Copyright rights ... and Fair Use for educators

copyright confusion by me

Are you an educator grappling with copyright issues? Still not quite sure about terms like Creative Commons, Fair Use, and Public Domain? As I was putting together a presentation on copyright and Fair Use for educators (at bottom), I thought I'd share what I've learned.

Although I admire Larry Lessig's work and the good people at Creative Commons, it's important to realize that CC is another licensing scheme. I've found that even if educators understand CC, they still can be unclear about how copyright is really a balance between the rights of owners and users like educators. So let's say you want to use a copyrighted work in your teaching. Can you?

The short answer is you CAN use copyrighted material in your teaching because of the Fair Use provision of the Copyright Act of 1976. The Code of Best Practices does a nice job of explaining the ethical, legal, and pedagogical questioning that all teachers and learners should engage in as we consider the use of copyrighted materials.

In her book Copyright Clarity: How Fair Use Supports Digital Learning, Renee Hobbs uses an example from one of my students. After the book came out, we interviewed Renee on Teachers Teaching Teachers, #184.

Since we're all pressed for time, here's a condensed version the original TTT podcast. The first seven minutes are Renee laying out her thinking on the culture of sharing in education. For the next six minutes Renee leads me through applying the Code to my own students use of copyrighted images, and why it's an example of Fair Use. That's followed up by two student examples – one from Paul Allison and an example from another student of mine.

My big takeaway: In recent years, legal scholars have found that courts return again and again to two questions in deciding if a particular use of a copyrighted work is a fair use:

• did the unlicensed use "transform" the material taken from the copyrighted work by using it for a different purpose than that of the original, or did it just repeat the work for the same intent and value as the original?
• was the material taken appropriate in kind and amount, considering the nature of the copyrighted work and of the use?

What I like most about the Fair Use Doctrine is that it's really up to educators to model the ethical behavior that was the intent of copyright law all along.

Spelling

Here's a bit on spelling rules I shared with my students recently. Feel free to use it.

Improve your spelling from csloan

Teaching the "Letter to an Elected Official"

Capitol by Abby_B

One way for students to learn how to become productive citizens is to craft a piece of argumentative writing for an authentic audience – a letter to their elected officials. The challenge is how to make sense of all the information on controversial issue. To make this proces manageable for my students, I've been using the gun control resources on the KQED Lowdown and the KQED DoNow websites, which have provided a good springboard for more sustained research writing and discussion. Here's how last week looked in my classroom.

Day One: As of March 2013, KQED has seven resources under the gun control topic.

1. Randomly assign students to read one of the seven articles in the collection of articles from the KQED. 
2. Individual students list the most important points of the article they were assigned; they write a brief summary of that article and cite the source using MLA format. Remind students that the most significant information might not only be in the story’s text (like facts or expert opinions) but might also be found in an image or graphic. Note: Although citing sources isn’t a typical part of a letter, in this case it is important for at least three reasons: 1) they are representing themselves as serious students to their elected officials and should demonstrate their academic skills, 2) citing the source might help educate the reader of the letter, and 3) the citation provides concrete support for their opinions.
3. Divide students into seven groups and have them share their summaries with others who read the same article. 
4. Once students read their individual summaries, the group agrees on the most important five points from the article and creates a collaborative one-paragraph summary that best represents the ideas of the group. Here’s an example summary from my class. 
5. Groups present facts and summaries to the whole class while the other students organize the information into facts and opinions that could be used to support more gun control and those arguments that could be used to oppose more gun control (see page 1 of the resource packet “Pro/Con information sheet.”) Although gun control is the issue I'm focusing for this lesson, the handouts in the lesson are more open-ended and can be used for any controversial issue

Day Two: Using the information found in their reading and note taking from Day One, students will complete a draft of a letter to an elected official in today’s class. In doing so, students must synthesize information from at least two sources

1. Individual students review their notes from Day One where they categorized the facts and opinions into two columns – one column for the information that could be used to support the argument for more gun control, and another column that includes all the information that could be used to oppose the argument for more gun control. 
2. Students rank (in order of importance) the top ideas or facts in each column. This is also a good time to discuss how some facts can be used to support both sides of the argument (example: “Gun manufacturing in the U.S. increased from 3.7 million in 2007 to 6.1 million in 2011” could be combined with other information from this FactCheck.org graphic to support either side of the argument). 
3. Research your local elected officials stance on the topic by reading information on their government website as well as information gleaned from news stories. Based on the official’s views, choose one to write the letter to. If the students aren’t sure who their elected officials are, look them up on the Common Cause website. 
4. Write a draft of the letter using the activities found on page 2, “Writing the Draft.” Tell the students not to worry too much about formatting issues right now, the important thing is to try to get the gist of their thoughts based on their reading and note taking so far.  
5. Revise the letter using the activities found on page 3, “Revision Guide.”

