#atp2014

This has been a crazy week for the open badges team.  Amongst our team members, we are covering 3 conferences: ATP Innovations in Testing, SXSWEdu and the Digital Media and Learning conference.  This includes 3 panel discussions, 1 interactive talk and presentation, 1 ignite talk, 2 Science Fair booths preparation, not to mention 1 BadgeKit private beta release and 1 Discovery prototype showcase.  WE CAN DO THIS!

I wrote this while I was on a plane with colleagues Meg from the Badges team, Matt Williams from SF Hive and Dustin from Sprout Fund. We had departed an unseasonably frigid Austin, having survived SXSWEdu, and were headed to an even more frigid Boston for DML.  So where are we at this midway-ish point in the week?

I think we’re pretty good to go with BadgeKit Private Beta release. More to come on that through several of our channels. 

We’re excited to showcase the Discovery prototype at DML and to get feedback from conference attendees. 

We have 1 panel at ATP, 2 panels at SXSWEdu under our belt now and have 1 more SXSWEdu panel, 1 ignite talk at DML and 2 Science Fair booths to go. 

Reflections on the panels and sessions so far: I couldn’t help but notice that the badges and digital credentialing conversation has come a long way. The ATP Innovations in Testing has not been a conference we had participated in the past. It is attended by the well-known guardians of high stakes testing, assessment and accreditation like Pearson, ACT, ETS etc. I popped into a couple sessions and was surprised to see the level of interest around digital credentialing and also its increasing relevance. On the actual panel that I had the honor of being a part of, it was clear that the badges conversation had expanded beyond the esoteric and was reaching a broader audience.

*** A session at ATP Innovations in Testing about the Changing Landscape of Recruiting in Industries, mentioned Digital Credentialing and Mozilla Open Badges.