Identity

Open Badges Unite! Connecting Open Badges through Evidence

Open Badges as Trust Relationship

Open Badges as Trust Relationship

One of my (many) interests in Open Badges is in relation to trust. Oblivious to Open Badges images, I can’t help but see Open Badges as primarily a trust relationships between Open Badge issuers and Open Badge holders, or recipients. Trust is expressed through an assertion which is informed by a series of criteria and evidence, eventually represented by a pretty picture. The current implementation of Open Badges does not (yet) fully exploit the potential of  trust relationships: as the chain of trust is fragmented  (we cannot establish that A trusts B who trusts C who trusts…). Far from being learner centered, i.e. badge holder centered, the Open Badge Infrastructure (OBI) is badge issuer centered. What connects badges together are the badge issuers (one issuer can trust many recipients). The user-centeredness of Open Badges rests in the discourses and not (yet) in the technological infrastructure. OBI is asymmetrical, and the asymmetry, if not corrected, will ultimately profit the institutions, not the individuals, and favour the concentration of Open Badges services, like Credly, into the hands of a limited number of providers.

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Punished by Open Badges?

Punished by Rewards Book CoverWhy Open Badges Could Either Kill or Cure Learning?

As many Open Badges supporters, and self-appointed ambassadors, I had absolutely no reservation regarding Open Badges: I saw them as the natural development of the work I did on ePortfolios as a means to support, recognise and celebrate learning and achievements: I envisioned Open Badges as a means to create an open and distributed ePortfolio architecture.

I saw no evil in Open Badges. That is, until I learned about Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes. As the book was written by Alfie Kohn in 1993, and revised in 1999, it does not address Open Badges. Yet, the book provides plenty of evidence from research eliciting the deleterious effects of extrinsic motivation on learning (and work), one of the most noxious legacies of B.F. Skinner, the psychologist described by Alfie Kohn as the one who “experimented with pigeons and wrote on people.”

This post is divided into 3 main parts:

  1. An exploration on the potential dangers of Open Badges practice (Open Badges as glorified gold stars) and infrastructure (asymmetry)
  2. An exploration of the potential benefits of Open Badges practice (Open Badges as distributed ePortfolios) and infrastructure (trust).
  3. What needs to be done ASAP[1] to minimise the risks and maximise the potential of Open Badges

One of the objectives of this post is to prepare the welcome of Alfie Kohn as keynote speaker at ePIC 2014. Shall Open Badges and ePortfolios pass the Alfie Kohn test? Whatever the results, his presence should contribute to raising key questions and possibly debunk some of the prejudices hidden in our practices.

In the Reference section of this post you will find some of the (very few) posts addressing the same issue as well as references to Alfie Kohn’s writings and public speaking.

Why Open Badges Could Kill the Desire to Learn?

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My ePortfolio, our Badge!

[The first idea for a title was: User-Driven Badges vs User-Driven ePortfolios.]

Yesterday, during the Open Badges weekly meeting (link), Patrick McGee (1) from The Volunteer Centre Blackpool, Wyre and Fylde’s  presented Do A Bit, a project using Mozilla Open Badges, in conjunction with a volunteer passport, to increase participation in volunteering and to reward participants (2).

One particular element of the strategy stroke my attention: volunteers are invited to tell what skills they would like to be recognised with an Open Badge. It is not the organisation that is deciding what are the badges worth delivering, but the participants deciding on which badges they would like to have designed, just for them.

Although this is very much in line with a presentation I attended some time ago where teachers were inviting students to establish together their badges awarding criteria [I need to add a reference!], this made me ask the following question: could something like that have happened with ePortfolios? After all, aren’t ePortfolios, like Open Badges,  designed for making learning visible to others and oneself – reflective learning? At that point of my reflection, the answer is… probably not…

This post is a first attempt at explaining why, although ePortfolios and Open Badges are supposed to be user-centric, Open Badges have a greater potential to be user-driven, than ePortfolios.

My ePortfolio, our Badge

One of the main differences I see between ePortfolios and Open Badges is the social dimension. Collective ePortfolios remain a rarity, a good theme for an inspirational keynote address at a conference! Yet, when reflecting on the dialectic between individual and collective ePortfolios, one can ask whether:

  •  a collective ePortfolio is an aggregation of individual ePortfolios, or
  •  the individual ePortfolio is a projection, on the individual plan, of a collective ePortfolio?