If you want more details, here's a link to the actual lesson plan.

Teaching curation in the classroom

Cowboy by me

My media students have been using some KQED Lowdown resources lately to try to understand the gun control debate. As my students and I have studied this issue for the past few weeks, a couple of things have occurred to me. My first observation is how complex many issues are today. It can be difficult for students to write a simple thing like a piece of argumentative writing, or participate in a classroom debate, when there's so much information on the topic. Trying to get a handle on an multifaceted issue can be overwhelming for all of us. This leads me to my second observation – researching wicked problems like gun violence in America might be better undertaken in collaborative groups not only in classrooms but also in larger connected learning environments.

Here's how it went in my class.

Currently KQED has seven resources under the gun violence topic. I started off by dividing students into seven groups and had them examine one of the resources. Individual students first wrote a summary of their article's main points. Next they shared their summaries with their group members. In the end the group was responsible for one summary that best represents the ideas of the group and then presented to the rest of the class. Here's an example summary from one of the groups in my class.

To make doing these activities more manageable, I've always appreciated objective educational resources that have been assembled by experts, for example EBSCO Host Connection gun control resources and ProCon's concealed gun fact sheet. These are packaged to make researching more efficient for students and teachers, but I've also begun to realize that the act of searching for articles and discussing the merits of sources is an integral part of learning how to thrive in a knowledge economy. That's why I'm doing more collaborative research projects in my classes now on sites like Diigo, Delicious, and Gooru. One project that gets at what I'm moving toward is this shared Gooru collection that has been added to by Paul Allison's students in New York City and my students in Utah.

I've found that the most effective groups consist of informed individuals. Once we go through the process of collaboration and curation, we're much better able to articulate a stance on complex issues.

Annotation and reading comprehension

It might not mean much, but as I was recording some scores in my gradebook today, I noticed the difference between my students who annotated versus those who didn't annotate a sample AP English Language multiple choice passage. Out of the 65 students who took the test, 33 of them annotated but 32 didn't. The people who annotated the passage scored on average 9% higher than the students who didn't. I always encourage the students to read with a pencil in hand, but it's not a requirement; now I'm rethinking that. The image on the right is of a student of mine who had a perfect score, and I couldn't help but notice the rich annotation on the passage (arrows, summary, brackets, quoted materials). I haven't had the time yet to do more than a cursory view of the research on the effect of annotation on reading comprehension, so this could just be a coincidence.

And even if it isn't an isolated phenomenon, we all know that correlation isn't causation. Maybe annotation makes more effective readers, or maybe more effective readers annotate. Still, it does make me wonder....

Writing connected research

Adventure by Ben Harvey

In my last post I wrote about the connected research and social scholarship that's happening in my classroom. The most significant way those things manifest themselves is through the discussions that my students post on Youth Voices. The students search for information about their inquiry as they learn to navigate different resources and then post the most interesting things they discovered on their Youth Voices blogs. After all the blogging and discussing at the end of the unit, they distill the most compelling information into the traditional research paper format.

Is their writing that's done for the screen better than their writing for paper, or vice-versa? I don't know. But what I do know is that I need to prepare my students for both types of composition, at least for the immediate future. And I also know that students now need to understand how to access and assess information from a lot of different sources. For example, some of these databases and resources I use are open; others are locked behind paywalls or only accessible through library subscriptions (more on that later).

If you're interested in doing this yourself, here is some information about the resources and databases the students use as they blog and discuss their findings:

• Read some Opposing Viewpoints about a current political issue. 
• Using the date range advanced search feature in Google, read recent news articles written about your topic. 
• Search using the Gale database available through our school library.
• Search the EBSCO database, available to all students in our state. 
• Use the Google top-level site operator, read the different types of information available through .org .edu .mil .gov .info etc.
• Interview experts with extensive knowledge of your topic.
• Search Twitter and blogs for real-time information. For this and all posts do the assessing credibility exercise

Connected research and social scholarship

As my seniors work through a research writing unit in my English class, the ideas of connected research and social scholarship become more apparent.

