism, supporting alternative forms of assessment, a way to credentialize learning, charting learning pathways, support self-reflection and planning
a study, the “Why We Post” project, has just been published by nine anthropologists, led by Daniel Miller of University College, London. worked independently for 15 months at locations in Brazil, Britain, Chile, China (one rural and one industrial site), India, Italy, Trinidad and Tobago, and Turkey.
In rural China and Turkey social media were viewed as a distraction from education. But in industrial China and Brazil they were seen to be an educational resource. Such a divide was evident in India, too. There, high-income families regarded them with suspicion but low-income families advocated them as a supplementary source of schooling. In Britain, meanwhile, they were valued not directly as a means of education, but as a way for pupils, parents and teachers to communicate.
How would you answer if addressed by this study? How do you see social media? Do you see it differently then before?
On a recent visit in 2015, I found the social media landscape dramatically changed, again. Facebook began actively steering reading practices through changes in 2013 to the News Feed algorithm, which determines content in the site’s central feature. That year, Facebook announced an effort to prioritize “high quality content,” defined as timely, relevant, and trustworthy—and not clickbait, memes, or other viral links. This policy, along with changing practices in sharing news content generally, meant that current events can unfold on and through social media.
how much of your news do you acquire through social media? do you trust the information you acquire through social media? #FakeNews – have explored this hashtag? What is your take on fake news?
meaning management :
Anthropologists and the culturally sensitive analysts take complex bits of data and develop a higher-order sense of them. Information and meaning work at cross purposes. In managing meaning, context is everything while in managing information context is error and noise. When we give our social listening projects to information specialists, we lose an appreciation of context and with it the ability to extract the meanings that provide insight for our companies and brands.
Meaning management also involves a deeper appreciation of social listening as a component of a broader meaning-making system, rather than as, simply, a data source to be exploited.
How do you perceive meaning management? Do you see yourself being a professional with the ability to collect, analyze and interpret such data for your company?
how data is produced, collected and analyzed. make accessible all kind of data and info
ask good q/s and find good answers, share finding in meaningful ways. this is where digital literacy overshadows information literacy and this the fact that SCSU library does not understand; besides teaching students how to find and evaluate data, I also teach them how to communicate effectively using electronic tools.
connecting people tools and resources and making it easier for everybody. building collaborative, open and interdisciplinary
robust data computational literates. developing workshops, project and events to practice new skills. to position the library as the interdisciplinary nexus
what are data: definition. items of information, facts, traces of content and form. higher level, conception discussion about data in terms of social effects: matadata capturing information about the world, social political and economic changes. move away the mystic conceptions about data. nothing objective about data.
the emergence of IoT – digital meets physical. cyber physical systems. smart objects driven by industry. . proliferation of sensor and device – smart devices.
what does privacy looks like ? what is netneutrality when IoT? library must restructure : collaborate across institutions about collections of data in opien and participatory ways. put IoT in the hands of make and break things (she is maker space aficionado)
make and break things hackathons – use cheap devices such as Arduino and Pi.
data literacy programs with higher level conception exploration; libraries empower the campus in data collection. data science norms, store and share data to existing repositories and even catalogs. commercial services to store and connect data, but very restrictive and this is why libraries must be involved.
linked data and dark data
linked data – draw connections around online data most of the data are locked. linked data uses metadata to link related information in ways computers can understand.
libraries take advantage of link data. link data opportunity for semantics, natural language processing etc. if hidden data is relative to our communities, it is a library responsibility to provide it. community data practitioners
dark data
massive data, which cannot be analyzed by relational processing. data not yield significant findings. might be valuable for researchers: one persons trash is another persons’ treasure. preserving data and providing access to info. collaborate with researchers across disciplines and assist decide what is worth keeping and what discarding and how to study.
rich learning experience working with lined and dark data enable fresh perspective and learning how to work with data architecture. data literacy programming.
in context of data is different from open source and open projects. the social side of data science . advising researchers on navigation data, ethical compilations.
