Purely Digital for Distinct Skills, Knowledge and Competencies
Professional Examination Service, January 24, 2013
In my email today was this press release (useless adjectives excised): "Professional Examination Service today introduced the credentialing industry’s first  comprehensive system to create, deliver and display digital 'badges,' the ProExam Digital Micro-Credential solution. The new service is being shown for the first time at the Association of Test Publishers’ annual Innovations in Testing Conference in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Feb. 3-6, 2013. The ProExam Digital Micro-Credential adds psychometric soundness, exacting assessment and one-click secure verification to the emerging open badges environment, which is being driven by efforts and organizations such as the Mozilla Open Badges project and the MacArthur Foundation." What's most interesting in this to me is the recasting of 'badges' as 'micro-credentials'. More...

Going All In: How to Make Competency-Based Learning Work
Katrina Schwartz, Mind/Shift, June 16, 2014

Examination of the employment of competency-based learning in New Hampshire and a discussion of the issues around competency-based learning in general. For my own part, I think something like competency-based learning is the way of the future, but not for the reasons suggested. More...

The Learning Curve: Education and Skills for Life
Paul Kielstra, Pearson, June 9, 2014
This is a fairly basic-level report on some trends in education and skills development, focused mostly on lifelong learning. The full 28-page PDF is available here. While nothing in the report is particularly controversial, the language and emphasis is clearly slanted toward a particular perspective. More...

Skills and Higher Education in Canada
Daniel Munro, Canada 2020, June 4, 2014
Interesting and very detailed report from an institute called Canada 2020 on education and skills development. It underlines the importance of education in social and economic development, and focuses on two challenges - excellence, which it defines as "producing the right skills" (their emphasis), and equity, which focuses on the distribution of skills. More...