Learn to make study abroad explicit: Open badges, experiential learning, and narrating study abroad...

Learn to Make Study Abroad Explicit: Open badges, experiential international learning, and narrating study abroad 2.0

Table of Contents

Contents Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 3

International Academic Credentialing ................................................................................ 3

Towards a Theory of Intercultural and Participatory Culture ............................................. 4

Intercultural Learning .................................................................................................................. 5

Motivation to Learn .................................................................................................................... 6

New Media and Participatory Culture ......................................................................................... 8

Co-‐Curricular Learning, Badges, and Participatory Culture ................................................ 9 Badges ......................................................................................................................................... 9

Digital Badges ............................................................................................................................ 10

Co-‐Curricular Learning in Study Abroad .................................................................................... 12

Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 12

Works Cited ...................................................................................................................... 14

Annex 1: Mozilla Open Badges & Co-‐Curricular Learning Certificate ............................... 17

Introduction: ............................................................................................................................. 17

What is a badge ......................................................................................................................... 17

The CLC and Open Badges ......................................................................................................... 17

Google Site, Open Badges, & the CLC ....................................................................................... 18

Google Site Authoring Badges ................................................................................................... 18

What the Open Badge will and will not be: ............................................................................... 19

Why issue Open Badges to recognize Co-‐Curricular Learning? ................................................. 19

Introduction

Study abroad was the first version of distance education in the higher education system. It still is. Instead of relying on new communication and information technology to connect students, professors, and higher education institutions, students travel to the institution where the professor meets them in person. On first glance, this would seem to run counter to the prevailing direction of new technology and higher education, where movement is toward open education resources, massive open online courses, online degree programs delivered through learning management systems, and collaborative international teaching via synchronous (i.e. live) technologies. In as much as new technology is useful on any residential or commuter campus in the United States, new technology is equally useful in the study abroad curriculum.

Study abroad is academic teaching/learning in an intercultural context, and many see that the goal of study abroad is for students to gain competencies that facilitate intercultural communication. As such, many study abroad professionals and academics lamenti how US students do not disconnect from new media and technology while they are immersed in the intercultural study abroad experience, and it is not uncommon for these professionals and academics to blame new media and technology when students do not develop intercultural competencies during study abroad.

Therefore, the challenge of using new media and technology in the study abroad curriculum is to find purposeful ways to support the goals of intercultural learning and international academics. This paper will explore a theoretical basis whereby new media and technology supports these goals, and it will propose a pilot program whereby students author rich-‐text narratives about study abroad and co-‐curricular learning. This pilot program suggests that Mozilla’s Open Badges infrastructure may be grafted into The College of Global Studies’ Co-‐Curricular Learning Certificate program in order to motivate students to develop new media literacy skills as they narrate their intercultural study abroad experiences.

International Academic Credentialing

Study abroad is the experience of learning in an international context during the undergraduate curriculum in higher education. Students study at a university in a foreign country or undertake a planned educational intervention such as an internship or a project-‐based learning experience. Domain content learning is credentialed on an

academic transcript according to the course syllabus, through a process by which the course syllabus is proposed and revised by an academic control board, and eventually approved by the relevant university authority. The university or college is the issuing institution for a credential that certifies that a course grade signifies the student’s learning achievement. The student receives a transcript to accredit this learning achievement, and the student uses this transcript as a credential so that their home-‐institution in the United States transfers academic credit toward their course of study.

There is no standardized, authoritative, system of equivalencies between credit issued by foreign institutions and their equivalent credit at institutions in the United States. Most universities or colleges have their own equivalency system, or use an equivalency system from a third party organization such as International Student Exchange Programs (ISEP). Based on these equivalencies, an academic authority will evaluate the study abroad course syllabus, and perhaps the student’s academic work, and assign credit hours or points from an equivalent course offered at the home-‐institution. If there is no equivalent course at the home-‐institution, academic credit will be issued for a general subject elective course. The credit is then processed through the university registrar, or other university authority, and the student advances toward fulfilling the state-‐mandated requirements to obtain a university degree, diploma, or certification.

