Originally published by SmartBrief on SmartBlogs.com

There’s a national conversation on the topic of alternative digital credentials that’s had decent coverage for the past couple of years. Our work at Mouse was highlighted in some of Education Week’s early coverage in 2012, and just last week Kevin Carey penned a nice piece for the New York Times on the topic using challenges in higher education to make his case.

Most often, the trade news orgs, social media and members of the education community are using the shorthand “badges” to talk about graphic representations of skills earned through a learning experience that are awarded and shared over the web. But the term can be a bit of a hindrance - especially if you have some personal experience with, say, Brownies or Boy Scouts - if your goal is to understand the more serious potential of new credentials, beyond cute graphics.

 Badge on his profile in the then popular Disney app. In that instance, badges appeared like gold stars, a mere indicator that a task (or level of the app, in this case) had been completed. You couldn’t use that badge to look back on his performance, it didn’t carry metadata to help understand more about the context in which it was earned, and importantly, he had no agency to curate the badges in a shareable way that might help him demonstrate what he knows to others.

The topic carries with it important questions regarding motivation, which I write a little about in my recent post, Why We Badge, outlining five reasons that Mouse decided to invest in the design and development of a badging system starting back in 2009. And while the question of intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivators requires our ongoing, thoughtful consideration, it’s important to get past an idea that “badging” is merely the gold star of the web. When you think “Badge” in this context, train your mind to supplant patches with portfolio data. Wonder to yourself what it might be like to give your students new ways of demonstrating digital-age and workforce-ready skills. Dream a little about school models like IowaBIG, where students receive school credits for answering the question, “what is something that you hate?” with projects that impact their local or global communities, and what badges might offer those students in describing what they “know” and are “able to do” to their future colleges and employers.

Ian O’Byrne of University of New Haven recently wrote a terrific Digital Badges Overview that serves as a great primer if you’re interested in digging deeper. My favorite video talk on the topic is a recent TedX from Providence Rhode Island, featuring Damien Ewens, an educator and CEO of Achievery.

Marc Lesser is the Senior Director of Learning Design at Mouse.