Winners of the Open Badge contest #dmlbadges

The winners of the Open Badge contest have been announced. Very cool competition to support innovative projects that aim to develop tools and methods for open assessment and recognition of skills through an Open Badge Infrastructure (OBI). The OBI is developed by the Mozilla Foundation (with funds from the MacArthur foundation) in collaboration with P2PU.org (Peer2Peer University). It is a very promising project that might lay the foundation for a true distributed online reputation/badge system. The project is interesting, because it shows a shift from formal, centralized assessment and certification toward other kinds of assessment of both soft and hard skills in a decentralized infrastructure that allows anyone to earn a coherent badge-based reputation. Such a reputation is managed by the user self, and each online community or forum, course, open education initiative, museum, etc. is able to connect its badge system to this infrastructure using the protocols described by it. Doing this increases the likeliness that a badge-ecosystem emerges that is much better able to recognize skills and show it to relevant people (including employers).

More information on the project: openbadges.org.

Winners include the cool Curiosity Machine, a Virtual Ecotourism project, and many more (but I cannot view them anymore, the links seem broken)