Towards a Theory of Intercultural and Participatory Culture

Moving towards a theory of intercultural learning, gamification, and participatory culture is a unique epistemological direction in study abroad and higher education. On the one hand, the data suggests that students need a monitored and hands-‐on learning intervention in order to make a significant improvement in intercultural learning. Students need a teacher to correct ethnocentric misunderstandings, explain the social facts and norms of the new culture, and point out the “natives point of view”iithrough insider information. In other words, students need the teacher to be the “key informant” if they are to achieve intercultural learning. On the other hand, data about how gamers solve problems inside the design grammar of video games, and how gamers use “agency” (Ortner, 1984) to seek solutions to these problems outside of the proscribed, authoritative, intervention (i.e. the game manual), suggests that interest and motivation serve as the essential “key informants”. Students report that study abroad is transformational, and thus highly motivating. It follows that being highly motivated would provide the scaffolding to learn intercultural skills. Empirical research has discounted this notion (Vande Berg, Paige, & Lou, 2012), but these studies do not take

into account participatory culture and new media literacy (Jenkins, 2006, Ito et. al, 2009). Thus the question follows: If study abroad students are motivated to learn intercultural skills, and have the new media tools to participate with each other in creating a narrative of their experience, will they develop intercultural competence?

Intercultural Learning

Intercultural learning has been repeatedly looked at in psychological, intercultural, anthropological, and developmental research. A common refrain to hear is that students report study abroad to be ‘transformational’. Like informal and incidental learning, this transformation is not credentialed, does not happen at one discrete momentiii and may not have been intended by the student. Self-‐reports of the transformation that study abroad students realize are often deconstructed within development and intercultural theory. Another large body of research describes how motivation is key to learning (Clark et al. 2006; Bransford, J., Brown, A., & Cocking, R., 2000; Sawyer, K., 2006). In particular, the body of work on participatory culture suggests that interest, incentives, and scaffolding effectively guide learning. Motivation and interest are two of the most influential problems in the learning sciences, and as such, we should sit up and take notice when a student uses the word transformational to describe their learning experience.

Intercultural learning lies at the crossroads of one’s understanding of the self and their new cultural reality. According to Milton Bennett (2012), a learner with the highest level of integrated intercultural competency is “consciously constructing dynamic identities for themselves that acknowledge their primary socialization, but that extend who they are into alternative worldviews and cultural bridge building” (p.111). Bennett explains this intercultural repertoire with an analogy which likens the family context to the intercultural context -‐just as an individual learns to be different their with grandmother versus their spouse, individuals learn to do cultural context-‐shifting (Bennett, 2012, p.110) without any contradiction in their perception of their self-‐identity. Many studies have compared intercultural learning outcomes for students who participate in different kinds of programsiv. Results conclude that “being in the vicinity of an event in another culture does not mean that one has an intercultural experience” (Hammer, 2012, p.126) nor does the duration of the study abroad experience, nor does “immersion” in a new culture, result in much greater intercultural learning for students (Hammer, 2012, p.126).

When study abroad students have cultural mentoring, they show the most intercultural learning (Paige & Vande Berg, 2012, p.38, and Engle & Engle, 2012, p.303-‐304). These findings have spurred international education professionals to scaffold intercultural learning through credit and non-‐credit courses, different orientation designs, and reflective writing and narration programs. Hammer (2012) also argues “unexamined cultural experiences do not facilitate intercultural competence development” (p. 131), whereas successful reflective activities are those in which students examine their own “cultural assumptions, values, and practices vis-‐à-‐vis the assumptions, values, and practices of host country nationals” (p.132). Different programs have conducted these activities on-‐line, in-‐person, or in a blended format, and ideally the activities should encourage students to become involved in day-‐to-‐day life with host country nationals.