open science movement .https://cos.io/ pushing beyond licences and reframe, position ourselves as collaborators
analysis and publishing ; use tools that can be shared and include data, code and executable files.
reproducibility and contestability https://www.lib.ncsu.edu/events/series/summer-of-open-science
In the age of Big Data, there is an abundance of free or cheap data sources available to libraries about their users’ behavior across the many components that make up their web presence. Data from vendors, data from Google Analytics or other third-party tracking software, and data from user testing are all things libraries have access to at little or no cost. However, just like many students can become overloaded when they do not know how to navigate the many information sources available to them, many libraries can become overloaded by the continuous stream of data pouring in from these sources. This session will aim to help librarians understand 1) what sorts of data their library already has (or easily could have) access to about how their users use their various web tools, 2) what that data can and cannot tell them, and 3) how to use the datasets they are collecting in a holistic manner to help them make design decisions. The presentation will feature examples from the presenters’ own experience of incorporating user data in decisions related to design the Bethel University Libraries’ web presence.
silos, IT barrier, focusing on student success, retention, server space is cheap, if
promotion and tenure for faculty can include incentive to work with the librarian
lack of fear, changing the mindset.
deep collaboration both within and cross-consortia
don’t rely on vendor solutions. changing mindset
development = oppty (versus development as “work”)
private higher education is PALNI
3d virtual picture of disastrous areas. unlock the digital information to be digitally accessible to all people who might be interested.
they opened the maps of Katmandu for the local community and they were coming up with the strategies to recover. democracy in action
i can’t stop thinking that the keynote speaker efforts are mere follow up of what Naomi Klein explains in her Shock Doctrine: http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine: a government country seeks reasons to destroy another country or area and then NGOs from the same country go to remedy the disasters
A question from a librarian from the U about the use of drones. My note: why did the SCSU library have to give up its drone?
Douglas County Library model. too resource intensive to continue
Marmot Library Network
ILS integrated library system – shared with other counties, same sever for the entire consortium. they have a programmer, viewfind, open source, discovery player, he customized viewfind community to viewfind plus. instead of using the ILS public access catalogue, they are using the Vufind interface
Caiifa Enki. public library – single access collection. they purchase ebooks from the publisher and they are using also the viewfind interface. but not integrated with the library catalogs. Kansas public library went from OverDrive to Viewfind. CA State library is funding for the time being this effort.
types of content – publisher will not understand issue, which clear for librarians
PDF and epub formats
purchase content –
title by title selection – academia is tired of selections. although it is intended to buy also collections
library – owned ( and shared collections)
host content from libraries – papers in academic lib, genealogy in pub lib.
options in license models .
e resource content. not only ebooks, after it is taken care of, add other types of digital objects.
instead of replicate, replacement of the commercial aggregators,
Amigos Shelf interface is the product of the presenter
instead of having a young reader collection as SCSU has on the third floor, an academic library is outsourcing through AMigos shelf ebooks for young readers
Harper Collins is too cumbersome and the reason to avoid working with them.
security issues. some of the material sent over ftp and immediately moved to sftp
decisions – use of internal resources only, if now – amazon
programmer used for the pilot. contracted programmers. lack of the ability to see the large picture. eventually hired a full time person, instead of outsourcing. RDA compliant MARC.
ONIX, spreadsheet MARC.
Decision about who to start with : public or academic.
attempt to keep pricing down –
own agreement with the customers, separate from the agreement with the Publisher
current development: web-based online reading, shared-consortial collections and SIP2 authentication
NOTE: This webinar will be recorded and everyone who registers will receive a link after the event; in other words, for our Australian and New Zealand colleagues, no need to get up in the wee hours of the morning to participate!
Following substantial discussions with colleagues in the US and UK, we are pleased to announce our first collaborative event: Recognising and presenting student learning in the 21st century’: An international webinar on emerging practice in higher education. This session is co-sponsored by the Association for Authentic, Experiential Evidence-Based Learning (AAEEBL), Centre for Recording Achievement (CRA), and the EPAC ePortfolio Community of Practice.
