I seemed to have marked my time at the Digital Media andLearning Conference by a movement through the story of badges. On Thursday as I was getting my conference
bearings, I edged into what turned out to be an impromptu lobby session on badges. So as far as I can tell badges are a way of
alternately recognizing work and skill attainment through online display of
earned symbols. (Think about your old
girl scout vest.) The badges I have been hearing about at DML are being tied to
or layered over forms of assessment in schools or newly formed as online
recognition formats for non-school entities.
In my experience of early #dml2012 the rhetoric seemed to be
that badges could be an optimum replacement of grades, in which students can be
recognized for their achievements and successes and move forward with the next
steps of learning in self directed ways. Metaphorically I’m not sure that I fully
walked away from that lobby badge session during the rest of the conference. My head couldn’t quite stop thinking about
that puzzle of people standing about and circling up chairs in the hallway to
figure out this badge thing. Well, I’ll circle back to that towards the end of
my post.
At first I felt rather at odds with the DML crowd, I found
the thread of competitiveness unnerving up next to and sometimes woven with
strings of civic engagement and social justice.
The collusion with private for profits that is quickly moving in on all
of public education was an unapologetic segment of DML, too. I felt this most at the awards ceremony
for the DML research funding competition, Rewards, Reputation and Recognition. All of the funds
awarded were for badge based projects, in fact the application itself requested
projects surrounding the conversation on badges. There is an interesting side note about e portfolios here, that felt very side-lined to me.
As the endweek and weekend unfolded, though, I noticed a
sense of hacking (of course) into the normative stance on badges and
privatization, particularly notable in the final ignite session when HenryJenkins’ moment of badge critique was met with applause of at least half the room. Throughout the conference everyone’s stance on everything seemed to me
to rotate around the issue of badges.
Were badges mentioned apologetically? with excitement? accompanied by a WTF face? or with
unconvinced curiosity?
The best example I saw of a counter-badge story comes from a
youth led session, Education for a Digital Democracy: Harnessing the Power of New Media to Empower Urban Students Personally, Academically and Civically, in which a youth presenter from the Council on Youth Research told a
story about a community member coming by the school garden and asking if he
could buy vegetables. The kid narrated
how the student-gardeners shook their heads, saying, “ you don’t have to buy
them, they’re free.” The high school free public garden shows the
possibility of use value in education.
The kids were involved in the learning surrounding the gardening project
because of the civic engagement, the social connectivity and the material
creation of a sustainable and healthy food source for their communities.
The non-badge sessions I went to and badge-critical action here and there had me thinking on the plane ride back to the East Coast about
the theories and stake holders working through badges. I decided to let some theorist speak for
themselves. Here’s a short play on badge
theory:
Arne Duncan: These badges are awesome! We should start adding them to state
flags! You tech people are da bomb!
Karl Marx: (sigh) YOU would like them.
Michel Foucault: (with straight face) Yes, all the
better to propagate the panopticon prison model creating self-regulation of
state ideology.
Duncan: Self-regulation is awesome! Think how much money we can save.
Marx: (sigh) (to others) You see,
change from inside the model is impossible.
Helen Cixous: (with frown) Let us explore the significance
of the closed circle of the badge symbol.
This is the closing off of meaning through symbolically representing
learning, which is intangible, fluid, moving, in the confines of measured marks.
We must work to the dispersal of meaning—ripping the seams from the stitches of
patriarchy that bind each of us, women and men, to a history of categorization
and binding off (in circular symbols of attainment- of what!) from one another,
from possibility, (continues into hash of words whose meaning is understood in
the loss of meaning)
Duncan: Uhhhh… I think she’s with
us! Yeah! Badges!
Marx: (sighs) This infatuation
with credentialing and recognition is yet another spasm of capitalism that
seeks to mark and differentiate kids of labor and accord a differentiation of
value to those labors.
Foucault: We are each creating the
power/knowledge that exists in badges, which of course, means we can
potentially, if at great risk, resist.
Duncan: (to all) Exactly who are you,
anyway? (lifts eyebrows suspiciously)
So I’m back home thinking about my
first DML conference and what I find most interesting about the space is the
mix of people, ideas and purposes. Even
as I saw an official script on badges from DML itself, I saw in the people of
DML many layers of inquiry into, re-mixing of, countering and openly resisting
badgification. This is interesting to me
in terms of this moment when badging is becoming hot, since being at DML gave
me space to sort out the particulars of my lens on the issue. Also, my tour of DML via badge talk gave me
insight into what kind of community DML is. Here’s what I’ve come up with: DML is a diverse place, with people from many
sectors, a large contingent of whom are
very interested in re-mixing, hacking and resisting dominant politics,
economics and social hierarchies that maintain current class structures to
the material benefit of a few. It’s
really good to me that a range of people and ideas are circulating at DML. This makes it a site for public conversation
and action. And yet, if this a place for
a resistant conversation with many stake holders, what the badge are we doing
focusing as a community, on symbols of learning rather than learning
itself?
