The Transcendent Potential of Digital Badges and Paradigm Shifts in Education

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...