Gamification stuff we love: Meaningful badges
Badges receive a lot of bad rep in the gamification world, primarily because if they are all you use, it will be a very superficial system and miss the point of driving behaviour change. Last week I came across the Open Badges Passport, which I feel is an interesting way of displaying your smaller achievements and can make badges become more meaningful.
Mozilla Open Badges are already know to promote that badges are earned for a meaningful set of activities. Mozilla even created a standard to which badges issued adhere to and how to display them. So far you could collect all your badges on their backpack and with this link display it to potential employers or people you just want to show the badges to.
The Open Badges Passport takes this concept into a further step and allows you to link it to your LinkedIn and Facebook profiles, should you wish to portray your achievements in these places. It would give the fact of earning an achievement more visibility and that in it’s own right may give the added meaning to what made you decide to take the steps to earning the badges, whether it is a course or skills display, it can all enhance your profile.
In the corporate world I often hear, that internal courses are not deemed as meaningful to the next employer then for example external or university courses. Typically an in-house certificate doesn’t travel, however creating an Open Badge and adding it to the Open Badge Passport may well overcome these barriers. Especially when there is an inherent standard attached to Open Badges.
Would you use a badge passport?