Ball o' fire by Reid Bell

For me connected research refers to the many interactions my students have, not only with each other through shared docs and such, but also to their direct communication with "experts." Even in my pre-digital classroom, I'd have students interview experts, so that much isn't really new. But seems different now is the rate of response the students are getting from knowledgeable people via a variety of channels. Increasingly, my students are finding that their chosen experts connect primarily through one channel: Facebook, Twitter, email, etc.  And when my students finally track down the expert and their preferred method of contact, the response rate has been greater than in the past.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with a retiring biochemical researcher who'd received countless competitive grants in his career. He said that when he first began as a researcher, the important thing in obtaining funds was the ready access to state-of-the-art labs and a cohesive research team. But now what he's seeing is that the big research grants are going to those people who collaborate by sharing the resources of labs located around the world while assembling a team of people with diverse perspectives. The idea was reinforced when I started coming across articles like "Science 2.0" and more recently in books like Dan Tapscott's Macrowikinomics.

In Social Scholarship: Applying Social Networking Technologies to Research Practices, the Computer Research Association states that "fewer individuals will be able to carry out their work without connecting with their peers, experts, and mentors via electronic networks."

A similar sentiment is echoed in the Horizon Report's 2012 Higher Education wiki on New Scholarship: "Increasingly, scholars are beginning to employ methods unavailable to their counterparts of several years ago, including prepublication releases of their work, distribution through non-traditional channels, dynamic visualization of data and results, and new ways to conduct peer reviews using online collaboration. New forms of scholarship, including creative models of publication and non-traditional scholarly products, are evolving along with the changing process. Some of these forms are very common — blogs and video clips, for instance — but academia has been slow to recognize and accept them. Proponents of these new forms argue that they serve a different purpose than traditional writing and research — a purpose that improves, rather than runs counter to, other kinds of scholarly work." 

I suppose this is all just a subset of what's meant by connected learning. And maybe I'm just more aware of it now, but I'm seeing more connected methodologies manifest themselves in the digital and traditional writing my students compose now.

Funny thank you note from a student

Teachers get lots of goodies this time of year, but I have to say that the thank you card pictured below is one of the more memorable I've ever received from a student.

Bringing post-elections into the curriculum

Have you forgotten? by cgruis8

Was it my imagination, or was there less educational interest in the presidential elections this year than there was in 2008? In the last presidential election my students participated in national education projects like the National Writing Project's Writing our Futures: Letters to the Next President and Video Your Vote by PBS. Maybe I missed it, but it didn't seem like those kind of collaborative ventures for American students happened this time around. This surprised me since I teach a number of politically active teens.

A couple of months ago I wondered how others were bringing the elections into their curriculum. For what it's worth, my students recently completed a writing assignment where they wrote to the recently elected officials in their voting districts. The students identified the issue that mattered most to them, researched it using two different databases, and wrote informed letters to the newly elected. One student whose sister has autism wrote to our governor about the lack of support services for young adults with autism. Another student discovered a winning candidate's stance on immigration reform was one of the main reasons he was narrowly re-elected; this student urged the public servant to listen carefully to the Hispanic electorate's views on legislation like the DREAM Act.

The letter writing assignment was the culmination of careful readings my class and I did of great pieces of American political writing. Here are links to my presentations on the rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence, The Gettysburg Address and Kennedy's Inaugural Address. We examined the rhetoric of these fine pieces of American literature and then the students tried to incorporate similar rhetorical features, where appropriate. The students' letters turned out to be very well written and powerful. Here's more information about the actual assignment.

Experts everywhere

Experts everywhere by me

I put together this image to help explain how I'm re-envisioning my role as a teacher in a studio setting. As I'm teaching my students how to compose for mobile devices like tablets and phones, I've had to become more of an "expert student" rather than the expert in the studio. And for that matter the students are showing more expertise too. Experts are everywhere.

bad good bad

More examples of good & bad design ... or more accurately bad-good-bad design. About a month ago I upgraded to a new MacBook Pro. There are lots of things that I like about my new laptop, but not the MagSafe 2 connector T-design shape. I was so impressed with my last laptop's MagSafe connector, and I think that was one of the reasons I stuck with it for six years. It was an elegant piece of technology through and through. I remember thinking that one of the coolest things about it (beside the applications) was the new MagSafe technology. Although I also liked my previous laptop purchased in 2003 quite a bit, invariably someone would get tangled up in the cord and either pull the laptop along with them, or jerk it like a largemouth bass on a line.

