Badges are the primary way we will measure what we learn in HON 308 Curation Culture. The entire idea of using digital badges as a way to assess learning is gaining momentum, inside of higher education and outside of it in individual institutions like the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. So why use badges in a course on information literacy, social media, and cognitive brain science? This is, after all, college, not the girl scouts.
I think the problems with learning in most colleges today are well-documented. No matter what the subject, many people boil down the meaning of a class to one factor: a letter grade. All that matters is the elusive “A.” While letter grades are a meaningful system, mainly because they are used by larger systems to make decisions on things like graduate admissions, fellowships, scholarships, and awards, they are a fundamentally impoverished measure of learning that actually takes place in most classes.
This class is no different. It’s impossible to to represent all of the skills and concepts learned by assigning a single letter. This is what badges offer: the chance to represent the literacies and platforms you actually do learn this semester.
Many thanks are due to Mike Price and Hunter Tinsley for their design of the badges. This class would not happen without their work and innovative ideas.
