Learning happens everywhere; how we capture it is a hot topic.
Not only is how we capture learning shapeshifting but so is the recognition of what we collect and what it means.
There are brilliant minds in higher education, data, and technology doing the thinking that will shape the future of badges, credentials, and recognition.
Laura Hilliger, Noah Geisel, and Doug Belshaw are a few of these individuals. They sat down with Dr. Bill Heinrich, Director of Mindset, to discuss the underpinnings and possible uses of badges and credentialing, the hurdles to implementation, their work to date, and how we can badge and micro-credential to empower learners and validate their experiences.
To quote Laura, “How do we change a system from within a system, and what are the types of work that go into it?”
Listen to our first episode of season 3, and the second part to Badges & Micro-credentialing, featuring our special guests, here.
For a little more on our guests, read their bios, below.
Laura Hilliger is a writer, educator, and technologist. She’s a multimedia designer and developer, a technical liaison, a project manager, a conceptual architect, an open advocate who is happiest in collaborative environments. She’s a co-founder of We Are Open Co-op, an Ambassador for Open Organizations, is helping to open up Greenpeace, and a Mozilla alum. She’s spoken at conferences like OnBrand, Engage Prague, All Things Open, the Mozilla Festival and many others as well as for policy makers at the European Commission. In 2020, Laura won the Women in IT Digital Leader of the Year award. Find her on Twitter and Mastodon as @epilepticrabbit.
Noah Geisel serves as Micro-credentials Program Manager at the University of Colorado Boulder. He founded and coordinates the annual Badge Summit Conference and is a lecturer at the University of Colorado Denver. His background is as a World Languages, EdTech and Digital Badges consultant and teacher passionate about helping educators and students make awesome happen. He has 19 years of experience teaching Spanish, English and Technology and was recognized as the 2013 ACTFL National Language Teacher of the Year. He is a constant collaborator on Twitter and frequent blogger on Medium.com. As a community organizer and champion of Digital Badge Credentials, he co-founded #BadgeChat and seeks to amplify others’ efforts to change the world. He is a learner, sharer, traveler, and giver of high fives. Noah makes his own buttons, collects ViewMasters, and takes his dog dad duties to Pepper very seriously.
Doug Belshaw is technologist, leader, and educator advocating for greater openness and transparency in the world. He’s a founding member of We Are Open Co-op.
Working from home in Northumberland, the English county of castles and coastlines, Doug has had a varied career, following his interests and values. He’s perhaps best known for his work on digital literacies, having successfully defended his doctoral thesis on the topic and then writing a book entitled The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies during the time he was Mozilla’s Web Literacy lead.
In addition, Doug’s known for his evangelism of Open Badges which is a form of web-native digital credentialing. He’s travelled the world speaking and facilitating on this and many other topics at hundreds of events. One of these topics is decentralisation and, after being the founding Product Manager for MoodleNet, he’s now helping the Bonfire team with a federated app toolkit.
