Welcome all, to the Research Working Group

[Carla Casilli, Director of Design + Practice]

Hey all -

Welcome to the Badge Alliance Research Working Group. You are on this list because you've attended Mozilla Research / Badge System Design calls in the past and/or you expressed interest in participating in this working group through the Badge Alliance site (http://badgealliance.org). We're excited that you'll be a part of this experience!

A bit about mailing group logistics:

• If you would like to change your mailing group preferences (digest vs individual emails), you can manage your BA Research account at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ba-research
  
If you would like to use a different email address than the one you received an invitation to, you can just sign up for the group with the appropriate email at http://groups.google.com.

• And of course, if you were added in error or no longer want to be part of this working group you can unsubscribe using the link in the footer of this message or at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!memberships
  

A bit about who will be leading the charge:

• Sheryl Grant, the Director of Social Networking for HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation, Digital Media Learning Competition, is the chair for this working group. She'll be the one driving calls and wrangling us all towards success. She has been working with, in, and around Open Badges for several years and so we're excited that she's taken the reins here for the initial cycle of this working group.
  
Nate Otto, who you may know through his work with Dan Hickey and Indiana University's Design Principles Documentation project is the group's secretary. He's been a tremendously active and dynamic community member and we're pleased that he's here to help guide and note our progress.

• I'm Carla Casilli, the Badge Alliance team liaison for this working group. I’ll be helping to guide this work and share it with the larger Badge Alliance community. 
  
• Sheryl, Nate, and I will be setting up a regular bimonthly call to work through key goals, issues, etc. 

What you can expect next:

A welcome message from Sheryl and Nate with information about the kick off call/meeting. 

• A time and date for the kick off call for the Badge Alliance Research Working Group.
  
• During the first call I’ll provide more details on how working groups will function but the sneak peek is that we'll leverage this mailing list and those calls to do a bulk of the planning together, and then divide and conquer to push the work forward in between meetings. 
• Some initial goals we’ll also be discussing during that initial call: 
• assembling a research agenda
• planning for badge research community-building
• coordinating spaces to conduct and discuss research activities and findings

What you can do right now:

Some of you may want to attend the calls or just read the mailing list digests; others may want to play a deeper role. All of that is okay and welcome! In the interim, please introduce yourself and your area of interest in this working group—get acquainted with your peers! We are going to do great things together! 

Thanks so much for your interest—this is going to be fun!

all the best,

Carla

[Nate Otto]

Hi, all!  I'm Nate Otto, secretary for this group. Thanks to Carla for the official Badge Alliance welcome.

As I related to you on last week's research/system design call, I'm excited for what we might get done in these discussions. We will meet regularly throughout the first working group session from now to September to make meaningful progress building out the research community around Open Badges.

I've met many of the people on this group so far on community calls and events, but I'm pumped to see a bunch of names I don't recognize too. Welcome!

As far as a personal introduction to those I haven't talked to already, I am a web designer and researcher currently coordinating the Design Principles Documentation Project, which is led by Dan Hickey at Indiana University. We've been studying the grant winners from the 2012 DML badges competition, and we're now starting to publish case studies and detailed investigations of how this diverse set of projects envisioned, implemented, and refined educational ecosystems involving badges. I am happy to be involved in research around badges as well as technical issues with the standard working group and forthcoming projects directly building badge systems and badge-aware applications.

I think we can do some really cool things as a research community, particularly because of the great work so many people have already done building an atmosphere of sharing and a culture of building transformative systems with care.

Here are some things I'm looking forward to talking about:

• What are the interesting questions around badges, and how can we connect those questions with those who are interested in studying them?
• Development of spaces to share our research with each other and those interested in building with badges: including promoting conferences and journals, making research accessible, and organizing a shared library of resources.

Stay tuned!

As I'm the group secretary, please feel free to contact me directly to ask about any logistical or coordination matters.

Nate Otto
na...@ottonomy.net

[Sheryl Grant]

Hi everyone,

Thanks to Carla for the official Badge Alliance welcome, and hello to new people and old friends from the badge community! 

For those of you I haven't met yet, I'm Sheryl Grant, bringing a couple of different badge + research hats to the Badge Alliance Research Chair position. I'm finishing a Phd at the University of North Carolina's-Chapel Hill's School of Information & Science -- my dissertation is on value-driven design in a professional development badge system. I forget how many years I've been in school, so that means I must be getting close to finishing. 

I also work for HASTAC, the organization that administered the Badges for Lifelong Learning Competition (the same one Nate Otto mentioned he and his team are researching in the DPD Project) and the Badging and Badge Systems Development Research Competition, among other Digital Media and Learning Competitions. 

One of the best things about research and badges is the community -- so let's get together and start shaping the future of badge research. Our first call is coming up this week, and we'll announce our regular calls in upcoming messages: 

Research Working Group kickoff call details:

Friday, May 2, 2014 at 12pm ET

Dial in: 1-800-707-2533 then password 369 then confID 7686#

Working etherpad: https://badgealliance.etherpad.mozilla.org/ba-research

During the first call Nate and I will provide more details on how working groups will function but the sneak peek is that we'll leverage this mailing list and those calls to do a bulk of the planning together, and then divide and conquer to push the work forward in between meetings. 

We'll discuss some initial goals during Friday's call: 

• assembling a research agenda
  
• planning for badge research community-building
  
• coordinating spaces to conduct and discuss research activities and findings
  

Thanks to those of you who have introduced yourself -- anyone else who wants to say hello, please do. Let us know your area of interest and what kinds of projects you might be working on, or what you'd like to get out of this group. 

Feel free to reach out with any questions. Looking forward to Friday and getting to work! Sheryl Grant, Badge Alliance Research Chair: shery...@gmail.com

Cheers,

Sheryl