Here is my nutshell summary of the panel:

Research suggests that introducing an extrinsic reward (in the form of a badge) will decrease existing intrinsic motivation. We also know and understand that many other factors can provide intrinsic motivation for learning. In order to avoid lowering participants’ desire to learn, we should therefor focus on understanding and increasing the development of the intrinsic motivation and refrain from introducing extrinsic rewards.

I am glad to see people like Mitch and his panelists add their thoughtful voices to the conversation. He is right that there is a risk that we get badges wrong. And he is right that the hype around badges may lead to the development of poorly designed badge systems that will at best not improve learning, and at worst hinder it.

But I believe that there is more to badges than their role in motivating learning. And that through careful design choices we can try to avoid the negative impacts he describes. After all that’s what his team at Scratch is already doing – experimenting with aspects of rewards that are not that different from badges, such as showing points for discussion forum participation and counting remixes.

The issue is not, “badges or no badges” The issue is how we can design badge systems that foster great learning practices. We will learn a lot more about how these systems work in the next year as the DML badge competition projects kick into implementation, but for now I would suggest two simple design principles to get us started in the right direction:

1 – Use badges to define roles rather than as rewards. In many learning communities users take different roles. Mitch actually mentions the importance of taking roles within a community like Scratch, but he sees roles as separate from badges. I believe that by recognizing roles – for example a mentor role – through a badge will signal to a new members of the community that mentorship is a valued practice within the community, and helps  them identify those who can help with problems and questions. And finally it may encourage users to strive to become mentors themselves. So rather than give badges as rewards they can help diffuse awareness of roles within a community.

2 – Anchor badges within community. The relationship between issuer and recipients will influence perceptions and expectations around badges. Badges that are woven into the fabric of a community of learning will be perceived less as extrinsic motivators, but as representation of core practices within the community. When the badge recipient feels ownership of the design of the badge, because she fully considers herself a member of the community that defines and issues the badge, the badge can provide an effective marker of learning pathways that help the learner to orientate herself within the landscape, and can act as a marker and pointer for new members of the community following in her steps.

It lists some of the pro-business (e.g. more private & less public, let the market solve our problems) arguments and those of us who don’t agree (including me) need to be prepared to argue the other side. The post also has a good thread of comments that cover some of the shortcomings of the pro-market positions (see one example below). I would add that other countries with strong public education systems (Northern Europe for example) do not exhibit similar cost increase in education. And the US health care system, which is highly market driven, is running up costs even faster than education. Both points suggest that this is not an economics problem, it’s a US problem.

OER is in an interesting space in this debate. I have seen “open” come under attack from both sides -> one side called it a right-wing effort to undermine the public education system by letting non-experts participate, others label it a socialist conspiracy that is out to destroy the publishing business.

You know you’re doing something right when you irritate all of the incumbents.

Example comments:

George Mitchell says:

“Parry says ‘I think the whole premise of this post is disingenuous. If it were the “public” in public education that was holding back this imagined productivity growth curve, one would expect to see private schools figuring out how to make the productivity happen.’”

Wow. Where to begin? In Milwaukee, independent research documents that private schools do as well or better with low-income students, and those students graduate at higher rates, than their peers in public schools. Yet private schools operate at a fraction — I estimate 2/3 — of the cost of public schools. Those are clear productivity gains that would soar if there were a true open market.

Reply >> michael mazenko says

George, the private school market has numerous advantages in cost – the primary one being they have no responsibility to provide additional, extremely costly services under the Americans with Disabilities Act. They have a right of refusal on their applicant base, and are dealing with no consumers who did not choose them. They don’t have to compete with Title IX requirements, nor do they have the same security concerns. The tit-for-tat cost between public private is a gross overgeneralization.

Thanks to Carolina Rossini for pointing me to the article.

Apple’s vision is a walled garden that offers a carefully curated experience to those willing to lock themselves into it. It will be shiny and beautiful, but education will be a commodity and Apple the company through which we will consume it.

MIT’s vision is bolder. It sets us on the course to an educational future in which anyone, regardless of background, budget or location, has access to a high-quality education – even those who don’t own iPads.

It struck me that there isn’t really an open lab for learning innovation – and that P2PU could be it. During Monday night’s board meeting we discussed sustainability, and Neeru riffed on the platform idea a bit. She wondered if we could model ourselves as a research institute. There would be heaps of experimentation and research, some of it driven by us and some driven by partners who want to work with us, and each year we would publish a string of short reports about what we are learning. Cathy added that we could connect it to an annual conference with great speakers from the P2PU community who share the results of their work, and suggested that corporations would be willing to pay substantive amounts of money for this knowledge.

Which brings me to the term “lab”. Speaking to more people about the idea of a “platform” made me realize that it’s a term that means different things to different people. And when I explained that it was a mechanism to support experimentation and research, they would ask if it was “kind of like a lab.” And that’s exactly what it would it be like.

The idea of an open lab for social learning sounds exciting and it feels in line with our original spirit of experimentation. What would it look like?

Supported by a platform that is extendable, hackable, malleable and customizable – We need a sandbox, so that we have a place to experiment, and track the results of these experiments. But the sandbox is not the important piece here, it’s a means to an end (or a journey rather).