There is probably no such thing as a personal narrative that is not deeply intertwined with other people’s narratives. The interweaving of our stories are like the threads of a social fabric. Yet the technologies developed for ePortfolios lead to the creation of personal silos of information where the natural interweaving of our narratives is fragmented. We have lost the opportunity of presenting the threads of our narratives in the context of a rich, dense and colourful fabric (a possible variation of T. S. Eliot’s Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?). And from that point of view, there is certainly no advantage in using an ePortfolio platform over a simple blog system — ePortfolio platforms remain still useful for institutions (that are mostly silos!).

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Open Badges are more than Pretty Pictures

One of the reasons why Open Badges are so popular is their ability to make visible what people have achieved. And the way to make the achievements visible is through the display of a picture. Several times in the past I have commented that Open Badges are more than pretty pictures and that there is a risk that the  pretty pictures might become to the Open Badge Infrastructure (OBI) what the proverbial tree is to the forest…

What gives value to the pretty picture is the metadata baked into it, i.e. the links to the issuer, the recipient, the awarding criteria and possibly the evidence informing the criteria. Without metadata (and the underpinning OBI trust architecture) a badge would be dumb. Conversely, a badge does not really need a picture to be made visible: from the point of view of accessibility, or simply good design, any picture should have an “alt” field properly informed, so a visually impaired reader could make sense of it. It should be the choice of the badge owner or reader to decide whether to see the picture or the textual version. This would be practical to compose a CV from a collection of badges without having to force a potential employer or client to figure out what those pretty pictures mean.

Why should the pretty pictures be dynamic?

There could be various reasons why the picture displayed by a badge should be dynamic, depending on the point of view:

  1. Issuer: an issuer can decide that a badge is valid for a certain period of time, after which the candidate needs to become re-accredited. Being able to provide a visual cue on the badge, such as changing from bright colours to grey, from sharp to fuzzy, or displaying a countdown to the expiration date, are some of the many options an issuer should be able to choose from.
  2. Recipient: a candidate could pledge for a badge and display a pie-chart indicating the % of progress towards achievement. This would be a means to show potential employers or clients ones current learning, not just past achievements.
  3. Reader: an employer reads a series of CV’s with 100+ badges, many of them totally new to her/him (except for those delivered by well known brands of education providers) and wants to use her/his CSS to create a display relevant to her/his own needs based on the baked metadata.

 Why Should the Design of Pretty Pictures be Consistent?

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Hello World!

Hello world! is a message well known to the apprentice programmer and webmaster: it is the typical output one tries to get when learning a new programming language or checking whether a system is operating correctly.

Such is the case: after many years of (extremely) irregular postings to my blog, I have installed an instance of WordPress and configured it in such a way that all my posting will go seamlessly to my different Twitter and Facebook accounts. This message is a means to test whether I have done a good job when configuring WordPress!

Hello world! is also meant to convey another, less technical, message: I have made the decision to keep a regular journal on learning technologies and identities. Why do I believe that the frequency of my postings will be less stochastic than in the past? Open Badges is the answer!

Open Badges is a truly open community, where every contribution, from the most humble to the most challenging, is welcomed, nurtured and reviewed with consideration by a community supported by the Mozilla Foundation. Being part of the Open Badges community gives one the sense of contributing to a global co-design exercise. Thousands of initial practitioners have delivered hundreds of thousands of badges, and their experience is directly fed-back into the design circuit. Open Badges is truly a learning technology, in the sense that the technology is the result of a learning process, a community learning process.

This is a very different experience from the one I had within the ePortfolio community. For example, when in 2010 I wrote the 10 ePortfolio challenges, the text generated some polite interest but no actual commitment. Conversely, after I wrote Open Badges vs Tin Can, within a few weeks two communities that had never worked together before (ADL/SCORM and Open Badges) joined their efforts to write a series of use cases and are now working on the specifications for a demonstrator.

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To create a trustworthy Internet respectful of privacy, shouldn’t we simply make our personal data public?

