The Penn State Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology is both an annual event and a year-round online discussion of ways that faculty and staff are using technology to enhance teaching, learning, and research.
In the past year, we developed a set of ten digital badges that can be used for introducing the interdisciplinary, lifelong learning skills associated with information literacy. We will discuss what we have learned from test driving this initial set of badges. We will also share the useful products of the Teaching and Learning with Technology fellowship focused on complementing the badges with deliverables such as evaluation rubrics to score badge evidence, an infographic to help you design effective badges, and a website to engage and entice other educators and badge earners. The presentation will feature updates to Penn State’s badging platform as well. This will help participants focus on the whole system and show the many components that need to be thought out when badges are implemented and adopted by potential users.
The second part of our session will introduce the idea of design-based research (DBR) and how this concept can help you form a research team, like our fellows team, that leverages distributed expertise and strong collaboration as first steps in implementing DBR.
In this session, we will be sharing our deliverables and soliciting and encouraging feedback from the audience about these items in order to improve them. We also plan to encourage a discussion around the concept of DBR and hear the ideas of the audience about this concept and how they might implement it themselves. The participants will be active in the process through evaluating our work and seeing how these components can help or hinder the adoption of their own potential digital badges.
