Sunday, June 23, 2013

Mozilla Badges #InAfS



Badger , Badger but watch out for any snake-oil


To make my new year's prediction come true - I've been doing a bit of work in the background to get Mozilla Badge Making and Earning  an established part of the Scottish learning firmament.

Think about a different way of credentialing you or your learners skills . A way that is on-line, in the cloud  and portable. You can add a badge to your online identity or resume when you want to, no more hunts in cupboards and attics for paper certificates and you can decide what , when and where you want to share your badges.

The infrastructure can make public,  the learning outcomes you achieved , the awarding agency, the assessors, even the work that was produced for the assessment can be digitally linked to the badge.

Add to this some quite well built out systems in areas like web-design and coding for the web and Mozilla Badges offer a real opportunity to change the way we think about the recognition of achievement.

The system also offers,  the opportunity to bread-crumb learning outcomes towards national qualifications and a mechanism for providing recognition for chunks of learning smaller than would normally be recognised either by formal qualifications or by national credit frameworks like the SCQF ( normally learning of less that 10 hours is not recognised) .The system could allow centres to quickly build customised awards where they want these .

Ideal too for primary and secondary schools and other groups that may want a flexible recognition of achievement system.

Have a look at how the  JISC RSC Scotland have built badges that provide steps towards a range of national recognition and recognition too through professional standardsThe Jisc RSC Scotland are making extensive use of the Mozilla Open Badge Infrastructure (OBI), which enables an open, standards-based way to issue digital recognition and accreditation. 

In areas like web-design centres should be using the well developed on-line resources and badges and offering accreditation of prior learning for relevant badges towards larger national awards.

Mozilla Badges  will become in time the natural adjunct to any e-portfolio .

The Scottish Qualifications Authority is exploring how open badges can be built into the national qualifications system. We are hosting an event next Tuesday in Glasgow to see what else we can do to support and promote the flexibility for centres and learners that Mozilla Badges offer.

#OpenScotland #OER



On the 27th of June a group of decision makers from across Scottish Education will gather in Edinburgh for "Open Scotland".  

Open Scotland is a one day summit facilitated by Jisc CETIS in collaboration with SQA, Jisc RSC Scotland and the ALT Scotland SIG. 
The event will provide an opportunity for key stakeholders to critically reflect on the national and global impact and opportunities of open education, provide a forum to identify shared strategic interests and work towards a more integrated Scottish approach to openness in education.
A smarter Scotland is critical to delivering the Government's Purpose of achieving sustainable economic growth. By making Scotland smarter, we will lay the foundations for the future wellbeing and achievement of our children and young people, increase skill levels across the population and better channel the outputs of our universities and colleges into sustainable wealth creation, especially participation, productivity and economic growth.”

How can Scotland leverage the power of “open” to develop the nation’s unique education offering? Can openness promote strategic advantage while at the same time supporting social inclusion, inter-institutional collaboration and sharing, and create new opportunities for the next generation of teachers and learners? 

The Scottish Government’s ‘Scotland’s Digital Future’ strategy, published in 2011, sets out the steps that are required to ensure Scotland is well placed to take full advantage of all the economic, social and environmental opportunities offered by the digital age.  However, whilst the Scottish Government has been active in advocating the adoption of open data policies and licences it has yet to articulate policies for open education and open educational resources. 

 In March 2013, the Scottish Funding Council published a ‘Further and Higher Education ICT Strategy’ that builds on the Scottish further and higher education sectors’ culture of collaboration and the range of national shared services that are already in place, many of which are supported by Jisc, JANET UK and others.  

What kinds of open policies and practices can we develop and share across all sectors of Scottish education to help implement these strategies and move them forward?