In the developments relative to trust and privacy technologies, one of the goals was to provide people with the means to protect their personal data: personal data is mine! This has naturally led to the idea of personal lockers and personal data stores: if all of my data is in my personal locker, then I can decide who has access to it and under which conditions (for how long, to do what, etc.). Personal Data Stores rapidly became the Holy Grail for the most advanced actors in the field of personal data management, from ePortfolios to personal health records. Personal lockers and personal data stores helped us to understand that an Internet based on a clear separation between storage of personal data and services creating/exploiting them would revolutionise the Internet. Empowered users would be at the centre of an ecosystem they control. “The Semantic Web & THE POWER OF PULL”, by David Siegel admirably describes the transformations one should expect from the systematic use of personal lockers.
However radical and transformative, personal lockers and personal data stores have their limits. One is to be found in the initial statement: personal data is mine! Data, the product of social interaction and processes, is generally shared with other people and organisations: I share the name of my parents, the review of a paper submitted with reviewers and conference organisers, the diagnosis of my illness with a doctor, a laboratory and a drugstore. Even my intimate thoughts can be shared when I commit a freudian slip… If most data is shared with others then we might want to rewrite the initial statement with: personal data is ours! Translation into technology of this statement might lead to something radically different from personal data stores as personal information silos.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we were able to exploit the natural property of data as a connection to people (places, ideas etc.) while preserving the need for privacy, anonymity and enabling trust? Could Shared Data Stores or Shared Lockers be a solution?
Another problem with personal data lockers is in the name itself. If they are personal, that means that they contain information that renders their owners identifiable. If they are lockers it means that there will always be someone ready to break in to steal data —who would be stupid enough to break into a safe if money grew on trees in public parks? And is there not a contradiction between aiming at the creation of a trust environment while basing it on highly protected safes and lockers? In an environment I trust, I’m not afraid to leave my wallet on the table… So, if personal lockers are not that safe, does it mean that the alternative is between abandoning the idea of privacy altogether and developing technologies that would create higher and thicker walls around our personal lockers? Is there an escape from an alternative that can only lead to an escalation in the development of distrust technologies?
Starting from the premises above, can we design an architecture that is at the same time natively social (data is ours!) and natively anonymous (I share my data but you can’t connect this data with the real me)? Anonymity is extremely hard to implement, it is why it should be a native feature and not an add-on, like anonymisation or encryption are.
Imagine that, instead of storing our data in personal lockers, we store them in Public Anonymous Data Stores (PADS). When I store a piece of data in a PADS, anonymously, I receive in exchange a key that allows me to edit it. Associated to this data is a kind of mailbox, so if someone wants to contact me, it is possible to leave a message in the box. My data can be distributed over a number of PADS and I’m the only one to know that it is my data. For the rest of the world, my data is just a drop in an ocean of anonymous data.
Putting personal data in PADS allows fine search granularity while respecting anonymity. Let’s say that someone is looking for a professional in the region of Chablis (not far from where I live) who has some expertise in ePortfolios. The enquirer leaves a message in the PADS mailboxes of all the people who have declared living in Chablis and in all those who have declared an ePortfolio expertise. When people collect their mailboxes from their PADS, only those that match both criteria are notified*. The person who has made the query doesn’t know whether there is someone matching the query until the target(s) decides to notify him/her that there is a match; and even then the target(s) remains fully anonymous.
Of course, when we make a query we expect to have timely, if not instant, feedback. As it is very unlikely that people will collect their mail at the same time and even less likely that they will want to spend any time validating more of less relevant queries. We need something more, something able to take decisions on our behalf. A software agent or proxy could do the trick, so that when someone queries the Internet, it is the agents that act on our behalf that validate, or not, visibility of the match. PADS + agents/proxies give us the power to control our visibility on the Internet.
Going back a few years, we advocated that every citizen should have an ePortfolio, then that every citizen should have a personal data store, we now would like to explore how to provide every citizen with a personal agent or proxy operating, on our behalf, in a space where our personal data is stored in PADS to explore the question:
To create a trustworthy Internet respectful of privacy, shouldn’t we simply make our personal data public?
It is one of the discussions that will be in the background of the 9th international ePortfolio and Identity Conference. You are welcome to contribute to it.

The New Internet of Subjects Manifesto

After the Internet of Subjects Forum London (5 July 2010) Graham Sadd wrote in his blog: Violent Agreement Breaks Out at IoS Forum.

