By Sheryl Grant. By any measure, the HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Badges for Lifelong Learning Competition--our fourth Digital Media and Learning Competition--has been our most ambitious and most potentially transformative initiative. Collectively, we took an idea as old as badging, layered it on top of learning, and plugged it into the Web. And by collective, I mean "standing on the shoulders of giants" kind of collective. It’s taken a lot of people, a lot of organizations, and a lot of giants to get here. And most importantly, it's taken Connie Yowell, Director of Education at the MacArthur Foundation, to be the bold thinker mapping the way for us. Read more...

By Ernesto Priego. My colleagues Élika Ortega and Silvia Gutiérrez have launched a site for their Mapa HD project. (HD stands for 'humanidades digitales', needless to say 'digital humanities' in Spanish). This is a project that originated during the DíaHD (Day of Digital Humanities in Spanish and Portuguese). Élika and Silvia are working together across borders and time zones mapping who and where digital humanists are through a survey and visualisations of the survey results. Read more...

By Dan Hickey. In previous posts at HASTAC and Remediating Assessment I argued that we need to look beyond the intended purposes of digital badges and consider the actual functions of badges.  This builds on what Jim Greeno has convinced me what happens when situative views of knowing and learning are applied to assessment. A later post elaborated on the summative, formative, and transformative functions of digital badges. That later post also promised a subsequent post on what we might call transcendent functions. I had written some about it in the original version but it was too long and I really could not wrap my head around it at the time. Read more...