Run by a community that is passionate about peer learning and openness, and thrives on experimentation – In her comment earlier, Karen pointed out that talking about “platform” wasn’t enough and asked “how do content, community, and methods tie into this?” She is absolutely right. What happens on the platform is directly connected to the values and principles we hold as a community. I think we need to spend more time talking about what they mean to us – but our three original values of open, community, and peer-learning have stood the test of time quite well so far.

Turning experiments into great learning experiences for lots of people - This third bullet is new and still a bit wonky (and needs word-smithing). But it’s an important stake to put in the ground if we want to make sure our work has a broader benefit. Many research labs have to rely on industry to turn their work into products and services that affect “normal” people. As a result success is often measured through proxies for innovation (like scientific articles, or patents, etc.) because the research work is at least one layer removed from the “end-user”. Luckily that’s not the case for us, because the end-user is part of the P2PU community. Why not be bold and try to measure impact through our ability to turn experimentation into great social learning experiences that work for many people?

While Harvard can focus on innovating teaching and learning within the institution – we could be the open learning lab for everyone. Thoughts?

In today’s world learning can look very different than traditionally imagined. Learning is not just ‘seat time’ within schools, but extends across multiple contexts, experiences and interactions. It is no longer just an isolated or individual concept, but is social, informal, participatory, creative and lifelong. And yet, in the current formal education and accreditation systems, much of this learning is ignored or missed entirely. We are exploring badges as a way to support and acknowledge learning that occurs across broader connected learning ecologies so that this learning can become part of the conversation in hiring decisions, school acceptances or credits, mentoring opportunities and even self-evaluations. Badges can be used to motivate learning, signify community and signal achievement across contexts and the collection of badges can tell a more complete story of an individual. In this talk, we will present a number of user stories that demonstrate learning and interaction occurring outside of formal channels, such as an afterschool program, a local artist community, on-the-job experience and/or open education courses, and highlight the breakdown between that learning and the transference and translation across contexts, including the broader education and career ecosystems. Using vivid and personal imagery, we will help the audience connect with these learners and their needs, and then demonstrate how badges can enable each learner to capitalize on the learning experiences that they are already having, inspire and help them to seek out new ones and communicate their achievements and skills to necessary stakeholders. We also plan to take photos of attendees earning badges at the Drumbeat Science Fair on Wednesday evening, and will use those images at the end to help tie the concept and value of badges back to very real and relevant experiences that many will have just had. This talk will illustrate the conceptual framework for badges, drive home the need and potential for this alternative system and help more people get excited about working on these issues together. 

We’ve just launched a Kickstarter campaign to create at least 100 new videos. This will make Smarthistory a truly viable, free alternative to the traditional and very expensive art history textbook for you, and for students around the world.

How are these two things related? In our sustainability conversation today kickstarter (and a related service called spot.us) came up and we were discussing about ways to integrate different aspects of P2PU with kickstarter campaigns. So, it was nice to see that others in the Open Edu space are looking at crowd funding mechanisms like kickstarter to support their efforts as well. Sustainability is a big issue for many OER and OCW projects – and getting the public involved is a great way to raise funds, and get a reality check on the services and value one provides. This approach doesn’t work for everything – some ideas are important, but more at the infrastructure level and might not appeal to a wide audience, but there are lots of things it could be used for. One idea was to help course organizers who can’t afford to run courses (and especially run courses repeatedly) raise funds through a P2PU kickstarter campaign – of which a small overhead charge would go towards supporting the core P2PU operations. There are lots of questions around paying for individual contributions in volunteer communities – and it has to be done carefully to not destabilize the intrinsic incentive mechanisms that are in place right now. But at the same time, tying some form of financial reward to individual courses would be a great gauge of value that users place in particular subjects, disciplines, or course organizers.

Course participants will be working on individual prototypes for open education projects. For those that want to take their ideas a step further, there might be a good opportunity to get funding from JISC.

In the context of P2PU, we have lots of ideas for innovative tech projects. If anyone is interested in pitching an idea together – please get in touch!

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/fundingopportunities/funding_calls/2009/03/309ricall.aspx

JISC invites institutions to submit funding proposals for grants to fund technical rapid innovation projects addressing priority areas.

Proposals are sought under the following priority areas:

   * Mashups of open data
   * Aggregating tags and feeds
   * Semantic web/ linked data
   * Data search
   * Visualisation
   * Personalisation
   * Mobile Technologies
   * Lightweight Shared Infrastructure Services
   * User Interface Design

Bids for projects dealing with other areas that are relevant to the Information Environment are also welcomed.

Funding of between £15,000 – £40,000 for 6 month projects for up to 30 projects is available

The deadline for receipt of proposals in response to this call is 12 noon on Wednesday 22 April 2009.

Funding is available for projects starting in early-mid June 2009 for 6 months. All projects must be complete by 30 November 2009.

There are case-studies, prototyping, web-seminars and we are looking to discuss lots of innovative new ideas. The announcement is on the course wiki here.

From the P2PU perspective this course comes at the perfect time. One of the biggest challenges for us has been to find a technology platform that is light-weight, does not need major tweaking, keeps up with new developments by letting us plug web 2.0 services into it, and supports open standards. So, one goal for us is to get more ideas from the course, on how to set up a volunteer-run open online university. Piece of cake, right?

Anyway, have a look around the course wiki to see if the course is interesting for you – and consider signing up. Space is limited and first come first serve!