NYTimes writer David Pogue called the downgrade "one of Apple's best ideas ever – made worse."

Ownership in learning spaces

In The Sciences of the Artificial, Herbert Simon wrote, "Engineering, medicine, business, architecture, and painting are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent – not with how things are but with how they might be – in short, with design."

Recently some colleagues and I interviewed teachers who live hundreds of miles apart and asked them about how they design their educational spaces. Whether it was the high school art teacher, the middle school technology teacher, or the college philosophy professor who teaches both face-to-face and online courses, all of them spoke of the importance of developing individual problem solvers, but also about fostering valued members of their larger learning communities.



All of three of these educators spoke of student ownership of their learning, even of the environment itself, a shared enterprise where the teachers is also a member of the learning community.

This reminded me of an article by Larry Sanger (co-founder of Wikipedia), "Individual Knowledge in the Internet Age." Obviously Sanger sees the positives of cooperative learning, but in the article Sanger reflects on how the Internet is changing education and among other things warns against the celebration of the virtues of collaborative learning as superior to "outmoded" individual learning. He writes, “my notion of a good scholar is someone who is capable of thinking independently.... Reading, writing, critical thinking, and calculation should make up the vast bulk of a liberal education. Social learning could not replace these individual, 'Cartesian' activities without jettisoning liberal education itself.”

Cracks of Life by Montana Sage

He wraps up the piece with an impassioned plea: “The educational proposals and predictions of the 'Internet boosters' point to a profoundly illiberal future. I fear that if we take their advice, in the place of a creative society with a reasonably deep well of liberally educated critical thinkers, we will have a society of drones, enculturated by hive minds, who are able to work together online but who are largely innocent of the texts and habits of study that encourage deep and independent thought. We will be bound by the prejudices of our ‘digital tribe,’ ripe for manipulation by whoever has the firmest grip on our dialogue.” 

Sanger’s arguments remind me of what Howard Gardner calls the “disciplined” mind: "As the world we inhabit continues to change, educators must frequently reevaluate the goals of education, and the types of "minds" we wish to cultivate." Like Larry Sanger and the teachers we interviewed, Gardner's minds are a balance of the individual who has learned deeply and has cultivated a commitment to their larger communities.

Solution #1 for managing student PLEs

Fans by Claire Cook.

A couple of weeks ago I started thinking more about how to manage the personalized learning environments (PLEs) going on in my classes. No doubt K-12 education will increasingly integrate more individualized approaches, but what does this mean for those of us who are customizing learning in traditional schools right now? Consider this excerpt from the NMC Horizon Report, 2012 K-12 edition:

While the concept of PLEs is still fairly fluid, it does seem to be clear that a PLE is not simply a technology but an approach or process that is individualized by design, and thus different from person to person. Widespread adoption of PLEs may require shifts in policy, as well as attitudes, toward technology for teaching, and learning.

"adoption may require shifts in policy, as well as attitudes toward technology for teaching and learning"... As I see it, these are "shifts" of seismic proportions; adopting them isn't just a pedagogical or curricular issue, it also calls for looking at the situation as a design problem. In The Reflective Practitioner, design guru Donald Schön shows how architecture students learn through reflective conversations; he highlights the value of having an expert unpack their thinking for the novice. But what becomes even more apparent to me is how including the novice in the discussion benefits the expert as well because this "back-talk" is integral to the solution. After all, without the novice, the expert has no occasion for conversation. Designer Nigel Cross gave me another insight when he emphasized the importance of personal experience in Designerly Ways of Knowing

Taken together, Schön and Cross provide a strategy that helped me begin to manage the personal learning environments – by engaging my students in reflective conversations about their personal experiences in my classroom. A number of things came out of these conversations; I'll mention one as an example.

Problem: Where's everybody's stuff?

A chronic problem is when some students want to remix other students' media or collaborate on a project, but can't find each other's stuff. If I had my students put all their work in a learning management system like Blackboard or Angel, this really wouldn't be an issue. But since I want my students to work in authentic spaces, their products are scattered all over the Internet – Flickr Photostreams, Youth Voices discussions, YouTube channels, shared Google Docs, personal websites, etc.

