Doug Belshaw | Making Visible the Social Value of Open Recognition
“As important as ‘getting hired’ is, it’s possible to go beyond badges as micro-credentials for hiring. To use Douglas Rushkoff’s phrase, we can use badges to help ‘find the others.” —Doug Belshaw, Ed.D
Leading at the edges of badging and recognition, and pushing the boundaries is Doug Belshaw, a specialist in digital literacies working at the intersection of learning, technology, and community. An original member of the Mozilla badging team, a founding member of We Are Open (WAO) Co-op, and a Director/Consultant with Dynamic Skillset Ltd, Doug has over 12 years focused on Open Recognition to improve our world.
At this year's Badge Summit, Doug will be speaking on Open Recognition, The Role of Trust, and Getting Weird with the Open Recognition Alliance.
A Connector, Helper, and Pioneer in Open Recognition!
With a doctorate in digital literacies and over 20+ years in education, Doug is deeply committed to helping others to develop web literacy skills, exploring new forms of open education and accreditation such as Open Badges. In his TEDx talk, and book ‘The Essentials of Digital Literacies’, he shares about eight core elements, namely cultural, cognitive, constructive, communicative, confident, creative, critical, and civic.
He has deepened this work through the We Are Open (WAO) cooperative.
“With WAO we help organisations embrace transparency and openness which, of course, is a great fit for using badges to recognise development. After over a decade talking about the potential of badges as credentials we’ve seen mass adoption, meaning that hundreds of millions of badges are now being earned every year.” — Doug Belshaw.
To Doug and his peers in the open recognition effort, it is not just about being recognized for skills and competencies in order to get hired, employed, or advance in your employment. It is also about the social power of open recognition to ‘find the others.’
Find the others is a phrase that Douglas Rushkoff uses to describe finding people who are interested in working on the same kind of missions/areas as you.
Badges inherently have a social value in addition to a functional value. It is therefore important for us to explore and make visible the ways badges are also common symbols, connecting people over shared priorities and paving the way for deeper collaborations.
Badging Everything That’s Worth Learning!
I caught up with Doug and asked him a few questions about the Open Recognition and Badging community, his own learning journey, and some of the key themes he sees emerging in the space. He also shared about a project, Reframing Recognition, which he is looking forward to sharing more about at this year's Badge Summit.
What is it about badges, micro- and digital credentials that drew you to this space as the right possible fit to meet learners’ and organizational needs?
Back in 2011, I was working in Higher Education and I stumbled upon the very first MacArthur Foundation-funded pilot project. Although it was focused on developer skills, I realized that the concept had HUGE potential! Having just spent 27 years in formal education and attaining a doctorate, I wanted my own children (aged four and zero at the time) to have a real choice as to whether or not to go to university. And the way to do that is to be able to badge/credential everything that’s worth learning.
What is one theme you see emerging this year in the skills and credentialing space that is really important for us as a community to focus on and discuss?
The move to version 3.0 of the Open Badges specification means alignment with the W3C Verifiable Credentials specification. There are all kinds of implications to that, but one small thing which might have a huge impact is that the badge image is no longer a required field. Given that creating images to go with badge metadata is often a stumbling block (or even a blocker) for some people, this could lead to a lot more recognition being given out!
What new learning are you and/or your team focused on right now?
WAO has just launched a short ‘Reframing Recognition’ course to help people who are new to the concept of Open Recognition. It’s free, and delivered by email, just like our other courses. Anyone can access it here, and forward it to other people they know!
What is one misconception or assumption you see people having about digital credentials that you’d love the community to talk more about?
I’ve been talking about this recently in the Open Recognition community, about how the Open Badges community had a strong theoretical underpinning. We’re losing that with the focus in Higher Education being almost exclusively on microcredentials. Julie Keane from Participate wrote a great piece on this that I’d love everyone to read. I’ve also shared similar thoughts on the WAO blog.
When you consider where we are as a community today, compared to where we were about 5 years ago, what is one development that really gets you excited?
I’m delighted at the resurgence of the original ideas underpinning Open Badges. There’s now some pushback on the idea that badges = microcredentials, when really the ethos which got things started was around recognition. So the community which has emerged around the concept of ‘Open Recognition’ is really interesting and exciting to me. I really do long for a world where universities and formal education institutions are just one of the places through which we recognise lifewide learning.
A Short Course on Reframing Recognition
Doug is looking forward to sharing more about WAO at this year’s Badge Summit, as well as a short course WAO has developed on Reframing Recognition.
The purpose of the course is to help people who are new to the concept of Open Recognition. It’s free, and delivered by email, just like our other courses. Anyone can access it here, and forward it to other people they know! The course is designed for
- Educators and trainers
- Community leaders and organizers
- HR and L&D professionals
- Non-profit organisations and NGOs
- Professional associations.
To learn more and sign-up for the course visit Learn with WAO.
We look forward to learning more with Dr. Belwshaw at this year’s Badge Summit, as well as the great work WAO and the Open Recognition community are contributing.
To learn more and connect with Doug visit his LinkedIn Profile and Medium where he is sharing about the Social Power of Open Recognition, The Future of Open Recognition amongst others in a series of online papers. People interested in joining the WAO Badge Community and joining the effort to Keep Badges Weird, are also very much welcomed to show up to the community calls: https://badges.community.
Sources
[1] Belshaw, D. (2023). Finding the Others: The Social Power of Open Recognition Badges. We Are Open Co-op. Medium Magazine.
[2] Belshaw, D. (2023). Open Recognition: Towards a Practical Utopia: Exploring the Future of Work and Learning. We Are Open Co-op. Medium Magazine.
[3] Belshaw, D. The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies.
