Bronwyn Stuckey

Apologies for typos - was dashing off some thoughts in my lunch break ;-)

In the simple badge system described above I feel some friction about quantifying engagement as in "actively contributes to 7 of the 12 primary discussion threads". I know that many uni courses count how many posts a student makes as a part of simple rubric for engagement but how effective is this? Dialogue is such a qulaitative thing it seems not enough to just count posts. What does "actively contributes" mean in this count? Writes 10 words? Writes a message in response to others? Writes a message that attracts responses? Opens a new topic? There is just too much left to interpretation in things like this and gamification in my experience needs to be readily transparent to users to be effective.

I am not just criticising here as these are issues I am struggling with in my own project work gamifyinging a teacher PD community experience. We are working on peer review, social gifitng and the building of evidence pages of reflection and learning as ways to raise the bar for badges.  Early badges can be simple quantifiable tasks but later, for the badges to be part of your identity, a human response/reflection/review is required in granting them. Do you agree?

I agree John!  That's why I like the idea of the Mozilla OBI - in that it is users who choose which badges can pushed into open spaces. We as accreditating or issuing organisations can attach metadata to a badge and a URL so that people can see how a person eraned the badge, but in the end it is the user who decides which badges become part of their identity outside the community/project/course that it was earned. In my book, as you say the people who earn badges should be able to decide where they display and where and how they form part of their identity/ies.

Hi everyone - apologies for catching up on events and discussions here...

I did post a bit of an intro in the earlier lead up discussion about a major project to gamify teacher professional learning in a community of practice here in Australia. This project has been a coming together of my two big learning passions - games and CoPs. I have to say I am having a blast thinking through all the issues it raises.

http://scope.bccampus.ca/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=16750&parent=68764

Bron

Zack, I could not agree more with what you have said. See my post below about a project that I think ties together much of what you have suggested. We have to get beyond the notion of badges as trinkets and there is a lot of work that can be done to do that.