Solution: 1) Create a Google Form where students input the URLs to their various online spaces. 2) Share the resulting spreadsheet with the group. Here's how the output looks to users:

The things (my students) carry

Lucky Penny by me

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned an assignment that I was going to do which was loosely based on Tim O'Brien's short story, "The Things They Carried." One idea that I take away from O'Brien's story and from this assignment is that our artifacts are inextricably linked to our identity.

If you're a teacher, you should try this assignment with your students because the things our students carry say a lot about them. The assignment gave me a new perspective on my students and showed them in a positive light. I now know them in ways that I might not have if not for this activity. And the funny thing is that these things that say so much about them were right before my eyes all the time.

A couple of themes emerged from the portraits. The first is that these potential learning tools either aren't used very often in their classes or are banned outright in schools. My students use their digital tools as calculators, translators, dictionaries, ways to exchange notes, to create school publications, search for information, and draft essays, just to name a few. The other thing I learned is that their artifacts represent significant relationships – ways to connect with family members near and far, to loved ones who have passed away, and to their peers.

Managing individualized learning

Photo by Sarah Kranz

A lot of people talk about how American education is faltering, our schools are outdated, and that we need to tailor learning for each student. All well and good in theory. But how exactly do you manage this? To be clear, I'm not talking about parking kids in front of computers and marching them through tutorials and standardized test prep materials. Khan Academy videos have their place, but that's not what I'm talking about. That's manageable.

I'm wondering about evaluating and assessing students who are engaged in projects that they choose based on their passions. The learning is genuine and powerful, their products are professional quality. But as I embrace this approach as an educator, the classroom atmosphere can sometimes totter toward chaos. The issue I'm grappling with is how to keep track of all that individualized work?

A little background. Half of my teaching load is more traditional English classes with a bit of digital writing and research blended in; the other half of my schedule is made up of an assortment of media production classes. My traditional classes are easier to manage; the photography and new media classes, not so easy. For example, in my new media class one of the things we do is document our school on a daily basis in whatever medium is most appropriate to tell the story. That means that some of the students right now are laying out the September issue of a news magazine, a couple of them are shooting last minute photos for that magazine, while still others are editing footage into video packages. Some people work more than others during class time; others do an amazing amount of work outside of school but not so much in school. One girl stayed after school yesterday for a couple of hours taping interviews for somebody else's project. Right now a student has come into my classroom for the second time today to work on the news magazine layout because she has a free period. But for all the self-driven, self-motivated and talented students I have, there are others who need help every step of the way and take a large investment of time to keep them going.

The need to get a handle on this isn't just for my benefit. Sometimes a student in the media class needs a photo that was shot by a student in another class. Currently to find this, the students ask me, and that's where chaos can sneak up. I'm working on devising (or adapting) a system that helps my students and I navigate all this individualization.

Different tasks, different levels of engagement, different media, different work loads, different maturity levels. If you work in an environment like this, how do you manage the work flow?

Assignment: What's in your pocket?

Keys by me

Punya Mishra has a lot to tell us about design in general and educational design in particular, how artifacts give meaning to our lives and how they are tied to our identity. So partly inspired by Punya's teachings, Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, and partly out of curiosity, I'm setting out to see what things have meaning to my students. Specifically what things they carry with them through the school day.

Although I consider myself not all that materialistic, I'm beginning to see how things matter.

To get a sense for how this assignment will go, I wrote a reflection of sorts (see image below).

Ideas before and after their time

Long ago Dieter Rams gave timeless advice about what makes good design: things like usefulness, aesthetics, honesty, and simplicity. Because I'm a packrat, I happened to have an old catalog from the 1960s on one of my bookshelves. Although it might be tempting to say that these products have design flaws, they remind me of how time can also affect a design's efficacy.

Exhibit A: Today we watch videos on smartphones & portable DVD players. The item at left was an idea that was ahead of its time. Someone 50 years ago realized that viewing movies wouldn't always be a communal activity. Still, this product probably wasn't the most practical.

Exhibit B: Although having your social security card on a keychain might seem like a bad idea now, it's possible that it wasn't such a bad idea in the 1960's. An example of an idea that's now "behind its time."

Bringing the elections into the curriculum

My dad on July 4 by me

As a new school year approaches I'm wondering how other educators are going to incorporate the elections into the curriculum. For what it's worth, here are my thoughts so far.... Those who teach students who will be old enough to vote in the 2012 elections should check out the U.S. Election Assistance Commission's "A Voter's Guides to Federal Elections"; the National Conference on Citizenship is group whose mission is to increase the United States' civic health.

