From the Digital Media & Learning competition website:
This Competition focuses on building digital badges for lifelong learning. The Competition is designed to encourage individuals and organizations to create digital tools that support, identify, recognize, measure, and account for new skills, competencies, knowledge, and achievements for 21st century learners wherever and whenever learning takes place.
Some notes from Jackie Hood:
Mozilla and MacArthur emphasized that this is an international competition.
Stages of the badges competitions $10,000 to $200,000
- Call for content
- Call for badge design (sets or systems)
- Matchmaking between content and design winners – one month of collaboration off-line and then a 2-day f2f including a pitch
All must be part of the Mozilla badge infrastructure or interoperable with it: See http://www.dmlcompetition.net
Research competition $5000 to $80,000: Interest-driven learning.
Not everyone loves the idea of badges: the panel moderator summarized these objections that showed up in tweets as “trivializing education” and “a badge for everything including showing up”. See #dmlbadges [for discussion via Twitter].
I’m not surprised to hear about objections to badges. Established models of education and credentialing are being challenged. To anyone satisfied with the existing paradigm this is not a happy thing. Meanwhile my 10-year-old nephew is watching lots of Khan Academy videos on his own time, trying hard to earn the Moon Badge. Bring it on!