Scotland has a proud and distinctive tradition of education, which is recognised internationally.  The Curriculum for Excellence is transforming schools to better equip our children for the challenges of the 21st century.  With our colleges and universities experiencing major changes in terms of structure, funding and access, Scotland’s colleges are opening up their educational content to the world through the new Re:Source OER repository.  
The University of Edinburgh have pioneered the delivery of MOOCs in Scotland, recently attracting over 300,000 students to six online courses, and Napier University is embracing open practice through their open 3E Framework for teaching with technology, which has been adopted by over 20 institutions globally.  The Jisc RSC Scotland are making extensive use of the Mozilla Open Badge Infrastructure (OBI), which enables an open, standards-based way to issue digital recognition and accreditation. The Scottish Qualifications Authority is exploring how open badges can be built into the national qualifications system and the ICT Excellence Group, which is overseeing the re-development of the Scottish schools' intranet GLOW, are also investigating their potential use

Elsewhere, the HEFCE funded UKOER Programme has been instrumental in stimulating the release of open educational resources and embedding open practice in English HE institutions.  SURFNet in the Netherlands recently published their second ‘Trends Report on OER’, and a group of Nordic countries have launched the Nordic Alliance for OER. The UNESCO 2012 Paris Declaration called on governments to openly license publicly funded educational materials, and later that year the European Union issued a public consultation on “Opening up Education – a proposal for a European initiative” in advance of a new EU Initiative on "Opening up Education" expected to launch in mid-2013. Underpinning many of these developments is an increased acceptance and adoption of Creative Commons licences.

We are experiencing a period of unprecedented flux in all sectors of teaching and learning.  For better or for worse, the advent of MOOCs has opened a public debate on the future direction of post-school education, though the balance of commercial opportunities and threats from the increased marketisation and commodification of education is  still unclear.

Open Scotland is a one day summit facilitated by Jisc CETIS in collaboration with SQA,  Jisc RSC Scotland and the ALT Scotland SIG.  The event will provide an opportunity for key stakeholders to critically reflect on the national and global impact and opportunities of open education, provide a forum to identify shared strategic interests and work towards a more integrated Scottish approach to openness in education.

“UNESCO believes that universal access to high quality education is key to the building of peace, sustainable social and economic development, and intercultural dialogue. Open Educational Resources (OER) provide a strategic opportunity to improve the quality of education as well as facilitate policy dialogue, knowledge sharing and capacity building.”

I hope the gathering  will decide that we must have some simple policy drivers in Scotland to encourage individual and institutional open sharing , re-purposing and re-use of learning materials . The right decisions here will lay the foundations for lifelong learning in Scotland for generations to come.

Ultimately I think this will take some firm leadership and some political decision making.
 It has taken some mandating in other countries to make open and shared the norm.

I am very grateful to my colleagues at CETIS and the membership of the Association for Learning Technology for making this gathering possible 

Six Months of Programming and MooC'ing around



In between real work I've been doing less blogging over last six months some of the time I have been doing a wee bit to support a range of initiatives in computer programming and coding domains. I also spent some time - usually in the wee small hours having a shot at some massive open on-line courses. I feed these experiences back into the day job as Head of New Ventures.

In programming space there are so many local , UK , global  offers in this space it can be quite hard to keep track on all of them.  They are all focused on learner and teacher engagement and around skill building.  Some are established global initiatives and some have more specific UK drivers - many are in response to the hiatus in England around GCSE  ICT/Computing space in the curriculum while  some others  focus more broadly on computational thinking for learners of any age.

Since Christmas SQA  have given bits of support to

One Day Digital 
Coder Dojo
Space Apps Challenge
Kodu Cup
Apps for Good

A bit of support might be as simple as using our networks to raise awareness of a specific initiative . In case anyone else is reading this and assuming SQA event sponsorship.

It would be useful if someone tried to capture all of these initiatives open to Scottish teachers and learners in one place. Perhaps a mission for either Computing at School or Comped.net or for somewhere in GLOW

I also had a go at three MOOCs and dropped out of all of them . I enjoyed the Mozilla Mooc best of all . I like re-mixing content but doing it in wee small hours was taking a toll on me - liked the Mona-Lisa Shining mix was how I was starting to feel after all the late nights - the shining bit rather than Mone Lisa-ish bit

I had a go at using Mozilla Popcorn to remix things - my feeble effort is here

But I was blown away this week by this creation from the Edinburgh University Digital Creations MOOC
#ECMooc