In summary, the research is that when students report their transformation as a result of study abroad, psychometric data suggest that transformation is exaggerated, at least in terms of intercultural development theory. The gains that students make are notable only if informal immersion is turned into deliberate intervention for the purpose of “acquisition and refinement of general intercultural skills (competencies) that facilitate interaction” (La Brack & Bathurst, p.206).

Motivation to Learn

Video games are about solving problems. These problems are not hypothetical low-‐stakes problems, but important problems which must be solved in order to advance in the game. For example, in Sid Miers Civilization you must solve the problem of how to maintain a powerful military while not bankrupting your civilization. If your treasury goes bankrupt or do not build a powerful military, it is certain that one of your neighbors will attack your civilization and the game will end. The game offers several strategies to achieve a powerful military and a healthy economy, but choosing the right strategy depends on many other choices built into the design grammar of the game. A sophisticated Civilization gamer will learn which array of choices lead to not being conquered by the neighboring civilization.

The interesting question is about how gamers learn to solve this problem. Kurt Squire (2011) points out that video games are built around the player using “walk-‐throughs, guides, even video… forum threads, spreadsheets” (p.13) to learn to solve problems in the game. Gee (2007) points out that game “walk-‐throughs” (i.e. game-‐manuals) can be 70 or more single-‐spaced pages, and “do not make a lot of sense” (p.98) unless the

reader has “an embodied world of experience” (98) in the game. Gee makes the same criticism of the ”academic language” of textbooks in school subjects like science, math, or social studies, saying that in order to understand specialized language, for example about Biology, a reader needs experience in a Biologist’s “ways of talking and debating, their reasons for doing so, their interests, norms, and values” (p.104). Without this experience, the simple fact is that a lot of students don’t have the interest to cross reference, look-‐up, or define specialized vocabulary in order to understand academic texts in school, and thus they don’t comprehend fully what is considered important in the school curricula.

If students are interested in reading these texts, is the situation different? A study by Steinkuehler, Compton-‐Lilly, and King (2010) found that when texts are interest-‐driven students demonstrate higher reading comprehension. While video games may be more interesting than many academic texts, they are also social and participatory activities. Making an analogy between a gamer community of practice and school curricula, Squire (2011) points out that “it’s as if students had access, not only to the teacher’s notes [the game handbook], but also to the guidebook, the Cliff notes, and experts in the field in question” (p.13), and the students wanted to get information from all of these sources. The point is not that school curricula should be turned into video-‐games, though Squire does give examples of this, but that the “school based culture of passive knowledge reception” (p.35) serves to “erect strong barriers between classrooms and authentic communities of learning” (p.13), whereas promoting open, participatory culture seems to be how individuals learn gaming skills and new media literacy skills.

Squire (2011) points out that “if there is one message coming out of the learning sciences over the past 30 years, it is that learners are active meaning makers who create knowledge from experiences” (p.30). Video games are fun experiences. They are peer-‐group activities, they reward achievement and expertise, and they realistically simulate user interests like car-‐racing (Grand Theft Auto), war-‐fighting (Call of Duty), or city-‐building (Sim City). Video games are not “just about the software, but also about the participatory communities that games inspire” (Squire, 2011, p.61), which Gee calls affinity groups. These are groups in which individuals “recognize certain ways of thinking, acting, interacting, valuing, and believing… as well as the typical sorts of social practices associated with a given semiotic domain” (p. 27-‐28). Whether termed communities of participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991), zones of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978) or affinity groups, learning scientists promote the notion that learning, particularly in new media and technology, occurs best through collaboration and communication between experts, novices, and apprentices.

New Media and Participatory Culture

New media literacy is “a set of cultural competencies and social skills that young people need in the new media landscape” (Jenkins, 2006, pg.4). Tablets, smartphones, computers, video-‐audio devices, music production instruments, or other types of computer-‐aided hardware tools mediate these skills, as do video games, social media, website authoring sites, and other software tools. An individual gains the cultural competencies and social skills to affiliate, collaborate, express, and circulate with others who are using new media tools and to learn from experts and teach novices. As Varenne (2012) points out, this communication is how so many people have learned so much about technology, with so few teachers (p.12). This same point can be extended to explain how individuals learn to solve problems in video games. This communication is the essence of participatory culture.

