Badges for badging?

There's a fair bit getting written about “badging”as a tool for skill development and tracking, e.g. an article late last year in the New York Times. I think there's real promise in the digital version of this, but like so many potential applications of technology, as it becomes more successful, there needs to be careful thought to make it reliable and trustworthy enough.

Badging is sometimes talked about as a metaphor from the electronic gaming world, where it's been a successful way to document – and motivate - bragging rights for accomplishments. It has, of course, a much longer history in other arenas, like scouting and the military. In all these cases, there is a rigorous, secure way of validating the accomplishments that underpin a badge, although none of these is completely immune from fraud: e.g., paying someone else to play a game for you, or buying someone else's military or scouting badges and fraudulently claiming them as your own. (Even there, as fraud becomes a problem, there are ways to validate/secure the badges even further.)

However, there's increased interest in using the idea more generally to document a wider array of skills and accomplishments. Indeed, at least one major technology company I've spoken with is considering this as a way to acknowledge, document, and motivate a wide variety of new behaviors, no matter what the source, rather than relying on formal training and transcripts for every single thing. And the MacArthur Foundation has started up a multi-phase grant competition around badging for skills, and for technologies to support these.

There's risks,though. We have to be careful not to expect more from badging systems than from our other credentialing systems – even traditional high-stakes credentialing like the SAT exam system still has incidents of cheating. However, we can't ignore the trust issues around badging if this approach catches on:

• A key reason formal, college-issued transcripts are valued is a belief that they are trustworthy, representing substantial work in the fields represented, at least at some time in the past. (One of my earliest employers checked in with each university I had been to, and came back amazed that I hadn't falsified any of it. Sheesh!) While certain existing badging systems have similar levels of trust (e.g., those military badges, perhaps scouting badges), new systems will take time and experience to become viewed “real” in this same way.

• The assessments and evaluation system used will be critical. The same pressures for “grade inflation” may apply to badging evaluation, without some care by those who are seen as standing behind the quality represented by a badge. This is a non-trivial problem – even well-meaning communities might let their standards drift, or be influenced by very active subgroups, or influenced, at times, by philosophies of evaluation that make the interpretation of a badge more changeable than originally intended. (“This badge from 2012 to 2015 meant XX, but from 2016 to 2/17/2018, it meant YYY, and from 2/18/2018 on it meant. . . )

• As with many things, especially Internet/community connected things, the more popular and important things become, the more they are at risk of manipulation. While communities are small, with lots of repeated exposure to each others skills, and lots of communication, these things get fixed. What happens when badges really matter to a wider audience? Without additional work to secure the badge-awarding process, folks may start to manipulate or buy out various parts of the system, as has begun with social media based ratings and rankings.

• It may become valuable to sell work that can be used by others to get badges. This is not much better (or worse) than the problem universities now face with marketplaces of papers and work for popular courses. As there, other methods to ensure who does critical work become valuable (proctored performances, including ID checking, although the SAT cheating case above shows this, too, is not perfect), as well as technology-based tools (like TurnItIn) to check if the work has appeared somewhere else. Public/community displays of work might help ferret out such plagiarism too, as long as there is sufficient traffic.

With all these issues, why the interest?

• There's a much clearer awareness that many skills are accumulating over a lifetime from informal sources. Transcripts from 10, 20, 30 years ago or more are only limited guides to “what you can do,” and resumes provide limited assurance of specific competencies (beyond the grammatical).

• Mismatches of skills to job requirements are very common, and very expensive to fix. Trying to get a better bead on skills – and adding motivation to get them – seems like an increasing win, given how much more information-intensive most careers and tasks are becoming.

• Careers are, indeed, increasingly changing – or even at risk. (If you're a bread-and-butter tax attorney, your eye must be on India.) That means more and more workers need to be prepared to change careers during their lives, not just jobs. We need efficient, trustworthy ways to catalog and document (for ourselves, our communities, our current and potential employers) what we really can do in a concise way.

• Skills and focii that may have started as incidental interest or hobbies can morph into key components of a new career or opportunity. Perhaps your casual but increasing environmentalism around your community can and should transform into evidence of deep engagement with the environment, that leads to new opportunities for a paid contribution in a greenfield enterprise (pardon the pun. . . ;-) )

So some method for documenting skills from a variety of sources at some level of defined trust seems valuable.

There's a good white paper about some of the latest thinking on badging from the Mozilla Foundation, which is working with MacArthur and the Peer-to-Peer University to develop an infrastructure for badging. There's quite a range of possibilities for badging, from community- or even learner-delivered badges on up to much more formal schemes. And in all cases, a digital approach has the advantage that underlying evidence and artifacts for the credential can be stored and made available with a few clicks. Even if the badge was awarded in a less formal fashion, making the artifacts available and visible can help an observer see the real work – if you trust that the badge owner did the work, of course.

This doesn't mean college transcripts are history. In theory, a transcript could/should work like this too: each entry in a formal transcript becomes a link to final exam work, final papers, perhaps the individual standards/objectives used and the pieces of work that verify the students' performance against each of these, too. This would have advantages:

• It forces more clarity and transparency on what, exactly, a course covers and what evaluation was used to document mastery.

• It provides a natural reason for programs to deeply think through the interconnections of the objectives (and assessments) in each course, if they become visible to many.

• It makes more transparent the connection from standards to assessments to marked up work - and, again, the visibility may motivate improvements.

• It allows employers and others to ask about the exact coverage within programs and courses – are there things employers (now) find important that are not visible/assessed/documented within these more detailed transcripts?

• If students allow it, regular news about their incremental academic success delivered to a subset of their social network could provide on-going motivation for the hard work they're engaged in.

Badging isn't a panacea – but we all need some way to more reliably document what we are able to do, given how quickly the needs for what we should be able to do, and what we want to know about it, are changing.