A Working Badge Paper

We’ve done a lot of thinking, talking and conceptualizing about badges as an alternative path to certification. We’ve talked about badges with a large number of people over the last year, including academics, researchers, youth developers, game designers, technologists, entrepreneurs, teachers, learners and more.

From those discussions and meetings we have collected quite a significant amount of ideas, examples and questions. We’ve seen some trends emerge and have used them to refine our own thinking and approach to badges.

We have been drafting a working badge paper to capture and express that thinking and approach, which we are now ready to put out for wider consumption and feedback.

The paper includes some conceptual foundations about badges for learning, as well as an experimental badge system framework that we have been developing to guide badge efforts and explorations. It also ends with a bunch of questions that are still unanswered and can only hope to be answered through on-the-ground badge prototypes and associated research studies, as well as through more discussions with more people. Thus the paper is intentionally approachable and less formal than an academic paper, but is meant to communicate our approach and support others thinking about badges system prototypes, as well as, perhaps most importantly, to put something on paper for people to start reacting to and to get more people involved in the discussions.

So please get involved. Read the paper. Give us feedback. Share your thoughts. There is a link within the doc to give feedback via a talk page or email.