This was echoed in the final session of the 8th ePortfolio conference (www.epforum.eu) when Derrin Kent offered to invite the Mahara open source ePortfolio community to integrate the idea of separation between data, metadata and ePortfolio services. We hope that more ePortfolio providers will support this model, which should lead to greater interoperability across systems and organisations, whilst increasing control by individuals of the exploitation of their personal data. It is a path to creating true personal lifelong learning environments.
One of the next documents to be produced is a New Internet of Subjects Manifesto, based on the ‘7 IoS principles‘. It will be a response to the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (USA).
A simple analysis of the NSTIC document reveals that:
  1. there is not a single reference to (personal) data storage
  2. there is one single reference to publish[ing] private information
  3. there is no reference to ‘discoverability’
  4. the word ‘relationship’ is only used 3 times

10 ePortfolio challenges

For the 7th ePortfolio conference, and in order to give directions to our work towards our 2010 goal (ePortfolio for all), EIfEL decided to address a number of challenges to the ePortfolio community and beyond —many of the problems the ePortfolio community faces today will not be resolved if they are not addressed beyond the ePortfolio silo. The goal of these challenges is to move beyond the current state of ePortfolio development, in particular in the field of interoperability as interoperability is not just a technical issue, but a means to enable new practices and the emergence of truly lifelong and life wide ePortfolios.

The ten challenges are:
  1. Universal ePortfolio Repository —a unified view of all my assets
  2. Universal Competency Identifiers —share competency definitions across systems
  3. ePortfolio social —share assets, knowledge and processes across communities
  4. ePortfolio semantic editors —make sense of what I write, connect, etc.
  5. ePortfolio Readers —read any ePortfolio through consistent and multiple views
  6. Open & Trusted Service Architecture
  7. ePortfolio based performance support system —make the ePortfolio part of my work
  8. ePortfolio discovery mechanism —find people, competencies, resources
  9. URIs as tags —make tags meaningful
  10. Universal Metadata —create a world brain

Our main objective is to create the conditions for the emergence of MultiPortfolio organisations (one organisation can interact with many different ePortfolio platforms) and MultiOrganisation ePortfolios (have one ePortfolio to interact with many different institutions with their own platform).

Challenges’ link

Other documents related to the challenges are:

EIfEL becomes a MultiplePortfolio (MeP) organisation

Until now, the issue of ePortfolio interoperability was mainly considered within the framework of documents export/import, hence the focus on data structures and the lack of appetite, except for EIfEL and very few others, to fully embrace identity and access management (IAM) as the central locus for ePortfolio interoperability.

In order to contribute actively to the design of state of the art interoperability solutions, EIfEL has decided to become a MultiplePortfolio (MeP) organisation, i.e. an organisation where each of our member will be able to choose their own ePortfolio platform while still being able to fully interact with the organisation and their peers to support their continuing professional development and recognition as professional members of the learning community. In doing so, EIfEL aims at being a life testbed, a benchmark for interoperability.

As an organisation wishing to represent all the actors of the ePortfolio community, unlike other organisations, it was not possible for EIfEL, even if we have our personal likes and dislikes, to select a particular platform to support the continuing professional development of our members. Moreover, many of our members already have their own ePortfolio system that they use within their organisation or institution and several already have to deal with multiple ePortfolio systems — e.g. a member of the Institute for Learning (IfL) who uses REFLECT, based on PebblePad, for his/her CPD might work at a college using eXact Portfolio to support teaching and Multi-Port to support the delivery of NVQs (just to name the 3 Gold sponsors of the 2009 Learning Forum London conference!).

Committed to become a fully functional MultiplePortfolio organisation, EIfEL will work with all the ePortfolio and learning technology publishers and providers to demonstrate the feasibility and benefits of an interoperability framework where individuals are free to choose the components of their own ePortfolio system while being capable of interacting with a number of different institutions across time (diachronic interoperability) and space (synchronic interoperability). A MultiplePortfolio approach is a necessity to territorial approaches, i.e. to the implementation of systems working across multiple institutions within a city, a district, a region or a state.

EIfEL’s MultiplePortfolio environment will be dedicated to supporting the continuing professional development (CPD) of our members validated through peer review of their CPD ePortfolio. Reviewing other members CPD portfolio is part of members’ own professional development to demonstrate assessment skills and gain an opportunity to explore a range of different professional practices.

