#learning pathways

Playing football in your childhood is great way for your children to grow up to be happy and healthy adults. Even as the risk of sports injury during sports training in SEDA College WA has attracted greater attention in recent years, for many parents and their youngsters, the advantages of participating in a well-run youth football programme and learning pathways far outweigh the drawbacks. Here are just some of the benefits of playing football:

The Health Benefits

Many of the health benefits of youth football are obvious. During sports training, it increases cardiovascular fitness and stamina. It offers a fun and effective way to build strength. SEDA College WA sports programme also allows students to achieve learning pathways to make themselves better. Ball handling, throwing, and catching help improve hand-eye coordination; running, blocking, and pass coverage work muscles used for balance and agility are achieved during sports training. At the same time, sports training in SEDA College WA has a lot of physical contact which helps strengthen growing joints and bones. Other health benefits are not so apparent at first glance. Sports training and vigorous exercise - far from being simply mindless motion - increases brain activity and can help young athletes think more clearly. It also helps them concentrate and stay focused.

Facing football's challenges and learning pathways - learning new plays and skills, following the coach’s rules during sports training in SEDA College WA and playing in less-than-perfect conditions – teaches self-reliance and ways to overcome obstacles and handle inconveniences with grace and style.

Football for your child's wellbeing

Sports training and exercise also helps counter the symptoms of anxiety and depression. Recent studies have touted the importance of outdoor activity for younger and older children alike. Engaging in casual games in playgrounds or backyards is no longer the norm for many students; SEDA College WA believes that organised play created by youth football programmes goes a long way toward picking up the slack.

Young athletes who play football will benefit from the experience and sports training, even if they don’t continue in the sport. Statistics show that a majority of college and professional athletes played two or more sports when they were young. As well, young people who exercise regularly are much more likely to exercise as adults. They also tend to do better in school.

Long-Term Success

One of the most important benefits of participating in youth football is teamwork. The learning pathway and the ability to be a good team member will pay off in school like in SEDA College WA and later in life, in the workplace, where using teams to accomplish tasks is increasingly important. Another long-term benefit: learning effective time-management skills. If you have to get to practice on time, and you have to practice to play in games you cannot miss, you’re going to have to learn how to make a schedule and stick to it. Parents raising young athletes will need to brush up on time-management skills, too.  

Agenda: http://bit.ly/RBSD26March

Speaker: Verena Roberts

Verena Roberts spent the last six months working on a final project for her Masters in Educational Technology Degree with the University of British Columbia. Much of her work investigated integrating formal and informal learning and how to develop learning pathways for m101, a pilot course in mobile learning at UBC. Open badges plays an important role in the research and proposal suggestions, which can be found on her blog.

To see Verena’s presentation document, click here.

How to create a credible currency around informal learning?

This question was at the heart of Verena's work, and her presentation to the research call attendees. Originally, Verena was more interested in exploring MOOCs in K-12 rather than higher education, and developed a MOOC for K-12 with the help of Steve Hargadon, founder of Classroom 2.0 and Web 2.0 Labs, which was based on digital citizenship. At the end of the course, she created a badge that students could choose to apply for, but many of her students felt better "learning for the sake of learning," saying the badge option put more pressure on them - so she removed the badge from the course.

This process led Verena to think about what learning was all about - wanting to capture learning that happens anywhere, to engage more students, and focus on open learning. Verena was asked by Hargadon how to create a credible currency for informal learning, a concept that fascinated her and spurred her into her more recent work.

The term 'currency' is inherently linked to value, and so led Verena to the question: what was the value associated with this work? What makes open learning important?

Verena carried out a literature review focusing on a "hybrid pedagogy" drawing on her experience in K-12 and looking at flexible, open learning programs. From this, she then looked at how to create potential badge types for competencies that could form a common currency for informal learning.

Questions Verena addressed included:

How do we measure learning anywhere and anytime?

How can we ensure that out of school learning get recognized and appreciated?

Will teachers value informal learning? How can we help them value it?

When examining ways to track informal learning, she "became obsessed with learning pathways" and inevitably began to track and examine her own learning pathway - an "autoethnography" of her own learning experiences.

Badge what you don't have

Verena's research dug into what competency-based learning (CBL) means, which wasn't as simple as it seemed. Within the US, the idea of CBL has only recently begun to gain more clarity and traction in the public dialogue, and outside of the US there are very different ideas about how particular competencies are defined. The differences between Europe and the US were especially confusing, but led her to an important conclusion: that, overall, "competencies may have many definitions, meanings, interpretations, and perceptions."

Ultimately, Verena says, competency-based learning and badges won't be about what you know but about what you do with that knowledge. That means framing badge criteria based on skills but also behaviors and competencies that are needed.

One of the first questions many are asked when they start looking into badges as a way to track and recognize learning is, "what do you badge?" Verena's answer was one that intrigued a number of us: "You badge what you don't have." This means using badges to recognize learning that is occurring beyond the formal learning environments, which is already represented by a certification or diploma, etc.

Verena created different badge 'types' and 'levels' for the m101 mobile learning course as a result of her work, going through numerous iterations of badges and competency frameworks (see page three).

Conclusions & next steps

"Badges are part of an emerging pedagogy." This was Verena's overall conclusion that she took from her in-depth work exploring competencies, pathways and badges. 

To see how badges were perceived, Verena spoke to industry leaders and communities about their thoughts on badges to determine whether they could be taken seriously in the contexts she was exploring. The most common questions she was asked were about trust, credibility and representation - leading to the question at the beginning of this post: how can a common language, and currency, around informal learning be fostered that imparts value onto badges that is recognized across sectors by those who 'count'?

Visit Verena's blog for more information and ongoing updates on her incredible work: http://www.openclassroomonline.com/

Verena's work is an important part of the growing body of exploratory research into some of the issues we have been tackling in these calls. The newly formed Badge Alliance will continue to address this and other key issues facing the badging ecosystem - and you can help!

Guest Post by: Susse Sønderby

This past few week we have been talking a lot about tree analogies, ways that growing a garden could apply to organic personal learning, and a lot of amazing references to garden colors . In terms of showing of skills with badges, the analogy of tree rings resonates with me. A tree is as many years old as it has rings (or so I was told in third grade). Visually, this is a great way to show time vs. learning and illustrate that the more experience you get, the higher you can grow. The way you see a tree stump with the inner rings inside and the outer rings on the outside as a way to illustrate the layers of this was an inspiration for me, see examples.

Tree stub, hub hub Resume 2.0 from Susse Sønderby Jensen on Vimeo.

My stab on Resume 2.0 has been to visualize skills and badges outside the Mozilla Backpack. Showing skills learned over time has been a big part of this. I think the most valuable aspect of my prototypes is that badges take up as much space on a resume as for example a degree, in presenting the insight of a person's skills I think this is essential for the future of learning, also to second Mark Slack's article on The future of resumes and bring learning outside the classroom.

Emily’s reference to learning as a wild river, flowing down the stream, I really enjoy this metaphor and going back to the analogy of the WILD flowing river of skills, giving the skills the possibility to be shown side by side and have earned badges be as big a part of your skill set as the degree you have earned.