You get a badge! and You get a badge!
How do you get your kid to eat green beans (when they don’t like green beans)? You can certainly reason with that 2-year-old and go through all the nutrition facts and reasons why it’s really important for a growing toddler to get all those good vitamins.
Or, you can bribe that 2-year-old with promises: ice cream, screen time, play date with that neighbor whose laugh sounds like a hyena, you know. Bribes. It’s a pay to play world with toddlers, after all.
Motivators
Kids and yes, adults too, need motivators. Some are fortunate and disciplined enough to be 100% intrinsically motivated, while others — including your humble narrator — require a little something extra from time to time. It might be a paycheck, or a pat on the back, or a thumbs up from your colleague, but those aren’t public and they aren’t permanent. Enter badging.
Badges allow users to display their skills and achievements publicly and show the world the ways in which a user is capable and qualified. I might hang my diploma on my wall, but badges awarded on the Internet are available for public perusal.
Maybe the parents of my students want to see what I’ve been learning. Maybe I want to show off my most recent achievements, awarded by my school district. Maybe I need a way to keep track of the skills and standards my students have mastered. Enter badging.
Solutions
We have recently been experimenting with Badge List as a method of promoting personal professional development in our school district. The process of building a badge is pretty simple, as is awarding them.
For users who are being asked to use a new tool, providing a badge that recognizes their new learning may improve the likelihood that the user will engage with the new tool in the first place.
I was motivated to complete a few of the tutorial modules at Badge List simply to earn the badge. For those users who are motivated by rewards, this is a simple, straightforward solution, and may be enough to engage users in chasing their own professional development goals.