In this episode, Laura and Doug talk about recognising learning and pro-social behaviours with badges. They also chat about the Participate project they’re collaborating on, Keep Badges Weird.
Links
Books
Find all of our guests’ reading recommendations at our The Tao of WAO book club.
Why do we need to keep badges weird?
- Participate KBW
- Project board
- Participate
- WAO’s work
- Technology innovation curve
- Open Badges
- Open Recognition
Are badges and digital credentials just for helping people get jobs?
- IBM badges
- Badges for digital transformation
- 4 benefits of Open Recognition Pathways
- Intern badges and self assigning
Where’s this all going next?
Other stuff
Transcript
Important note: this is a lightly-edited AI transcription of the conversation. If you require verbatim quotations, please double-check against the audio!
Laura Hilliger: [00:00:02] Heads up Tao of WAO listeners. In this episode we’re talking about badges and our current collaboration with Participate. Doug mentions it at the end of the episode, but we’re inviting you to join us on October 27th for a participatory session at the Badge Summit. Just go to the badge summit.com and look for keep badges weird. Welcome to the Tao of WAO, a podcast about the intersection of technology, society and internet culture with a dash of philosophy and art for good measure. I’m Laura Hilliger.
Doug Belshaw: [00:00:59] And I’m Doug Belshaw. This podcast season is currently unfunded. You can support this podcast and other. We are open projects and products at open collective.com/weareopen. So Laura, what are we talking about today?
Laura Hilliger: [00:01:15] Uh, I don’t know. Badges?
Doug Belshaw: [00:01:19] Well, I can talk until the heat death of the universe about badges and digital credentials.
Laura Hilliger: [00:01:24] Yes, I know. Which is why I am going to do my level best trying to help you rein it in. And we’re going to try to stick to about 30 minutes.
Doug Belshaw: [00:01:34] Well, good luck. Here we go.
Laura Hilliger: [00:01:36] I know, right?
Doug Belshaw: [00:01:38] So there’s lots of different ways of getting into the crazy world of open badges, digital credentials, all that kind of stuff. But maybe we can start. Maybe the angle we can take on it is the work that we’re doing at the moment with an organisation called Participate.
Laura Hilliger: [00:01:55] Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m thinking. If we start talking about the history of badges, um, you know, we’re definitely not going to be able to contain ourselves to 30 minutes. So I think coming from the participant angle is a great idea. Let’s do that.
Doug Belshaw: [00:02:09] So this particular project we were working, particularly with Mark Arthur, the CEO and Julie participate and the we’ve called this project Keep Badges Weird, which is an odd name for a project, isn’t it?
Laura Hilliger: [00:02:25] Well, it’s funny how the name came about too. It was our shorthand and now it is the official name, which I love, the fact that our silly shorthand became official because I think keep badges weird is a good name. But it begs the question why do we even need to keep badges weird?
Doug Belshaw: [00:02:44] Yeah. And I guess this is where we give like a potted history of open badges, open recognition, that kind of thing, and kind of where we’re at now in kind of the third quarter of 2021. So I did make a prediction probably about five, six years ago that it would be this would be the year of badges. Yeah, 20, 21, ten years after the kind of the first pilot project around open badges, open badges would be mainstream. And um, I think I’ve been proved right in that. Um, and there’s a quotation by Clay Shirky, which is, you know, technologies become socially interesting when they become technologically boring. And I think that’s now the case with kind of micro-credentials open badges, digital badges, however you want to call them, they’re now just being used. You see them popping up on LinkedIn, you see Futurelearn and other kind of course providers just using them. As a matter of fact, I see them from people who aren’t kind of badge evangelists. So this this is now kind of a mainstream thing, I would say.
Laura Hilliger: [00:03:55] Yeah. And they, I mean, they’ve certainly crossed over into the activist space. We’ve definitely seen badges in use for to help people understand their impact on climate, these kinds of things. So it’s they’re in use for sure and they’re all over the place. But maybe you want to I assume that you are thinking of a particular graphic that has what is this graphic called with early adopters going to mainstream?
Doug Belshaw: [00:04:23] Oh, the technology adoption curve. Yeah. So the the idea behind this technology adoption curve is that there are some people who are kind of inventors and early adopters, and then there’s some people who are early mainstream and some people who are, you know, the mainstream and late mainstream. Then there’s the laggards. Um, and there have been people who have been badge sceptics and we’re not really going to focus on that anymore because you can’t really be a sceptic when badges are being used in digital credentials and micro-credentials are being used in practice by people who don’t really care about the the academic side of it or the philosophy or the, you know, all of that kind of stuff. They’re just interested in the practical value of them. Um, so.