Description: It is increasingly recognised that:
the learning and achievement of our students is not limited to their academic studies;
institutions need to make decisions about the extent to which they wish to recognise and value such ‘lifewide learning’ and achievements as part of the statements they make about the achievements of their graduates;
the use of ‘richer records’ of student achievements formatively can support processes of reviewing and planning, and help students set targets and take increasing responsibility for their own development;
students may need support in making use of such records with third parties such as potential employers;
in a digital world the digital presentation of such records, and the supporting evidence for these, will be increasingly important.
‘Work in progress’ on this agenda is occurring in multiple locations, including the USA (the Comprehensive Student Record project), the UK (the Higher Education Achievement Report), and Australia and New Zealand (the Graduation Statement).
Key contributors to the webinar will be:
Cathy Buyarski, IUPUI (Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis) and Helen L. Chen, Stanford University, AAEEBL and EPAC representing their institutional work and that of the broader AACRAO/NASPA Comprehensive Student Record project and national initiatives around emerging credentials in the USA.
Rob Ward, Centre for Recording Achievement on the national picture in the UK, with Trish Lunt, University of Liverpool and David Stanbury, University of Essex presenting perspectives on institutional practice.
Each will respond to questions and issues raised, and the webinar will explicitly seek to:
identify an agenda for further online discussion if appropriate.
stimulate a collection of resources, questions for future exploration, examples, case studies, and also contacts for possible collaboration and networking.
Anyone who is interested in joining this jointly sponsored webinar is welcome to join by pre-registering for the session so that we can send you a participation link. As we look to new ways to innovate and encourage greater engagement and opportunities for networking for AAEEBL members, we welcome both your enthusiasm and patience!
An article in The Conversation recently argued universities should ban PowerPoint because it makes students stupid and professors boring.
Originally for Macintosh, the company that designed it was bought by Microsoft. After its launch the software was increasingly targeted at business professionals, especially consultants and busy salespeople.
As it turns out, PowerPoint has not empowered academia. The basic problem is that a lecturer isn’t intended to be selling bullet point knowledge to students, rather they should be making the students encounter problems. Such a learning process is slow and arduous, and cannot be summed up neatly. PowerPoint produces stupidity, which is why some, such as American statistician Edward Tufte have said it is “evil”.
Of course, new presentation technologies like Prezi, SlideRocket or Impress add a lot of new features and 3D animation, yet I’d argue they only make things worse. A moot point doesn’t become relevant by moving in mysterious ways. The truth is that PowerPoints actually are hard to follow and if you miss one point you are often lost.
While successfully banning Facebook and other use of social media in our masters programme in philosophy and business at Copenhagen Business School, we have also recently banned teachers using PowerPoint. Here we are in sync with the US armed forces, where Brigadier-General Herbert McMaster banned it because it was regarded as a poor tool for decision-making.
Courses designed around slides therefore propagate the myth that students can become skilled and knowledgeable without working through dozens of books, hundreds of articles and thousands of problems.
A review of research on PowerPoint found that while students liked PowerPoint better than overhead transparencies, PowerPoint did not increase learning or grades
Research comparing teaching based on slides against other methods such as problem-based learning – where students develop knowledge and skills by confronting realistic, challenging problems – predominantly supports alternative methods.
PowerPoint slides are toxic to education for three main reasons:
students come to think of a course as a set of slides. Good teachers who present realistic complexity and ambiguity are criticised for being unclear. Teachers who eschew bullet points for graphical slides are criticised for not providing proper notes.
Slides discourage reasonable expectations
Measuring the wrong things
If slide shows are so bad, why are they so popular?
Exams, term papers and group projects ostensibly measure knowledge or ability. Learning is the change in knowledge and skills and therefore must be measured over time.
