What do you want to know about digital badges?

Re: What do you want to know about digital badges?

by Bronwyn Stuckey -
Number of replies: 2

Hi All

I am just getting into this conversation. I have been working in a project here in Australia to 'gamify' acitvity within an educator professional development community of practice. The project is called PLANE ( http://plane.edu.au ). It is a Federally funded Digital Revolution project to support teachers nationally in using ICT with quality pedagogies in education.The community activity is accredited with Australian teaching regulatory bodies and counts toward teacher continuing accreditation.

We built our eight level game layer framework around the the Joseph Campbell framework of The Hero's Journey. Teachers enter a Hero and can level up through to Ninja and finally Maven. The idea is that they embark on an epic journey and face many challenges, realising the value of colleagues in conquering these and emerge back in their homeland as leaders. Their activity in the community gains them points, badges, missions, status and levels etc. We have worked very hard to engage teachers in meaningful actities and many of the awards and rewards are earned only through evidenced professional activity. Into this we have built a peer review process (higher levels support the lower), roles, social gifting of rewards with a view to recognition and community ownership of the game layer.

We have worked with Badgeville as the SOAS architeture for the game layer but all the content and rewards etc are designed by educators. It has been a 12 month process to get the first levels of the game layer into the burgeoning community and we are now at the the particpatory design phase where we are running, surveys, focus groups and interview to form a steering committee to evaluate the early design and effectiveness and to form an informed steering committee to take the project forward.

We have been dealing with a lot of tensions in this design. See attached PDF file of a very recent presentation I gave the the Games for Change Summit here in Australia. I do have to say I am having a blast with this convergence of my two greatest academic loves/areas of research - games and communities of practice.

In reply to Bronwyn Stuckey

Re: What do you want to know about digital badges?

by Joyce McKnight -

Sounds very cool...I don't usually like games just for the

sake of playing but to play a game and learn something

useful as well would be great.

In reply to Bronwyn Stuckey

Re: What do you want to know about digital badges?

by Julia Hengstler -

Hi, Bronwyn.

Any chance that you'll be opening up access to teacher education institutions outside of Australia?
Julia