Laura Hilliger: [00:05:08] So, let’s go back to the question why do we need to keep badges weird? Um, so I mean, we kind of answered it right there because like, you know, we’re talking about the fact that badges have ten years in kind of hit mainstream mainstream. Um, and I think, I don’t know how you feel about the word weird, but if it’s weird, it’s probably not mainstream, right? And so.
Doug Belshaw: [00:05:31] Right. So I guess you could an analogy of this would be kind of with music. So you get artists kind of selling out, I guess, and you get people who have followed people for years, you know, on the underground music scene. And then people go big and it’s like, Oh, you’re selling out or whatever. And it was better when things are weird and small venues and that kind of thing. Um, I guess that’s one way of looking at it. But another way of looking at it would be just to think about, well, what are badges and credentials for really? So with participate, what we’re trying to do is to keep badgers weird. So reasons why you would need to keep badgers weird. Well, if you need to try and go back to something, then something has been lost, right? And I think the thing which has been lost here is the understanding that badgers and digital credentials and whatever you want to call them. One person once told me that they need to be called digital medallions. Um, that these, these, these things can only be used for one thing or the default is to use them for one particular thing. And I think there’s so many different things you can use them for that.
Laura Hilliger: [00:06:42] I think that’s, that’s like the really hard to I have found over the years that I think that’s the hard thing for people to grok about badges And you know people they they tend to connect the entire world of digital credentials and badges to the kind of assessment that we have or that we understand from formal education. And so they think, oh, well, okay, if I earn this set of badges, it’s going to help me get a job, for example. And I you know, I really need to mark my learning in this way so that in the future somebody can clearly see that I am a trained scrum master and I’ve got this certificate and they sort of think of badges in that way and as.
Doug Belshaw: [00:07:23] Fair enough that’s one use of, of badges and credentials and, and in fact credentials are really important at moments of transition. So when you’re transitioning out of formal education or between jobs or whatever, you know, we’re helping another client, Julie’s Bicycle hire one of their first product leads at the moment. And so I’m going through with you different people’s CVS and, you know, people applying for jobs and you’re looking for these kinds of things. You’re looking for hard skills and soft skills and experience and whatever. So at these moments of transition between jobs, it’s absolutely important to show what you know and what you can do.
Laura Hilliger: [00:08:00] But I think that’s actually a really interesting example. Yes, we’re kind of we’re looking for a particular kind of person for our client to help them start their digital team. And, you know, we’re supporting them in trying to kind of filter through the kinds of people that apply. But you don’t just hire somebody based on the credentials that they slap on a piece of paper that they have on their LinkedIn profile, right? You hire people based on how they’re going to fit in an organisation, the type of how they kind of show up and how they’re present in an interview. And that’s why you do an interview process. And so I think that’s, you know, we and when I think about keeping badges weird, it’s kind of like, how can we bring back that sort of that social environment back into teaching and learning? Like, how can we get it to a point where badges is not just about marking something that you’ve already done, but also, you know, recognising that you as a person are on a particular path.
Doug Belshaw: [00:09:02] Right? And you know, even if you just take the kind of formal education case, yes, there is a lot of expert assessment that goes on in formal education settings, like the teacher who knows more, you know, is an expert in this particular subject, assesses the work of the novice or intermediate learner. But there’s at least two other kinds of assessment that goes on there. And I feel like this isn’t represented enough in the world of badges. And therefore that’s why to keep it weird and those two other things are peer assessment. So I kind of know as much as you do or I, I understand myself as a peer to you. And I’m trying to figure out like the skills that you’ve got and there’s all that kind of thing and then the self-assessment as well. And in general, I don’t feel like the world has enough self-assessment in my experience in formal and informal settings. People are a lot harsher on themselves than they are on other people. And that can be a huge way of growing if you kind of have to assess yourself or whatever. So there’s this wonderful graphic which maybe we can include in the show notes that Brian Mathers did years ago for a blog post I wrote for DML Central. I think it’s now the Connected Learning Alliance. And all this image is it’s a person standing and there’s circles around this person and it starts off with kind of self-assessment and then peer assessment, etcetera. But one of the things which you can do with open badges. Ever since. Version two of the specification which isn’t used enough is endorsement. So imagine the difference between this person who knows lots of things or this organisation. Yeah. Badges, An individual, a group of individuals versus somebody comes up maybe with someone else or by themselves with the things that they want to get better at, the skills they want to learn, the knowledge they want to acquire. A bit like our intern at the moment. Yeah. Honour. And from that they can badge themselves pretty much, but then have that badge endorsed by someone later on who knows stuff. It might be a peer, it might be an expert or whatever to kind of validate that, that self knowledge, that that growing.