Participatory culture is an eticv term to describe individuals working together on mapping insect species for a project in scouts, individuals having fun creating a video together in the neighborhood after school, or individuals communicating about their shared interest in a video game chat from across the country. Under the definition of new media literacy, participatory culture is when “the focus of literacy shifts “from one of individual expression to community involvement” (Jenkins, 2006, p.7). Ito et al. (2009) call this community involvement hanging out, messing around, or geeking out when, and if, the individuals are using new media production tools and the Internet to traffic in rich media. Through ethnographic work, Ito and her collaborators document the “hypersocial”vi, always-‐on, 1) friendship driven practices and 2) interest driven practices which are the two “broad framework[s] for identifying what we saw as the most salient social and cultural distinctions that differentiated new media practice among youth” (p.10). Hanging out, messing around, and geeking out are, in turn, the three genres of participation which correlate with “low end” to “high end” skills development in new media literacy. The group of teenagers trying out skateboarding tricks, recording the videos on smartphones, posting the videos on Youtube.com, and commenting on the webpage are probably hanging out. If on the other hand, these teenagers started editing their skateboarding videos with audio-‐visual effects and tinkering with web-‐design software to create a website for the videos, then they have probably transitioned to messing around, or as Ito et al. describe it, “begin[ning] to take an interest and focus on the workings and content of the technology and media themselves” (p.20).

Co-‐Curricular Learning, Badges, and Participatory Culture

In a wide-‐ranging book on the millennial generation and the recent political-‐economic moment in America, Winograd and Hais (2007) write that the pedagogy that colleges and universities deliver “will need to be redesigned” (p.183) in order to appeal to the millennial student’s penchant for “sharing knowledge among peers” (p.183), “mashing up or combining… whatever resources are available to suit their individual needs” (p.184), and the reality that millennials “love to use” (p.186) these new media tools. Katie Davis (2011) used qualitative portraiture of an undergraduate college student to describe how deeply new media tools are ingrained into life for young people. As Winograd and Hais assert, those colleges and universities that “place this twenty-‐first-‐century understanding of teaching and learning at the core of their business model” (p.185) are more likely to leverage this disruption into a new definition of higher education. Their advice seems prescient now that the ‘revolution’ in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS)vii and other open educational resources has entered the public’s consciousness. The higher education field is just beginning to debate the consequences of this disruption, all the while the MOOC technology ventures, and their university and college partners are moving ahead at breakneck speed.

Badges

Badges are an expression or recognition of an achievement. In culture in America badges are associated with the Scouts and the Scouting Movement and the “badges are intended to stimulate the boy’s interest in the life about him and are given for general knowledge” (Boy Scouts of America Handbook). Badges distinguish accomplishments and the accumulation of these badges determines the rank that the individual holds in the hierarchy of scouting. Badges are issued by the authority “Court of Honor of the local council” (Boy Scouts of America Handbook) to an individual who has earned the status of “first-‐class scout” and who demonstrates specific learning goals in skills like Pioneering, Personal Health, or Leather Working. While the authority issues badges for verified skills, they do not credential “that the scout is qualified to make his living by the knowledge gained in securing the award [badge]” (Boy Scouts of America Handbook). Inside of the group, the accumulation of these badges leads the scout to progress to

“life-‐scout”, “star-‐scout”, and the highest achievement “eagle scout”, and the badges mark status in the group and in the culture outside of the group, and may lead to employment or educational opportunities for the earner. However, the badges do not credential that the individual’s skills qualify the earner for any reward or recognition, such as employment, beyond the Scouts or the Scouting Movement.

