[OT] Note from a former student

[Alex Halavais]

Hi,

This is off topic for our mission here. Sorry, I've just been captured
with end-of-semester craziness; will get on posting items to the
biblio ASAP.

However, I wrote up a little on how I plan to implement badges (http://
alex.halavais.net/what-makes-up-a-badge) and one of my (very) former
students published the following comment, which I thought was
interesting. Most of the talk has been about getting jobs, but I
suspect this problem--not knowing what your colleagues know how to do--
is pretty common:

"""
I love this idea, and wish it was available back during my academic
career. In addition to the added visibility into what skills a
students has mastered, I think this would add a great deal of
motivation to students to extend their education as far as possible.
Just like video game designers increase game engagement through
unlockable achievements and gamer points, providing incremental
rewards and incentives to exploring the deeper corners of the game,
the instructor motivates the student through rewards to explore the
deeper corners of the content.

At my current job, there’s a lack of visibility into the skill sets
that each worker has. Although we share the same title, I am skilled
at very different things than my peers. Because of this lack of
visibility, however, project managers often assemble their teams based
on personal relationships, gut feelings, and hope. I’m going to
propose this as a potential solution, and will let you know if I learn
anything interesting that might feed back into your work. (As we are
an agency built on client-billable work, the largest obstacle I
currently see with this system is the amount of (non-billable)
administrative effort. Our implementation will undoubtedly be more
simplistic.)

Todd V
UW New Media Research Lab ’00-01
"""

[Philipp Schmidt]

This is an interesting spin on the idea. If they were willing to create a few badges and assign them to individuals, we could include it in the prototype?

P