Yesterday Scott Barber tweeted a link to The Certification Experience to which I responded (without reading it; and it is a good read)

i’m now thinking something like the lovechild or open badges and entaggle is the route forward

If you are not aware of it yes, Entaggle is site for ‘tagging’ people as a form of peer credentialing created by Elisabeth Hendrickson. In a follow-up to her I flushed out what I think the differences are between ‘tags’ and ‘badges’ which she allowed me to make public.

*So here is my thinking of tags vs. badges. Tags themselves seem to be more about the relationships between the tagger and the taggee (‘someone I know in person’, ‘someone I look up to’) whereas a badge is something that is earned and/or has requirements of demonstration of skills. Badges also have a more formal issuing authority and repudiation scheme (the tag ‘someone I look up to’ was removed from taggee by tagger, how is that made visible?).

In the Mozilla context of badges, there could be an HTML badge that you get by live-editing an existing page to submit a form to some ‘secret’ place that registered that you have ‘completed’ the badge (though X-Ray Goggles or Firebug or whatever).

(I also have badges on the brain from Cubs and have been looking at Red Star type pages the for the last week plotting the second half of the year.)

What would an Agile Tester badge look like?*

  • Would need an Issuing Authority (Entaggle?)
  • Likely have a list of Tags that that included both mandatory and optional ones (Exploratory Tester, Lives in the spirit of the Agile are mandatory, Performance Tester is optional)
  • When the requirements are ‘met’ they get the badge added to their backpack
  • Repudiation happens automatically when the requisite tags are removed from the person

I think too the Mozilla badge vision has the notion of levelling so could have Bronze/Silver/Gold which require a greater set of tags to earn (and keep).

Badges from a ‘game’ perspective is a pretty easy way to motivate ‘kids’ but there is nothing inherently motivating (at least for me) in trying to earn a ‘tag’. A badge, maybe. Especially if the badge gets some clout behind it. (Though yes, a tag could and should also get clout behind it as well.)

Badges could also, in the Entaggle context, become an aggregate of tags distributed by a number of people. Hmmm. More feature requests!