Digital Badges

Open Badges for Lifelong Learning is a collaboration between The Mozilla Foundation, Peer 2 Peer University, and The MacArthur Foundation to develop the infrastructure for an open resource digital badge system. They define a digital badge as “an online record of achievements, tracking the recipient’s communities of interaction that issued the badge and the work completed to get it” (Mozilla, et al., p.3). The purpose of this badge infrastructure is to credential learning, other than traditional classroom learning. The project means to move industrial era education design, and its credentials, into the digital age where learning is an “inclusive, social, informal, participatory, creative, and lifelong” (Mozilla, et al., p.3) pursuit, carried out beyond “a single classroom or online space, but instead encompass[ing] many spaces in broader, networked, distributed and extensible environments” (Mozilla, et al., p.4). Participatory culture is a compelling organization paradigm in today’s new media rich environment, and if Open Badges for Lifelong Learning can harness the behaviors of participatory culture, there may be consequential reverberations in higher education.

There are systemic implications of removing the power to credential learning from schools, and the bodies that oversee schools. If an alternative system, like a badge system gains traction, it would mean that “the authority of higher education would be greatly weakened” (Meyer et al., 2005, as cited in Olneck, 2012, p.4). The catalyst to acceptance or rejection of badges will be if Fortune 500 Companies and other prestigious employers begin to compare these credentials to traditional degrees. If this happens, as David Wiley exclaims, “the gig is up completely” (Young, 2012, as cited in Olneck, 2012, p.4). Universities and colleges, while probably not facing Wiley’s scenario, would respond, some ignoring the alternative system, and others working badges into courses and non-‐course programs. On the other hand, a backlash might occur whereby employers, mystified and overwhelmed with the proliferation of badge credentials, would remunerate a traditional university degree more highly.

The validity of digital badges will determine if universities and colleges have to face the their emergence as an alternative educational credential. Validity answers the question “does something perfectly represent the thing it’s allegedly designed to represent?” (Casilli, p.1), and the reliability of Mozilla’s Open Badges infrastructure and the credibility that badges are not falsely obtained, are aspects of whether third parties, employers or others, will accept badges as valid representations (Knight & Mozilla, 2012; Bixler et al, 2012). In terms of digital badges, several questions of validity arise when third parties assess the value of a digital badge that an earner presents as a credential. In terms of academic credit, these same questions about validity can be asked, but third parties usually accept the credential of the academic transcript to mean that the earner’s skill/learning does represent value. Yet, all academic credit is not valued equally. A credential from an Ivy-‐League university (usually) returns more value than a credential from a community college, even if the two academic transcripts have the same course names and code levels. Therefore, the validity of a skill/learning credential is a complicated cultural norm that is established in a community, but validity is not immovable.

A new media and technology ecology is at the root of what George Siemens (2005) proposes in his connectivist learning theory. The idea is that “learning (as defined by actionable knowledge) can reside outside of ourselves (within an organization or a database), is focused on connecting specialized information sets, and the connections that enable us to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing” (Siemens, 2005, www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm). Badges display that an individual can use their connectivity to learn new skills, and that he or she cares enough about this learning to display it through their own connections. The connectivist theory of learning builds on work in distributed cognition (Salomon, G., 1993, as cited in Barab, S., 2006, p.156) and constructionism (Kafai, 2006), but work on participatory culture and new media more fully address the arrangement of the social behavior of these connectivist individuals. Looking at this sociology, Mozilla developed the software infrastructure of Open Badges to try to mainstream how individuals accredit what they learned as they are messing around or geeking out.

The evangelists of the Open Badges project hope that being able to display a digital symbol of what individuals achieve messing around or geeking out will motivate them to continue to develop their skills and interests. Motivation has long been an important topic in the learning sciences since it has been established that higher motivation correlates with more learning (Bransford, et al., 2000). The hope is that issuing and earning badges correlates with higher intrinsic or extrinsic motivation to achieve skills and tasks. For example, Abramovich et al. (2013) found a motivational relationship in

that student expectation of success increased by awarding participation badges (p.13), though they also warn against negative motivation if students perceive that badges pertain to skills which are not realistically achievable (p.14). Others posit that badges are effective to set learning goals, as a reputational symbol of the earners skill-‐set and expertise, as symbols of status and affiliation, and as markers of group identification (Antin & Churchill, 2011) all of which might influence motivation.