EIfEL will provide its members with an environment to publish their ePortfolio(s), select the reviewers for their CPD portfolio and publish the outcomes of the review process —a choice of ePortfolio platforms will be offered to those needing one. EIfEL staff will mainly support the quality improvement of the review process, and interoperability.

As MultiplePortfolio organisation EIfEL will go through the following stages:

  1. At the initial stage, each ePortfolio platform will be independent from each other, so the reviewers of peers’ ePortfolios will have to register on different systems. The focus on interoperability will be on the ability to publish ePortfolios using RSS/Atom/RDF feeds, based on multiple formats (LEAP2A, HR-XML, Europass, microformats, FOAF, etc.) and packaging ePortfolios (ZIP, IMeP, etc.) for archive and verification —quality assurance. We will also be working on the systematic exploitation of unique resource identifiers (URI) to competency definitions hosted in shared repositories of occupational standards, so definitions will be independent from ePortfolio platforms and could be used for many other purposes, e.g. to post a job, set a 360° assessment, etc.
  2. The second stage will be the implementation of single sign on mechanisms (SSO), so a member already identified by EIfEL platform will be able to use the same identifier to review a colleague’s CPD ePortfolio. This will require ePortfolio providers to support IAM standard frameworks.
  3. The third stage will be the implementation of circle of trusts and attribute sharing. At stage 2, the granularity of access is the whole ePortfolio, while at stage 3, elements of ePortfolios can be shared with other members of the EIfEL community —and others. This is very convenient when members work together on a project and want to share evidence from their respective ePortfolios. Sharing evidence is one of the means to increase the trustworthiness of individual ePortfolios.
  4. The fourth stage of interoperability will be the provision of ePortfolio readers independent from the idiosyncrasies of the different platforms, so a reviewer will be able to browse multiple ePortfolios created on multiple systems, while having the same navigational and informational interface. This will be particularly relevant in specific processes such as the accreditation of prior learning (APL) when an assessor needs to review evidence against a number of occupational standards of competence.
  5. The fifth stage of interoperability will be the ability to create a seamless space between the different components of one’s digital identity in an Internet where individuals exist as autonomous and empowered entities, lifelong and lifewide.

Of course, EIfEL will be working on these different stages in parallel, in cooperation with ePortfolio publishers, clients and users, exploiting the outcomes of existing and future projects (like TAS3). We will be looking at establishing a quality mark for the ePortfolio and ePortfolio-related solutions that have demonstrated their interoperability within EIfEL’s MultiplePortfolio environment.

The MultiplePortfolio initiative will be launched during Learning Forum London, the international ePortfolio conference, 22-24 June 2009. Demonstrations will be made during ePortfolio plugfest and participants will be invited to contribute their reflections to this ambitious and challenging project.

“The Internet of Subjects” Manifesto

EIfEL is currently working on the publication of “The Internet of Subjects” Manifesto. The objective is to bring together all the current efforts to make the Internet more ‘subject centric’, taking into account the human factor.

“The Internet of Subjects” Manifesto


The central role individuals now play in the Internet, calls for a radical rethinking of its organisation, in particular, the way the ever-increasing flow of personal data is being created, stored, connected, accessed, protected, tracked, exploited and managed. There is a need to create the foundations of an Internet where the architecture creates the conditions for the free association of self-conscious individuals, beyond the pre-defined boundaries of current information systems and social networks.

The foresight of an Internet of Subjects, rests on a vision of self-conscious subjects who are in full control of the whole of their personal data, from personal healthcare, education and employment records, to bank, sales and various tracking records generated in the cyberspace.

The Internet of Subjects aims at being a people enabler, creating the conditions developing one’s social and professional identity and contribute to the growth of social capital.

The Internet of Subjects aims also at being a business enabler, creating the conditions for for-profit as well as not-for-profit organisations, public and private agencies, to provide personalised services while using personal data ethically, as defined by the individuals.

To achieve this, a second order change is required. Thanks to research, innovation, improved quality of online services and the ever-decreasing costs of online storage, bandwidth and computing power, we have reached the tipping point where this second order change is now made possible

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If you want to join the conversation and contribute to the Manifesto, please contact serge.ravet@eife-l.org.