Laura Hilliger: [00:11:26] Yeah, yeah. I think this is, this is also really interesting from the perspective of the learner and the, the person who is self growing, being able to tell the world what they’re actually interested in. So, you know, upon reflection, it could very well be that, that I don’t know the the the course that you took or the experience that you had didn’t rub you the right way, that you went home at night. And that was not actually something that you wanted to spend your time on. And through self assessment, being able to like clearly say, I’m actually quite interested in this area. You as and you know, either as an endorser or as a colleague, as a friend, whatever, are going to learn a lot about that person that they might not otherwise have told you. So I, I like the and we actually built self assessment into another project, which of course we can’t talk about. But I think that’s a really interesting one because it has to do with psychological safety, diversity and inclusion. Inclusion.
Doug Belshaw: [00:12:26] Well, what came back to participate? What I wanted to say about that is that they talk a lot about Lsps. They talk about learning experiences. Yeah. And so the way that we’ve designed the Ki badge is weird. One is that we’ve so it’s as much about learning about badges as it is learning about communities of practice. And so what we’ve tried to do there is to integrate value cycles, which is a core core part of communities of practice, but also they can do deep dives whenever they want to. And and what I think we see quite a lot is that people are forced into a particular way of learning when there’s no real reason or rationale for that. So for example, let’s say that you rock up to the Keypad’s weird community and you are issued a badge for introducing yourself. If you already know what badgers are or if you don’t really care, you’re just going to move on to the next thing. If you’re like, Hang on a minute, what’s this? This seems interesting. There’s a whole little course you can do over there. No, another learning experience. You can do a deep dive on badgers and you can do that at any point during the the other course of the learning experience. Do you think just mixing things up in terms of the design of what of what we’re doing so that people can pick and choose bits? And just earn badges which represent what they’re interested in and where they’re where they’re being taken by. By their curiosity.
Laura Hilliger: [00:13:58] How? How important do you think that badges are to individual people? Like, I mean, I’m sure that they’re they’re more important to some people than they are to others. But I wonder about this example and the idea that somebody who hasn’t heard of badges before and maybe they’re interested, but how many of them are so used to badges as sort of a kind of pointless commodity on some of the bigger platforms? Like I’m thinking specifically about some of the badges that you can earn and some of the major social media networks where it’s like, Oh, hey, you know, this isn’t an open badge. It doesn’t have metadata. It’s not transferable outside of this independent platform that you’re currently on or this particular platform. But hey, thanks for being here and you posted your first post or whatever right now.
Doug Belshaw: [00:14:52] Yeah. So lots to unpack in that. So my two kind of go to examples. There would be something like Duolingo, which I’ve just started using at one point I was using it every day. I had like a 370 day streak or something, learning Spanish when we were going to move to Barcelona. Um, can you take your badges that you earn out of Duolingo and show them on a platform like LinkedIn or your E-portfolio whatever? No, you can’t. But you can link to your Duolingo profile if it’s public. So there’s, there’s something there, but it’s not as useful as being able to be more granular and say, Well, here’s my language learning badges and here’s whatever. Like having a more holistic view on the other end of the spectrum is something like IBM’s badges. So if you’re looking for a badging program that has impact, has millions of badges issued and actually takes something of value, packages it up and makes it available to learners, this would be it. An IBM done a great job because there’s things which either they haven’t started teaching yet in universities. Maybe, or things where the knowledge around that would change quite quickly because the industry is quick. So think about things like blockchain, nfts, crypto, all that kind of stuff. They can quickly spin up courses and badges related to that and they can literally hire people.
Doug Belshaw: [00:16:20] And as I’ve said many times before, IBM has a policy now of they’re looking to hire fewer people with degrees and more people with with badges. So all of a sudden a portfolio of badges has kind of what I would call real world cash value. It can help you get a job. And yeah, certainly I would be interviewing anyone who had those kinds of badges for those kinds of positions. But in terms of individuals like my background and philosophy makes me think about, okay, well, let’s think about a thought experiment. So imagine you’re on a desert island and somehow you earn a badge and you’re, you know, or you’re on a desert island, you’ve got a badge in some kind of way, or you’ve self-issued a badge or whatever, that badge, unless you’ve got a connection with the outside world and you’re sitting on that, you know, desert island as some kind of crazy digital nomad. Has no value, like badgers only have value in terms of their exchange and their display and that kind of thing. So there has to be an understanding and this was the problem in the early days of badgers. There has to be an understanding of badgers and what they are for them to have that exchange value.