Co-‐Curricular Learning in Study Abroad

Co-‐curricular learning takes place outside of the credentialed undergraduate curriculum. In the model of study abroad put for by The College of Global Studies, intercultural learning is not embedded into courses. Independent co-‐curricular opportunities are supported in order to scaffold students in developing intercultural competencies. Students independently choose a topic and work on learning about the topic while they live and study in the country. The goal of co-‐curricular learning is for students to do self-‐directed, “non-‐academic co-‐curricular and extra-‐curricular learning experiences… such as community service, lecture series, excursions, field research, workshops, language partnerships, ect” (Lalond-‐Wyant, 2012). Students develop a “narrative that could support students’ endeavors to be good stewards of the story of their host communities when they return to the US; and could also help students as they plan for cover letters and interviews that speak to the lessons of their time abroad” (Lalond-‐Wyant, 2012). In doing so, students submit a narrative text to document their co-‐curricular or extra-‐curricular learning, and they are awarded a certificate of achievement by Arcadia University.

The Co-‐Curricular Learning Certificate (CLC)™ is recognition of learning experiences which are not credentialed as academic credit, self-‐directed by the learner, unstructured by a curricular authority, exploratory and experiential, and interest-‐driven. This vocabulary is similar to the vocabulary of Open Badges and not wholly unlike the vocabulary of participatory culture. For this reason, Open Badges may be grafted into the Co-‐Curricular Learning Certificate program in order to motivate students to develop new media literacy skills as they narrate their intercultural study abroad experiences using rich-‐text. The annex 1 section describes this proposal.

Conclusion

The trajectory of study abroad is optimistic but fraught with uncertainties. Study abroad leaders predict that as many as five-‐hundred new leadership positions will be created in the study abroad field in the next five years. As universities and college leaders scramble to internationalize their campus, study abroad appears that it will continue to play an important part in these efforts. Study abroad administrators are a motivated and dedicated group of university professionals who believe in its transformative experience. While overall student participation in study abroad is low compared to the number of undergraduates in higher education, students, and their parents, have continued to invest in the experience, even throughout the last half-‐decade since the 2008 financial crisis. As global economic, political, cultural and demographic integration continue, individuals with intercultural competence and knowledge will be well placed to understand and adapt to these changes, and study abroad is a first step that many young people make toward this goal.

At the same time, study abroad leaders are taking risks if they feel a sense of complacency. The same changing international environment that makes intercultural learning valuable means that doing study abroad is easier. A century ago, at the invention of the modern study abroad paradigm in higher education, many logistical and institutional barriers made studying abroad a complicated undertaking. These barriers have mostly disappeared, and yet the study abroad field operates according to a business model that places it as an indispensable connector and value-‐adder between the student and his or her prospective experience overseas. Information and communication technology already allows confident, experienced, independent students to obviate institutions of study abroad and arrange their own intercultural learning experience for academic credit. The next step is for these technologies to bring intercultural learning into the student’s class and residential experience at his or her home university or college. In higher education, a debate is already raging about the efficiencies and consequences of teaching and learning brought about by new media and technology. This debate will arrive at the doors of study abroad. Personally, I look forward to it.

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Annex 1: Mozilla Open Badges & Co-‐Curricular Learning Certificate

Introduction: The Mozilla Foundation’s Open Badge project is for online representations of earned skills. Open Badges can be issued by an organization to individuals to verify the achievement of a skill, and the user can display a collection of badges – online and offline to tell a story about achievements.

What is a badge A badge is a symbol or indicator of an accomplishment. Open Badges are designed to make this sort of learning visible and consequential in terms that are recognized by formal educational institutions and broader career pathways. Badges are for documenting the co-‐curricular, self-‐directed tinkering, information gathering, project based learning, and community experience. Often these skills are digital literacy and 21st century skills. (Mozilla Foundation, Open Badges for Lifelong Learning, 2012).