When we do attempt to measure learning, the results are not pretty. US researchers found that a third of American undergraduates demonstrated no significant improvement in learning over their four-year degree programs.
They tested students in the beginning, middle and end of their degrees using the Collegiate Learning Assessment, an instrument that tests skills any degree should improve – analytic reasoning, critical thinking, problem solving and writing.
continued practice, clear goals and immediate feedback
project-based learning, Minecraft and SimCity EDU
Gamification of learning versus learning with games
organizations to promote gaming and gamification in education (p. 6 http://scsu.mn/1F008Re)
the “chocolate-covered broccoli” problem
Discussion: why gaming and gamification is not accepted in a higher rate? what are the hurdles to enable greater faster acceptance? What do you think, you can do to accelerate this process?
Gaming in an academic library
why the academic library? sandbox for experimentation
the connection between digital literacy and gaming and gamificiation
Gilchrist and Zald’s model for instruction design through assessment
Discussion: based on the example (http://web.stcloudstate.edu/pmiltenoff/bi/), how do you see transforming academic library services to meet the demands of 21st century education?
Gaming, gamification and assessment (badges)
inability of current assessments to evaluate games as part of the learning process
“microcredentialing” through digital badges
Mozilla Open Badges and Badgestack
leaderboards
Discussion: How do you see a transition from the traditional assessment to a new and more flexible academic assessment?
From printed newspapers to born-digital news, libraries and other cultural heritage institutions have a central role in ensuring future access to news content. This conference will examine issues and challenges in collecting and preserving the news and making it available to users. Do access and preservation have different prerequisites? In addition, the conference will explore how news media is used and transformed by researchers and the public.
Can we recognize variable user needs? Do we offer the most suitable APIs?
Proposals should address the main theme and related topics, including but not limited to:
Users’ experiences with digital newspaper collections and their usability expectations
Case studies of patron services for digitized and born-digital news (e.g., management systems, reading devices, printout services, etc.)
How digitized news collections are being used in the digital humanities, by researchers, and by the public
The importance and possibilities of citizen science
Long-term sustainability planning for news collections and the role of institutional commitment in preservation and sustainability planning
How institutions make digital newspaper collections freely accessible
Rules, regulations, or legislation for mandatory deposit of news content, paper or otherwise
Legal deposit libraries offering access to in-copyright digitized newspapers
National Libraries co-operating with newspaper publishing houses in digitization, access, etc.
Data research that benefits preservation practice and planning
Changing collection building in a social media and online world
New methods for media monitoring
Harvesting and preservation of web-only news content
Issues around suppression of digitized/digital news content and take down orders
Other proposals relevant to the main conference theme will also be considered.
Note: Papers from this conference will be considered for a special issue of IFLA Journal. All authors will be invited to use feedback from the conference to revise their work and submit it for peer review in collaboration with the IFLA Journal editorial committee and the conference organizing committee.
Submission Guidelines
Proposal abstracts should be submitted as an MS Word file. Proposal abstracts must be submitted by 27 January 2017, must be in English, and should clearly
include:
Title of proposed paper
Abstract of proposed paper (no more than 300 words)
Name(s) of presenter(s) plus position and/or title
Employer / affiliated institution
Contact information including e-mail address and telephone number
Short biographical statement(s) of presenter(s)
Proposal abstracts should be emailed to all conference committee members:
Selected presenters will be notified by 3 February 2017. To discuss any matter relating to this Call for Papers, please contact the conference committee members listed above.
Accepted papers
Complete accepted papers should be 3000-6000 words in length and be an original submission not published elsewhere.
Complete accepted papers and accompanying presentation slides must be submitted by 17 April 2017.
Final papers should be written in English.
The papers will be made available on the Conference Website and the News Media Section Website under theCreative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.
Approximately 20 minutes will be allowed for the presentation of the paper.
Registration
Registration information will be posted on the Conference Website at the beginning of 2017.