Laura Hilliger: [00:17:30] Mm hmm.
Laura Hilliger: [00:17:31] Now, I’m going to challenge you. If you’re on a desert island and you earn a badge for successfully opening your coconut or whatever A you would be in a pretty interesting, mystical situation that involves you being awarded a badge for doing anything on a deserted island. But B, don’t you think there’s some sort of intrinsic motivation that all of us have where when we are sort of I hate to use the word reward, but recognise when we are recognised for things that we’ve done that it inspires and motivates us to do more things like open more coconuts.
Doug Belshaw: [00:18:08] That’s a kind of form of. So some of the words that you get involved here, you have to really tease them apart. And I am not the world’s expert on this at all, but like I want to kind of tease apart validation and endorsement. Yeah. So, like. Using the crazy example of the coconut splitting. Yeah. You don’t need a badge. To to be to get satisfaction and joy and relief that you’ve managed to split this coconut. If we use a more kink of.
Laura Hilliger: [00:18:41] Because there’s milk inside, right? Like sorry, there’s milk inside the coconut or water. Coconut water.
Doug Belshaw: [00:18:48] And food. Let’s say that you learn how to do a thing. Let’s, let’s say, you know, learning how to play the guitar or you’re learning some kind of music production or sport or whatever. To some extent, the doing of the thing is the reward itself, but there is external extrinsic motivation that you can gain from someone else recognising your ability to do a thing. Right. So to what extent is that validation and to what extent is it endorsement? Well, it’s validation. I would say if it’s like, hey, Laura, I saw you do that and that’s awesome and you feeling like a warm glow about that. But I would say that endorsement is then bringing someone along to see Laura do that thing and then now being a kind of a tripartite relationship between the person doing the verification and the person doing the levelling up and the third person kind of viewing that. And if you imagine that in a badger situation, you’re basically talking about an issuer recipient kind of viewer or consumer relationship. And it gets complicated when we use the words loosely, as I have done there. But I think there’s something in that, something about the fact that packaging up this thing and then being able to show it to someone else is is what badges are for.
Laura Hilliger: [00:20:14] Yeah. And with a, you know, with the endorsement. Train of thought there there’s also the the kind of like lending of a reputation right. If your badge is endorsed by a well known organisation or a well known person or not even well known, but somebody who is an expert in that thing that you’ve learned to do, then your badge is suddenly more valuable because it is actually because you’re you’re loaning out somebody else’s reputation and putting it as a as a stamp of endorsement on that badge. Whereas a a validation is, is speaking to an inner, an inner feeling or emotion. Right?
Doug Belshaw: [00:20:55] Yeah. And we use different kinds of badges and signifiers all of the time. So when I was working on badges at Mozilla, I remember watching a TV program and it was this TV program was one of those just crappy ones where they try and sort out someone’s finances and whatever. And this family had the guy in the family, he was some kind of salesman and he used to travel around the UK and I remember him saying, I thought it was such an odd term to use, but I understood what he meant. He said that he needed a moderately prestigious car. Or going around to these interviews and thought that was such a funny way of putting it. But I knew what he meant because if you rocked up in a cheap car, he would be seen by the people he’s trying to sell stuff to as being somehow lessened. If he showed up in a flash car, it would be something. So we’re signifying stuff all the time, like we’re the clothes that we wear, the cars that we drive, the houses that we own, etcetera. And when it comes to kind of CVS and resumes and whatever, you’re right. Like it’s not just the academic qualifications you’ve got, but also the people you’ve worked for, the projects you’ve done or whatever.
Laura Hilliger: [00:22:02] And whether or not you’re using comic Sans on your resume. I mean, there’s there’s definitely an aesthetic level to how we present ourselves in the world, including digitally. And, you know, I mean, people who people who take a little bit more time to actually like show the side of themselves that they really want to show instead of just, you know, slapping their name on the top of a piece of paper or actually even being inventive about it in this day and age.