The CLC and Open Badges The CLC is a concrete example of The College of Global Studies’ recognition of the wide breadth of rich experiential education taking place beyond the curriculum for Arcadia students abroad. The CLC program is also a tool for students to develop their narrative about what they are taking away from their time abroad – a narrative that could support students’ endeavors to be good stewards of the story about studying abroad. An Open Badge will be issued to a student who creates and verifies a design skill using Google Sites Authoring tools. The credibility of the open badge will be that it contains metadata, a URL and a description of why the badge was issued, associating the badge image with The College of Global Studies. This metadata and language will be a credential that the earner has the skill which corresponds to the badge image. Third parties will be able to verify the validity of the badge by contacting The College of Global

Studies, and in the future third parties, such as the student’s home institution may be able to endorse the validity of the badge through Mozilla’s infrastructure. The validity, credibility, and reliability of the alternative credential (i.e. badges) are central to propagating the social, educational, and remunerated value of badges (Bixler et al., 2013; Mozilla et al, 2012; Casilli, 2012; Knight & Mozilla, 2012). The requirements, the architecture, and the learning rubric for issuing badges should be thoroughly mapped well in advance of implementation.

Google Site, Open Badges, & the CLC A Google Site is an e-‐portfolio authoring tool, also known as a Wiki. As an optional activity, students can use a CLC Google Site as an e-‐portfolio. The Template will consist of four tutorial pages so that students learn to create the elements of a Google Site. Each tutorial page will scaffold a discrete skill such as to “create and edit a page” or “embed a video”. An Open Badge will be issued when the student has achieved this Google Site authoring skill. The objective is to motivate a student to learn how to use the Google Site to document their CLC work.

Google Site Authoring Badges

Getting Started in Google Sites

How to Create a Google Site

Add Links and Websites in a Google Site

Use Gadgets to Embed Media in a Google Site

What the Open Badge will and will not be: • The Open Badge is not a replacement for the CLC. • The Open Badge is not to recognize academic credit. • The Open Badge will not be issued by The College of Global Studies. • A unique, and trademarked icon/logo of The College of Global Studies • The Open Badge will be issued by Steve Tippett, Open Badges Administrator. • The Open Badge will be issued on the honor system. • The Open Badge will have a link to The College of Global Studies website and include a

description about the criteria for which the Badge was issued.

Why issue Open Badges to recognize Co-‐Curricular Learning? Assessment should reflect pedagogy. The pedagogy of the Co-‐Curricular Learning is experiential, and thus the assessment should allow students to make that experience explicit. New media mobile devices allow students to produce a rich text to describe experiences outside of the classroom and their related learning. The Open Badges are a perfect match for e-‐portfolios. Badges are meant to scaffold and encourage students to develop digital literacy skills which can be used to narrate experiential learning. In the humanities, experiential education, in research, and, in general, badges can encourage the use digital storytelling techniques. A badge initiative by The College of Global Studies is an endorsement of digital storytelling and new media literacy.

i How Facebook Can Ruin Study Abroad, The Chronicle of Higher Education. January, 14th, 2013. ii Term first coined by Bronsilaw Malinowski (1922): Argonauts of the Western Pacific (New York: E.P. Dutton. 1961 [1922]. This became a seminal work in cultural anthropology and participant observation methodology. iii See Merizow, J. (2000). Transformation Theory would suggest that moments of crisis are important for the shifting of frames of references, iv See Georgetown Consortium Study, 2009 v Etic and Emic are terms used by ethnographers to differentiate between how people perceive and term their own social behavior (emic) or how social scientists describe and term the same social behavior (etic) vi The process, defined by Ito, through which young people use specific media as tokens of identity, taste, and style to negotiate their sense of self in relation to their peers (Mobilizing the Imagination) vii Tom Friedman “Revolution hits the Universities” NY Times, January, 26th, 2013.

Learn to make study abroad explicit: Open badges, experiential learning, and narrating study abroad...

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