In my jobs I have been fortunate to be able, in fact encouraged, to keep up to date with the developments in my field. One of the ways I have been doing this is by attending the international convention of AECT. Here I run into my former professors and peers from Twente and Penn State, learn something new from time to time and try to report back when I managed to apply some theory in the real world.
In recent years the topic of openness has interested me; it makes so much sense to me. Even more when one is working in an organisation like Oxfam, where equal rights and equal access to resources is the central focus of all our work. I am developing some e-learning modules at the moment, and want them to be published under a Creative Commons license, and do run into problems with copyrights at the moment. So that will be one focus of my participation in this course.
At the last AECT convention (Jacksonville, FL, Nov 2011), I heard about Badges for the first time. And something immediately clicked for me again. So often I get questions about 'can we get accredited?' 'does this lead to a Masters?' 'what does this internal training actually mean?' And in my humble opinion the answers generally are no, no and whatever you take from it. And some people are very capable of expressing what they took from a training, how that changes the way they work, how it contributes to the organisations objectives and what it means for their value for the organisation. For this who are not so well able to voice this, badges can be an excellent additional tool to show what one is capable of.
I am going to try to design a system of badges for some of the trainings in my department in Oxfam. And participating in this course will help me gt a better idea on what it should include an how it works.
Looking forward to learning from/with others!
Cheers,
Jeroen
I am fascinated by this badge system. Is it really an informal credits system?
ReplyDeleteI enjoy studying things I'm interested in but not hugely interested in paper qualifications. (Hence #ioe12) This is easy for me to write because I have a job I like and am at an age where I'm unlikely to be looking for a new one!
I work in a university but with practical "how to do it" courses for teachers which don't give any academic points. Maybe badges is a way forward? Fun, relatively informal, but based learning a real skill.