Doug Belshaw: [00:22:27] Yeah. And I feel like we’re moving, especially in the world of tech, to a world where people don’t people use credentials to back up real world experience. So for you, I would say that people are impressed of the people you’ve worked for. You know, when you say, Oh, I taught at UC Berkeley and I worked for Greenpeace and Mozilla and whatever, and then it’s like, Oh, and by the way, like I wrote my master’s thesis in a German university after like one year of moving there. And same for me. Like I worked for Mozilla and I did this stuff with Sydney and did the Moodle and whatever and or did my doctoral thesis like the, the credentials basically underpin the experience, capture the experience in some kind of way. But we use brands in the same way as we use academic qualifications as well.
Laura Hilliger: [00:23:18] Yeah. And you know, if we go back to the whole keeping badges weird thing, I think that, you know, I certainly feel that I’m moving into a world where I’m or a brain space maybe where I’m much more interested in the reality of somebody’s experience than I am with their credentials because I’m old enough and I’ve been working long enough in tech that I’ve met a lot of people where they might have really flashy credentials, but they don’t really have anything in their brain, you know, that was a mean way of saying it. But, you know, basically like pulling back the curtain and, you know, figuring out who like how are people really showing up, What do they really care about and where would they be a best fit to contribute to society as if I have the power to tell anybody where they’re the best fit. But you know what I mean?
Doug Belshaw: [00:24:06] But I feel like the way that you’re using the term credentials, there are traditional kind of chunky credentials. Yeah. And if someone showed up with a portfolio of, of badges which packaged up their experience of. I don’t know, working at Greenpeace or whatever. And just basically that when you went into the metadata of the badge and there was evidence and whatever it was, I don’t know if you did, if you badged yourself, Laura, I can imagine your portfolio having some of the speeches that you’ve done, women, you know, winning the women in Tech Leader of the year. I can’t remember the exact title of that, but you know what I mean? Like all of those things together and all of it being kind of undergirded by evidence at the end of the day. And I think that’s the thing. Um, in the early days of badges we talked about CVS or resumes being a bunch of claims, whereas badges are a bunch of evidence. And I think that’s the difference when I go, here’s my degree in philosophy, right? Well, yes, I’ve got a certificate, but you can’t peer inside that. You can’t see what I actually did. Whereas the badges you can. And that’s the interesting thing.
Laura Hilliger: [00:25:17] Yeah, I guess I wonder. How do people take the time to do that? Like, it’s an honest question. You know, if I think about myself and my experience and, you know, again, like I’m really like kind of focussed at the moment on the I need a job thing because I think that like when we think about mainstream and badges have gone mainstream, I think the, the most earners are earning badges so that they can advance their career so that they can, you know, make a better lives for lives for themselves by getting better jobs, making more money and participating, you know, in a in a industry. And I’m thinking a lot about the tech industry, which is where, you know, most earners are probably showing and using badges. I don’t have any data on that, but I’m making assumptions and. The you know, I wonder how many people are looking at the image of the badge and how many people are looking at the evidence of it.
Doug Belshaw: [00:26:22] Yeah, well, let’s say that you and this is the example I always give kind of an answer to this question. Um, I have three postgraduate qualifications from Durham University in the UK. Durham University is a world top 100 university. When I talk to people in the US, they mean, Oh, do you mean Duke University in Durham, North Carolina? I’m like, No, I mean the University of Durham in the UK. They’ve literally never heard of it. So when I show that credential to them, you know, not that I kind of walk around with my postgraduate certificate with me, but if I if I showed that as a badge, let’s say, they would be like, oh, and then they might find out that it’s a prestigious university, and then they might find that actually I’m good at what I do. And then maybe the next person who comes through, Oh, we now know who that university is, like what it is. And the last person who came through who had those credentials was pretty awesome. So maybe this person is going to be as well. And the more that happens, the more it’s just like, Oh, right, I see what that is. Yeah, let’s let them in. Um, but it takes time and that can happen with any kind of credential. You and I could make a deputy Bob Bob credential tomorrow and endorse it. And as long as it has real world value, like the people who do that stuff are amazing. It doesn’t really matter as long as there’s a link between doing that thing and the result.
Laura Hilliger: [00:27:52] Hilarious. Hilariously, one of my favourite badges is a bot badge that you made about a decade ago. When we were we were messing around with some tech. We needed some badges. You issued me a web literacy ninja badge, and I think you issued that badge to like two, three people and then you tossed it away. You were like, okay, we don’t need this anymore. Here’s the real badges. It was just like a shorthand example, and that badge is actually one of my favourites. I also have some that are just like people’s heads from the early days of Mozilla when we were still messing around with the tech before tech went mainstream, the tech got boring and it’s just, you know, functional and usable. And what’s really interesting now is how people are using these digital credentials across the Internet, what they’re using them for, what the mainstream is doing with them, and to lead us into a question What is the future of badges and digital credentials? What do you think?