Important dates
27 January 2017 Proposal abstracts due
3 February 2017 Acceptance notices sent to authors
10 February 2017 Start of registration
10 April 2017 Completed papers and presentations submitted
27-28 April 2017 Conference
Please note The Programme Committee regrets that it has no funding to assist prospective authors and the submission of an abstract must be on the understanding that the costs of attending the conference including registration, travel, accommodation and other expenses, are the responsibility of the presenters of the accepted papers, or their institutions. No financial support can be provided by IFLA, but a special invitation can be issued to authors.
my note: Avoid using infographics for purposes, which toodoo can serve. Infographics are for about visualization of stats, not just visualization. #FindTheRightTool
By Vicki E. Phillips
As instructors, we are constantly looking for new ways to capture our students’ attention and increase their participation in our classes, especially in the online modalities. We spend countless hours crafting weekly announcements for classes and then inevitably receive multiple emails from our students asking the very same questions that we so carefully and completely answered in those very same announcements! The question remains, how do we get them to read our posts?
It was precisely that problem I was trying to solve when I came across several articles touting the benefits of comics in higher education classrooms. I knew I couldn’t create an entire comic book, but I wondered if I could create a content-related cartoon that would not only capture students’ attention and maybe make them laugh, but also interest them enough that they would read the entire announcement or post. In doing so, I would be freed from responding to dozens of emails asking the same questions outlined in the announcements and students could focus on the homework.
A quick Internet search led me to a plethora of free “click and drag” cartoon making software applications to try. I started posting my own cartoons on characters, themes, etc. on the weekly literature we were studying in my upper division American and Contemporary World Literature classes, as well as to offer reminders or a few words of encouragement. Here’s an example of one I posted during week 7 of the semester when students can become discouraged with their assignment load: http://www.toondoo.com/cartoon/10115361
After a positive response, I decided to provide my online students the opportunity to try their hand at cartoon creation. I created a rubric and a set of instructions for an easy to use, free program that I had used, and I opened up the “cartoon challenge” to the students. The results were nothing short of amazing—what intrigued me the most was the time and effort they took with their cartoons. Not only did they create cartoons on the story we were reading, but they also wrote additional posts explaining their ideas for the creation, discussing why they chose a particular scene, and identifying those elements pertinent to the points they were making. These posts tended to receive many more substantial comments from their peers than the traditional discussion board posts, indicating they were being read more.
When students in my face-to-face course heard about the cartoons, they asked to try this approach as well. Their cartoons, shared in class via the overhead projector, led to some of the most engaging and interesting discussions I have ever had in the residential literature classes as students explained how they came up with the elements they chose, and why they picked a certain scene from the reading. The positive student feedback has been instrumental in my continuing to offer this option in both my online and face-to-face classes.
How does one get started in making these cartoons? The good news is you do not have to be an artist to make a cartoon! There are free programs with templates, clip art, and all the elements you would need to click and drag into place all those wonderful ideas you have simmering in your brain. My favorite to use is ToonDoo, available at http://toondoo.com. I like it because there are literally hundreds of elements, a search bar, and it lets me customize what I want to say in the dialog bubbles. It is very user friendly, even for those of us with limited artistic ability.
The whole experience has been overwhelmingly positive for me, and judging from the feedback received, for the students as well. It has also reminded me of one of my teaching goals, which is to incorporate more activities which would fall under assimilating and creating aspects of Bloom’s Taxonomy (Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy, 2001). If that is your goal as well, then try inserting a cartoon in those weekly announcements and ask for feedback from your students—I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised!
References:
Armstrong, Patricia (n.d.) Bloom’s Taxonomy, Vanderbilt University, Center for Teaching. Retrieved from https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy/#2001
Pappas, Christopher (2014) The 5 Best Free Cartoon Making Programs for Teachers. Retrieved from: https://elearningindustry.com/the-5-best-free-cartoon-making-tools-for-teachers
Vicki E. Phillips is an assistant professor of English and Literature at Rasmussen College, Ocala, Fla.
