Badges User Notes

Google Hangout with Kyle Peck, David Passmore, Brian Mulligan, and Billy Meinke 7/24/12

David Passmore - use badges in doctoral students course

• Has a new doctoral students course. Building 40 different skills throughout the course.
• Likes the interface for badg.us, and likes that users can reject a badge if they want.
• Issue: the awarder only knows if a badge has been awarded – but there's not tracking if it's been issued. So he's knows when someone accepts it, but he doesn't have a list of who it's bee issued to but hasn't accepted.
• So we need to show lists of badges made, badges awarded (accepted), AND badges issued (provided but not accepted).
• For use in the Fall class, he needs this done by 27th of August.

Kyle Peck - starting STEM scouts program

• Upload a spreadsheet, CSV file to apply multiple badges to multiple users all at once.
• This is a good intermediate way to connect with many different systems (so long as they can produce a CSV file) and engage badg.us with larger institutional users who may have 100s or 1000s of users at once.

Brian Mulligan - wants to use badges integrated with Moodle

• Develop courses in Moodle where Tutor can click a box and issue a student a badge
• Develop an API so that you can export the badging functions to other sites (like Moodle)
• The API would then also be integrated with Moodle for him to have his desired functionality

Other notes, thoughts:

• Institutional analytics – keeping institutional information, having a Organizations function with higher level.
• What if each badge easily generated a exportable, clickable image to paste into traditional resume, word doc, or PDF. This might be a good intermediate solution to allow people to add badges to their existing, traditional resumes.

In person discussion with Greg, Kristin F (school of information/librarian), Rachel (school librarian) 6/18/12

Kristin gave sticker badges out at a Texas Association of School Library Administrators conference, and people loved it. Of the ~80 that she gave out, almost all were redeemed on badg.us. Very different results than our Maker Faire experience where almost no one redeemed badges online.

She feels that it would be perfect for Professional Development (PD) circles, especially in libraries, in terms of tracking state mandated PD hours. However, a little considered aspect of badges is that it really forces the badge issuer to think deeply about what they are providing, what is being achieved, and what that means which makes implementing badges harder (though, that thinking is a good outcome which should be occurring anyway).

Clever use case: Sticker badges, then xerox the sticker sheet and use the xerox as a raffle after giving out the badges. Easy!

To identify more help for badg.us development:

• Email UMich School of Information students via Community Information Corps

Hangout with Anya, Billy (educator), Greg 6/18/12

To do:

Billy look for developors that might be interested in helping send us any more feature ideas or use cases you may think of or hear of we’d love to see a write-up of your experiences at ITSE perhaps try out some badges and the conference (narry a conference go unbadged!) - we’re happy to get them printed and shipped to you ASAP!

Notes:

1. Manual badging - how/will it change how badging happens...? Could the whole system be simplified even further?

manual badge creator - the idea is to simplify the technical side of things so that more people can more easily engage badges

Try out other cloud services to see if we get the same issues as with google docs and dropbox. If we can solve that problem, we’d have manual badging licked!

2. Maker Faire, QR code badges
3. Badg.us and Django badger (if you've got questions), also what do you think we should add, what do you think primary users will want, etc.

Educators will want:

• small set of badges for the purposes of their specific course
• simultaneous editing of multiple badges on a page at the same time
• likes the look and feel of the page right now for educators
• what about 13 - 18 year olds in HS - will they have issues with students having to sign up via email? - It’s a case by case basis - some schools are more open, some are much less open.

The big opportunity for schools (IMPORTANT!) They want to not have ot host their own json files - if we could do that, we could solve a lot of issues and dramatically speed up uptake of badges into the community. The question is - assuming badg.us hosted everyone’s json file, how could a site like badg.us verify a user?

• human verified badges - we literally call to verify using a known number
• Other ideas?

Discussions with other potential users 6/17/12

STAS from INITIATR.COM

• Initiatr is a website attempting to be Github for physical projects (making stuff). He's a great guy who fundamentally believes in open source, open hardware, and has a long-term view of badges. The site, in my opinion, fills a critical need in the Maker community.
• Initiatr needs a badging system so that users can provide positive reinforcement for each other through a set of Initiatr provided badges for Best Communicator, Most Creative, etc. as well as fixed meta badges (for example, a user is active in 10 projects, a user has 300 or greater positive feedback rating on the forums, etc.). The badges need to be displayed natively in the site (with a displayer trophy case) and the users need to be able to give badges in initiatr (without having to leave the site). That means initiatr and badg.us need to communicate.

AMELIA from YPSI LIBRARY

• Using badges (sticker badges) for their summer reading program
• A2 library is using online badges for lots of stuff - http://play.aadl.org/
• The third party log-in is killer - the library (as an independent entity) really doesn't want to send people to a third party
• How to allow kids to use badges?

KATIE from BRAIN MONKEYS

• Wants to use badges for after school classes for home schoolers -
• Ultimately need to solve the no badges for kids problem
• Also really likes the ideas of groups, needs to collect data about who's getting her badges, etc.

IMPORTANT UNIFIED CONCEPTS BETWEEN ALL PARTIES

• Groups are CRITICAL for a variety of reasons:

1. A group allows a variety of admin levels, so that someone may be able to give a badge created by someone else. In a company, if I created the "Great at Arduino" badge but you're teaching the class, I want to allow you to be able to give that badge.
2. Groups may allow us to solve the COPPA problem by admin users creating kid profiles themselves. Then, when kids get badges they can redeem them online through a different interface which doesn't require an email. Then, once they are old enough you can batch export their profile to a normal full user's profile.
3. Groups will allow all users to search and sort data from the badges - this is important for everyone! Meta badges are also critical.

Ann Arbor mini Maker Faire 6/2/12

See Greg's writeup HERE and Anya's writeup HERE for full details.

How To Badges Meeting for Beta Testers 5/24/12

Meeting with 7 people from Ann Arbor community who will beta test badg.us over the summer. Included summer camps, U of M school of information, and Maker Works folks.

• issue versus awarding badges - we should use the word issue instead of award wherever possible
• idea of using video as the criteria for the badge (stable link in description) or a video as the proof of successful completion of the badge (for a single given badge, each instance of the badge may have a different video proof, for example)
• badge passport
• private award info visible only to the badge reciever (for example to include coupon code information)
• kid created badges (and issuing badges) - how to do this easily and effectively? Issues of COPPA, parental consent, displaying the badges, etc.
• google education - they have “kid accounts” with parental oversight, perhaps this is a good model or something to connect into?