Laubersheimer, J., Ryan, D., & Champaign, J. (2016). InfoSkills2Go: Using Badges and Gamification to Teach Information Literacy Skills and Concepts to College-Bound High School Students. Journal of Library Administration, 56(8), 924.
https://www.academia.edu/21782837/InfoSkills2Go_Using_Badges_and_Gamification_to_Teach_Information_Literacy_Skills_and_Concepts_to_College_Bound_High_School_Students?email_work_card=title
From online trivia and virtual board games to complex first-person perspective video games and in-person scavenger hunts, libraries are creating games for a variety of purposes, including orientations and instruction (Broussard,2012; Mallon, 2013; Smith & Baker, 2011).
Although the line between gaming and gamification can be blurry, most scholars recognize differences. Games are interactive, involvechallenge, risk, and reward, and have rules and a goal (Pivec, Dziabenko, &Schinnerl, 2003; Becker, 2013). Gamification, on the other hand, utilizes spe-cific gaming elements, often interactivity and rewards, to make an ordinary task more engaging (Prince, 2013). The gamification layer is not the focus of an endeavor, but rather can add enjoyment and a sense of competition toa task.
Battista (2014) argues that well-executed badges could represent an authentic assessment tool, because they often require the student to tangibly demonstrate a skill, competency, or learning outcome.
Use of the badges helped the team organize the Web site and provided a hierarchy to follow once the steps for earning each badge were created.Each badge consists of three to six tasks. A task can be a tutorial, a video, a game, or a short reading assignment on a given topic. An assessment is given for each task
The fourth and final platform the group considered was BadgeOS fromLearningTimes. BadgeOS requires a WordPress installation BadgeOS was designed to work with Credly (https://credly.com/) and Mozilla Open Badges (http://openbadges.org/) as standard features.
LearnDash was the most useful plugin for the project beyond BadgeOS. Available for a reasonable fee, LearnDash adds tools and features that give WordPress the ability to be used as a complete learning management system(LMS).
Available for free under the GNU Public License, BuddyPress(https://buddypress.org/) is another plugin that was capable of integrating with BadgeOS as an extension. The advantage of BuddyPress for the project group was the addition of social media components and functionality to the project Web site.
Go-daddy.com offered comprehensive technical support, easy application instal-lation, and competitively priced hosting packages. A 3-year hosting agree-ment was purchased that included domain registration, unlimited storageand unlimited bandwidth.
compare to
practical application of D2L Brightspace badges for a chemistry course at SCSU
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2019/11/06/mastery-of-library-instruction-badge/
standard library instruction
Badging: Not Quite the Next Big Thing
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:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=badges