After keynoting this year’s Games for Change conference, Al Gore has been rather quiet about whether his Climate Reality Project was going to start adding games to its arsenal of change agents. Well, it seems the effort was in stealth mode, and they’re getting ready to go public.
Read my former colleague Nicole Haber’s blog entry wondering what the “gold coin” is to motivate a change in our national dialogue about climate change: If the earth is our princess, what is your gold coin?
I’m here at the launch of the 4th Digital Media and Learning Competition, “Badges for Lifelong Learning,” and listening to the ways in which badges might be superior to traditional grades. The major leap seems to be capturing informal learning in a quasi-formal way that, until now, was only relayed explicitly via resumes or accidentally via Google searches. But it seems that there’s also a spectrum of assessment techniques that flows from totally rigid to totally open, along which badges are more flexible (nimble?) than grades but more formal than pure text:
(Quantitative, simple, rubric-based)
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Points
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Grades
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Badges
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Tags
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Free assessment
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(Qualitative, rich, unstructured)