Digital Literacy for St. Cloud State University
a new paper published on gaming habits and education:
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more on gaming in this IMS blog:
AAEEBL (The Association for Authentic, Experiential and Evidence-Based learning) starts the Baston Blog
Blockchain Credentialing: What Impact Will it Have?
Posted By Trent Batson Ph. D.
blockchain credentialing, big news since the MIT Media Lab offered an open source means of credentialing using blockchain technology (the technology behind bitcoin).
Blockchain credentialing makes verification of credentials much simpler and less time consuming, according to the articles I’ve collected below. Even IBM has entered the arena.
As with badges, we in the eportfolio world need to be aware of the trend toward blockchain credentialing. I’ve sorted through the links below so I could select those I thought would be most useful for you.
http://www.learningmachine.com/credentials.html
https://campustechnology.com/articles/2016/05/16/how-blockchain-will-disrupt-the-higher-education-transcript.aspx — the Phil Long interview
https://www.gartner.com/doc/3279217/reinventing-education-credentials-using-blockchain
http://thenewstack.io/one-school-using-bitcoin-blockchain-authenticate-degrees/
https://console.ng.bluemix.net/docs/services/blockchain/index.html
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more on badges in this blog
https://campustechnology.com/articles/2016/09/01/global-elearning-market-in-steep-decline.aspx
a recent report released by Ambient Insight Research, a Washington state-based market research firm.
Revenues for self-paced e-learning in 2016 are heavily concentrated in two countries — the United States and China. The growth rate in the U.S. is at -5.3 percent, representing a $4.9 billion drop in revenues by 2021, while in China, the rate is at -8.8 percent, representing a $1.9 billion drop by 2021. The e-learning market in China has deteriorated rapidly in just the last 18 months, the report said.
Self-paced e-learning products include online courses, managed education services, managed training, e-books and learning management systems, according to the report. The author does not consider mobile and game-based learning, which are growing, to be in the self-paced e-learning category.
The news on the self-paced e-learning industry is so bad, Ambient Insight will no longer publish commercial syndicated reports on the industry, the firm says on its website and in the report.
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more on elearning in this IMS blog
#StarTrek50
Seeking to bring the qualities of well-designed games to pedagogical assessment, the University of Michigan created a learning management system that uses gaming elements such as competition, badges and unlocks to provide students with a personalized pathway through their courses.
By David Raths 08/24/16
https://campustechnology.com/articles/2016/08/24/an-lms-to-support-gameful-learning.aspx
UM School of Information and School of Education
a new type of learning management system called GradeCraft. GradeCraft borrows game elements such as badges and unlocks to govern students’ progress through a course. With unlocks, for example, you have to complete a task before moving to the next level.
Written in Ruby on Rails and hosted on Amazon Web Services, GradeCraft was created by a small team of students and faculty with additional software support from Ann Arbor-based developer Alfa Jango. Their work received support from UM’s Office of Digital Education and Innovation and the Office of the Provost. GradeCraft can work as a stand-alone platform or in conjunction with a traditional LMS via the LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability) protocol.
Here is how it works: Instructors create a course shell within GradeCraft (similar to the process with any LMS). Students use a tool called the “Grade Predictor” to plan a personalized pathway through the course, making predictions about both what they will do and how they will perform. When assignments are graded, predictions turn into progress; students are then nudged to revisit their semester plan, reassessing what work is available and how well they need to do to succeed overall. Students are able to independently choose an assessment pathway that matches their interests within the framework of learning objectives for the course.
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more on LMS in this blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=gaming
more on gaming in this blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=lms
more on badges in this blog
By Dian Schaffhauser 08/04/16
A summer-time enrichment experience for high schoolers at Penn State has taken on a heightened level of excitement with the use of the same development toolset behind the global phenom Pokémon Go.
Besides Unity, the platform used by Niantic to create Pokémon Go and other popular games, the course also introduces students to AutoDesk’s Maya, a program used for 3D animation, modeling, simulation and rendering.
problem-based learning, which brings the students together for team problem-solving.
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More on Pokemon Go in this IMS blog
The Games and Gaming Roundtable is now accepting conference presentation proposals on games and gaming in libraries for the American Library Association Midwinter Conference, January 20-24, 2017 in Atlanta, Georgia. Presenters will be required to provide either a twenty-minute presentation with Q & A or an hour-long hands on workshop.
Proposals are due September 9th, 2016.
Please include the names and email addresses of the presenters, and the title, a short description, and 200 word abstract of your proposal.
If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact me at thematthewmurray@gmail.com.
Please pass this message on to any people you feel may find it relevant.
Regards,
Matthew Murray
Chair, GameRT Program Planning Committee
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Email: thematthewmurray@gmail.com
Twitter: @MidniteLibrary
MLIS 2015, School of Library, Archival & Information Studies (SLAIS), UBC
Webmaster, ASIS&T Digital Libraries Special Interest Group
Digital Services Chair, BCLA Readers’ Advisory Interest Group
Blogs and other projects: thematthewmurray.weebly.com
While badging and digital credentialing are gaining acceptance in the business world and, to some extent, higher education, K-12 educators — and even students — are slower to see the value.
By Michael Hart 07/20/16
https://thejournal.com/articles/2016/07/20/badging-not-quite-the-next-big-thing.aspx
That’s when the MacArthur Foundation highlighted the winning projects of its Badges for Lifelong Learning competition at the Digital Media and Learning Conference in Chicago. The competition, co-sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation, had attracted nearly 100 competitors a year earlier. The winners shared $2 million worth of development grants.
Evidence of Lifelong Learning
A digital badge or credential is a validation, via technology, that a person has earned an accomplishment, learned a skill or gained command of specific content. Typically, it is an interactive image posted on a web page and connected to a certain body of information that communicates the badge earner’s competency.
Credly is a company that offers off-the-shelf credentialing and badging for organizations, companies and educational institutions. One of its projects, BadgeStack, which has since been renamed BadgeOS, was a winner in the 2013 MacArthur competition. Virtually any individual or organization can use its platform to determine criteria for digital credentials and then award them, often taking advantage of an open-source tool like WordPress. The credential recipient can then use the BadgeOS platform to manage the use of the credential, choosing to display badges on social media profiles or uploading achievements to a digital resume, for instance.
Finkelstein and others see, with the persistently growing interest in competency-based education (CBE), that badging is a way to assess and document competency.
Colorado Education Initiative, (see webinar report in this IMS blog https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2016/06/20/colorados-digital-badging-initiative/)
There are obstacles, though, to universal acceptance of digital credentialing.
For one, not every community, company or organization sees a badge as something of value.
When a player earns points for his or her success in a game, those points have no value outside of the environment in which the game is played. For points, badges, credentials — however you want to define them — to be perceived as evidence of competency, they have to have portability and be viewed with value outside of their own environment.
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More on badges in this IMS blog: