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Mapping Human Knowledge with Open Badges

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Open Badges Community Call October 8, 2014 http://bit.ly/CCOct8

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Page 1: Mapping Human Knowledge with Open Badges

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Page 2: Mapping Human Knowledge with Open Badges

Gamification Tech. Specially in relation to learning, OpenBadges is one of the best options as an standard for gamification processes. It is an standard to represent acquired competences and skills, but also knowledge, aptitudes, etc.

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Context. If we ask to everyone attending today’s conference about these badges (image), probably we could draw our own conclusions thanks to our visual culture: they are golden, geometric, artistic value, rounded, etc. But, could you situate them on any geographical context? In any age? Is it medieval? Civil or Military? European or Asian? What is the message? Bets are accepted!!!

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Context. In 1786 Great Britain broke a Peace Treaty launching a surprise attack against Spanish navy from Peru, destroying the famous frigate “Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes” (being blown up in the middle of the image). Previously shown golden badges are replicas from Spanish Almirants uniform whom participated in the dogfight. Any crew member could identify the said badges and associate them to rank (status) and knowledge (skills) of who wore them, and asses the contextual value (ranking) of the badge itself.

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Context. Image: 1915 Key. Guidance for Universal Structure of Badges Analogic badges have always represented awarded/acquired knowledge in a context, in a universe. Digital Badges should not be an exception to this. Every badge is born within a context and as such, they are parameterized within the limits of the information management system they belong. In other words, the badges universes are limited to be the metaphor for the universes they have impact into. The agents which belong to these badges’ space of influence should, in fact, know the value of every badge in the system they are impacted by (meta-knowledge). That leads to the generation of a map (no matter if it’s mental or written) which represents the real mapped value (ranking / knowledge) of the symbol (the badge) I.e., when we look at a policeman badge it should be clear to us that it is, indeed, a law enforcement agent. But, as we don’t belong to the police space of influence/universe it might be difficult for us to identify his specific rank and profile (sargeant, anti-narcotics, etc.).

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Context. A badge is integrated into a system because it is always the representation of the acquisition of something within a value system and, at the same time, this system or universe of values is a metaphorical reflection of a system or universe of real or metaphysical agents (knowledge / thoughts) and their relationships between them (ie. Military badges represent army structure). Without any relationship between badges themselves, they can not belong to any universe, so they have no value, they all behave as isolated representations or even just graphic artistic representations impossible to identify. Every badge (digital or not) must be integrated within a system with relational identifiers which represent the knowledge provided and the agents involved in a parameterized way (maybe a manual, maybe a code or digital metadata).

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Context. Until now Mozilla Foundation and their colleagues have defined a very useful and complex structure of the badge as a unit, a unitary entity. They have digitally shaped the knowledge acquisition, hence badge structure is progressing well.

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Page 8: Mapping Human Knowledge with Open Badges

Context. Nevertheless, the technology behind Open Badges is not setting up a clear digital relation between the rest of the system’s agents, meaning:

1- Badges with other Badges 2- Badges with Issuers 3- Badges with Signers 4- Badges with Earners 5- Etc.

Any Open Badge appears to be like complex and walled medieval cities.

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Page 9: Mapping Human Knowledge with Open Badges

Context. Even when linked metadata is starting to be risen in Open Badges technology, most of them behave as isolated elements within a non-existent ecosystem. Badges are playing alone… We know they ‘use white clothe, they wear a baseball cap but… They need a team and play against other teams’.

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Context. Every analogic badge belongs to a system of values but… Could we say the same about the digital ones?

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The Problem: Fragmentation Then the main problem with Open Badges is the fragmentation / atomization, we mentioned in our article (http://gecon.es/2014/09/09/openbadges-conocimiento-humano/) Open Badges have got the best from both worlds:

1. Heritage from the analogic world of Badges, that is, the subjective graphic representation of skills / competences / human Knowledge within a visual culture ecosystem (with agents who are familiar with meta-knowledge to interpret the meanings and hierarchy of the badges) and…

2. From the world of digital data. But this digital data should serve the purpose of defining not only the Open Badge structure in relation to its own structure but the relation of itself within a weight and values ecosystem. Why? Because the benefits for the agents within the system the open badges could define.

i.e. Each university worldwide would issue an Open Badge for every subject they are teaching we would live in a 17 millions of badges system. How do we know if a specific Mobile Marketing Curse’s Open Badge is more valuable to us than another one? By doing by ourselves the work a computational algorithm should have be done: checking agents’ information, taking a look on the educational organization, comparing with our profile and interests, etc. Indeed generating in our mind the relational universe of the badges we’re reviewing, a kind of a personal BadgeRank. This is exactly what we would like the universe of Open Badges to do for us automatically.

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Badge Universe. At this moment we have the possibility to acquire Open Badges that, at this moment, they have a few added value in comparison to a physical badge or credential (i.e. association to a digital profile and the mobility this means) But this is something that might be also done in a similar way be scanning oneself physical credentials and sharing. In our opinion thanks to a universe of Open Badges we would add am essential differential value to digital badges, a value way beyond analogic ones are worth. We think the problem we are facing right now isn’t very different than the one faced Google when they designed its PageRank, fruit of a research which had as objective to know what was more relevant in processes of dynamic relationships between agents: webpages, search engines, users, etc.

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Badge Universe. The Mozilla Open Badge Infrastructure explains the logics of issuing and receiving an OpenBadge, but it doesn't really translate into an interlinked ecosystem or universe of Open Badges. And we need to generate this universe.

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Badge Universe. We’ve stumped into Leibniz in an article by Joaquín Siabra in which he analysed an hyper complex system (the game Dwarf Fortress) with the Monadology model of universe. In this case we realized the inevitability of badges as representatives of acquired skills that will establish relationships between them all and, in turn, those links will generate new spaces that will be plotted as cartographies by the badges themselves because those spaces contain the meaning of it’s place and it’s movements. We would like to establish parallels between Leibniz’s theory and the ‘tagable’ knowledge thanks to OpenBadges:

• Knowledge is a metaphysic concept • It’s dynamic • It’s relational • It’s representable • It’s mapable

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Badge Universe. Leibniz’s model of universe and existence by the means of monads made us think about Open Badges and how they need to be related to other Open Badges in order to give meaning to themselves. Ontology, the study of what exists has gone from metaphysics to computational and information sciences, as a method and technology of representing knowledge and portions of the reality in a way a computer can understand by the means of a well specified vocabulary. Finally we end up in Linked-Data, as the way of publish and share data in a schema-less world, that we need to couple with such a defined vocabulary set that allows the OpenBadge universe to exist as one.

1. Linked-data standards: RDF: resource description framework URI: uniform resource identificator

2. “Vocabularies” (ontologies) standards:

RDFS: resource description framework schema Owl: Web Ontology language Skos: simple knowledge organization system

3. Query language for the universe of linked-data resources:

SparQL: Protocol and RDF Query Language

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Badge Universe. Badges have meaning and relations between them: hierarchy, associative, equivalent and other semantic relations one might think of. This picture is a map of relations between topics, professors and universities extracted from dbpedia, a linked-data resource, with which researchers from the university of Sydney computed synthetic rankings of universities by measuring resources’ Information Content, meaning the quality of related semantincs in the linked-data universe. Meymandpour, R. and Davis, J.G., 2013. University Ranking Using Linked Open Data. In: C. Bizer, T. Heath, T. Berners-Lee, M. Hausenblas and S. Auer, eds., Proceedings of the WWW2013 Workshop on Linked Data on the Web. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: CEUR-WS.org.

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Badge Universe. A new badge anatomy… Standardizing educative resources and it’s agents. In the article we have proposed a first approximation to Open Badges spatialization, stablishing relationships between the elements of the anatomy (metadata + graphic). To pointing that it should evolve into something more complex that what actually is. This is why we have divided the conceptual space of Knowledge (in a very first approach) in three vectors: fields, competences and categories (following Charla Long’s schema). Into this schema an issued Open Badge would be the reflection of the acquisition of such those (field, competence and category) both in its metadata and graphical representation. OpenBadges then would define:

• The Badge Space/Universe around itself • Relationships between them • Status of involved agents:

• Education centers • Students • Teachers • Courses • etc.

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Following Steps. We are well aware about the necessity of a thoughtful analysis in many fronts:

• To get knowledge about Open Badge universe and Gamification • Standardization of educative resources and it’s agents (metaphysical ontology) • Computational modelling (computational ontology, graphs and algorithms)

We are working in both the first steps to establish a relationship between all involved agents to define the weighting of Open Badges and the needed ontology (et al.). About the third step we are being aided by the Computational Algorithm Research Group of University of Almeria (Spain).

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The Utopia. We would like the Open Badges Universe to be a space where we could move around (following very clear learning pathways thanks to BadgeRank), eating (earning Open Badges) and growing (incorporating Open Badges to our Status level) Image: flOw game by Jenova Chen (Thatgamecompany, 2006).

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