In my classes for the next few months we'll be looking at the rhetoric and spin of the political season. One of my favorite set of resources is Fact Check and its companion sites Fact Check Ed (devoted to teaching students how to become smart consumers of information) and the humorous Flack Check.

Nonpartisan sites to help students clarify their stance on the issues:

• Project Vote Smart for voting records, biographies, candidates' positions, etc.
• Smart Voter by the League of Women Voters
• Find out your Political Typology at the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press
• Open Secrets from the Center for Responsive Politics
• Select Smart's 2012 Presidential Candidate Selector

Partisan but worth a look

• Every Intelligent Voter's Guide to Electioneering Bunk by The Nation magazine
• Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship by the USCCB

For research about new media and politics among youth, see the MacArthur Foundation's Youth and Participatory Politics and the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) from Tufts University. NoLabels is an organization devoted to getting our elected officials to work together instead of the partisan bickering and posturing we're witnessing currently. C-Span had an interesting panel discussion on Youth Civic Engagement through Social Media in May of 2011.

Finally, in my class this fall we'll be reading UnSpun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation, analyzing the style and rhetorical features of documents/speeches like the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, JFK's Inaugural Speech, Letter from Birmingham Jail, Civil Disobedience, and a couple of things by George Orwell: 1984 and the essay "Politics and the English Language."

Relevant tweeters: @civicMIT @NoLabelsOrg @Politifact @ProCon_Org

I'm always looking for more good resources though....

One idea for writing from database research

Symmetry by Grace Haley

A colleague just asked me how I go about having my students do research with periodicals, journals, and databases. On a recent episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers in March 2012, Cable Green, Mary Lou Forward and some others encouraged me to open up my teaching, so in the spirit of the Open Education Resources movement, here's essentially what I wrote in the email. This assignment is a two-day sequence where students research and write an argumentaive essay after searching through two academic databases that are available through a lot public libraries or schools.


Steps to an argumentative essay based on your initial research of a controversial issue

1. For 15-20 minutes read through the Opposing Viewpoints database, read an article, and highlight the most important pieces of evidence.  Paste that into your Google Doc that you started on Friday, add the parenthetical reference, and copy the citation at the bottom of the article.


2. For the next 15-20 minutes read through the articles found in the EBSCO database, read an article, and highlight the most important pieces of evidence.  Paste that into your Google Doc that you started on Friday, add the parenthetical reference, and copy the APA citation found at the top of the article.


3. For the next 40 minutes, write a draft of an argumentative essay keeping in mind the structure diagram that you have in your notes.

• Begin with a general statement, and then have a focused thesis in the first section
• Have at least one concession/counter-concession. Remember that good argumentation often does this more than once
• Order the evidence from weakest to strongest
• Consider concluding with EITHER the difference the evidence made to your opening paragraph OR an “echo” of the opening idea, (aka completing the “frame”)

4. Be sure to include parenthetical references as in-text citations, and a separate references section using APA style.

N.B. This photo and all photos on this blog are taken either by my students or me.

What badges taught me ... so far

My first open badge

Mozilla's Open Badges project has implications for how K-12 classroom teachers like me think about our students' online compositions. In my pre-internet teaching days, for example, assessment was more of an individual thing – writers' were formatively and summatively evaluated on their own work. But now that students are composing in online spaces like Youth Voices, composition is more social. With this in mind, I've read a number of instructive conversations that have sprung up after the announcement of the Badges for Lifelong Learning Competition winners.

One of the biggest things I learned is that there are a lot of ways people are approaching badging systems, and Barry Joseph's document provides a helpful overview. If you're not up to speed on the whole badges movement, I recommend the Mozilla badges wiki. I should also note that many have cautioned that badges aren't for everyone and that there are other types of legitimate assessments that still need to be explored regarding participatory learning. That said, here's my first take on how reading about badges has helped my thinking about my students' online compositions.