Doug Belshaw: [00:28:53] Well, just a quick comment on what you just said before. I kind of segway into that. You know, how people used to take used to get autographs from celebrities or kind of famous people in their lives, and now people take selfies. And I think there’s the kind of badge which proves a relationship between people and organisations, which is a powerful thing to do as well. Um, okay. So the where are things going next? Well, one thing that we haven’t talked about is that Mozilla, who you and I worked for for a number of years, handed over the stewardship of the open badges standard to IMS Global Learning Consortium who look after lots of different kind of EdTech standards and they’ve looked after it for the last four years, I would say poorly. Um, and there is now kind of a movement to try and move open badges towards what are called verifiable credentials URLs. Now this is a whole different ball game. Um, the verifiable credentials standard is looked after by the W3C, the, the World Wide Web Consortium. And if you go and have a look and we’ll put the link in the show notes to the the data model for verifiable credentials, part of it has been funded by the Department of Homeland Security in the US government. And that’s because we’re not just talking about like little badges for learning and this and that anymore. We’re talking about the type of like potentially biometric security which is going to allow you to get into countries and all this kind of stuff. So having badges as part of that might feel a bit weird because we’ve been talking about recognition, open recognition, peer to peer learning or whatever, but there’s no reason that you can’t carve out a weird part of something which is a worldwide standard for everything from allowing you to get into a country to recognising a relationship between two people. So I think that kind of thing is going to be quite exciting. And I’m also much more interested in the W3C stewarding this kind of stuff because it tends to be more open, have more talented people involved than maybe us. Um, so I think verifiable credentials are a thing and we should focus on that a bit more. But I’ve been kind of trying to figure out what social verifiable credentials would look like and what I mean by that and for you might lose me here at some point, people listening. Um, but I’ll do the best I can. There is a world outside of Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, and it is the world of decentralised social networking. Laura and I are on things like Mastodon and Pixel Fed and Pleroma and that kind of thing. These decentralised social networks, the servers interact with one another using a standard called Activitypub. And with Activitypub you can basically a bit like kind of email send and receive messages, but you can send and kind of receive anything pictures, files, whatever. So they tend to be used for the kind of social networking that we know through Twitter and Instagram and all that kind of stuff. But I’ve been trying to think of a way or a world in which you would be sharing, issuing, displaying verifiable credentials within that kind of social space. And because both activitypub and the kind of data model, verifiable credential data model use something called Json-ld, I think it looks quite promising. I’ve showed it to a few people and they think that there’s potentially something there, but I think it might need some funding. But either way, verifiable credentials I would suggest is the way to go. I think that all of the major badging platforms will make sure that when they issue open badges, they’re also verifiable credentials and that is where I’d be. I’d be putting my my money and my attention and my time.
Laura Hilliger: [00:32:46] Cool. Well, we’re at 35 minutes. And you did say that you could talk about badges for the Heat till the Heat Death of the Universe, which this is pretty sure that you can. And how do you want to wrap it up? We have tons of links in the show notes.
Doug Belshaw: [00:33:00] Yeah. So there’s the have a look at the show notes and especially have a look at the Badge Summit 2021. So Noah Geisel, who is a friend of We’re Open and I spoke at the keynote or one of the first ones these badge summit. Um, and that was in Denver quite a few years ago. Um, this one is a, a remote one. It’s free to register. It’s an online virtual conference, October the 27th. Everything is being run in the US Mountain Time Zone. Guess that’s because that’s where Noah is. Um, but it’s a virtual summit. Go along, find out what’s going on with the world of badges and digital credentials and yeah, have a look there. The other thing you can look at is the slide deck and I’ll try and find the YouTube recording of a presentation that I gave in February of 20 2021, which was called Getting Started with Digital Badges. And that was for the kind of higher education network in the universities of Ireland. So you can have a look at that as well. But um, yeah, other than that, I would just start experimenting, use one of the major badging platforms. We’ve linked to ten of them on our blog, um, and go from there.
Laura Hilliger: [00:34:14] Thank you for sharing so much of your very smart badgey knowledge. I feel like I learned things. I also feel like I need more coffee, so I am going to say goodbye to our listeners and stay tuned for the next Tao of WAO, by Doug!
Doug Belshaw: [00:34:30] Cheers for now!