1. Badges can help distribute assessment. Sure, I'm a classroom teacher, and I still have to assign grades at the end of the course. However I shouldn't be the sole issuer of badges. One of the things that underpins a lot of the badges movement is that some assessment should be done by peers, and this seems especially appropriate in online communites. Cathy Davidson expresses her enthusiasm for "peer-driven systems as an alternative to some of the rigid, limited, standardized forms of evaluation." Henry Jenkins is "deeply skeptical" of the massive push for badges going on right now because, among other things, "many young people have deep ambivalences about the kinds of 'credit' adults choose to give (or withhold) around their activities." Still, I can't help thinking that with some peer-driven systems, we could see, as Dan Hickey describes,"self-evident examples of learning ecosystems that have been fundamentally transformed or entirely created by digital badges." My challenge: handing over some of the assessments to the peer community of students.

2. Badges can recognize individual and social achievements.  For example on the individual level I think there's something valuable when a student posts a discussion that is well-crafted and results in a meaningful conversation, even if it's only with one other person. But just as valuable is a discussion post that results in a robust conversation among many members of the community, even if the original post is not all that well crafted.  David Theo Goldberg writes that badges work "within contexts that socially support them and where their users are invested in their significance." Andrea Zellner says that badges "should be operationalized in a way that incentivizes social learning and community involvement." My challenge: finding the balance between recognizing individual contribution and significance to the community.

3. Badges can make learning objectives visible. John Martin comments that "many of the standards we follow are rather nebulous and abstract for learners, particularly in the younger levels. With badges we can track and reward achievement as a progression rather than having students wait until something big like a report card to identify how they are performing." Barry Joseph, who through Global Kids and other programs has implemented badges for a number of years now, feels that if we offer badges to learners we have to be clear about how to earn them. Barry writes, "Our learning objectives, previously invisible within our lesson plans, are now made visible, empowering the youth to hold us accountable." My challenge: being more explicit about the steps students can take to becoming more effective communicators.

My web navigator badge

Henry Jenkins warns us that if we decide to adopt badges we need to do so only if "it's the right thing for your group." So with Youth Voices in mind and as a way to address each of the challenges I laid out above, I have a few initial thoughts about experimenting with badges.

1. Students could be involved in the distribution of assessment through something as simple as a "Like" feature for discussion posts and comments. But in addition to a simple "Like" or "Thumbs up" icon, I'd like to see an accompanying text box where the user gives a quick explanation as to why they like or don't like a post, comment, or reply. Archived, these rationales could be used for more reflective writing later on.... I also think judicious use of user stats could help distribute assessment too.
2. Base some badges on roles like the curator and moderator roles in the Scratch community Mitchel Resnick writes about. I could see additional roles like mentor and editor working in the Youth Voices community.
3. How can I make learning objectives more visible? (to illustrate I'll use something from Paul Allison's "Youth Voices Badges and Quests" document). One of the learning objectives I have for my students is that they become effective at collaborative argumentation, but how might I make this more visible to students? Example: here's some text from the Common Core about argumentative writing that speaks to this learning objective: "Engage in authentic conversations using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence" (second part of EA Writing 12.1). One way to do that is to "reply to other people's comments on a discussion that you started on Youth Voices or one that you commented on earlier." But even here, there are different ways to "level up." For example, a student might directly quote from another so that it's clear what they're commenting on; I think directly quoting another is important because oftentimes writers aren't sure what it is exactly in their discussion post that people are commenting on. However directly quoting another writer may or may not further the conversation. If I just agree with you by repeating what you wrote, there's not much more to say – end of conversation. But if I agree (or disagree) with you and provide new evidence to support my point of view, we are likely to enter into a robust conversation.

--------

Thanks to +Sheryl Grant for sharing the reading list below with me to get me started:

• Cathy Davidson's Can Badging Be the Zipcar of Testing and Assessment?
• David Theo Goldberg's Threading the Needle Between Skepticism and Evangelism
• Henry Jenkins' How to Earn Your Skeptic Badge
• Mitch Resnick's Still A Badge Skeptic
• Dan Hickey's Open Badges and the Future of Assessment
• Dan Hickey's Digital Badges as Transformative Assessment
• Andrea Zellner's Pretty Sure Badges Aren't the Answer to our Motivation Problem
• Andrea Zellner's Badges as Goals: Achievement Goal Theory
• Judd Antin and Elizabeth Churchill's Social Psychology of Badges

What I would add to Sheryl's list:

• Phillipp Schmidt's Let's Make Badges Not Stink
• Gene Koo's Games, Badges and Learning
• Alex Halavais' Badges: The Skeptical Evangelist
• David Wiley's More on Badges and Assessment