Taking a Leap of Faith

Exactly a year ago today I published a post about some exciting changes in my professional life. I had just applied for a 12-month unpaid leave of absence from BYU. My goal was to spend the time away focused on supporting and scaling the adoption of open educational resources (OER) in formal education. Specifically, I … Read more

Thoughts on Badges for LINCS: Lessons from History

This week I’m participating in a conversation about badges over on the Department of Education’s LINCS website. I believe badges are potentially a key piece of infrastructure necessary to support truly open, distributed learning, but I’m frequently disappointed by the level of thoughtfulness of the discourse around badges. There’s much to learn about badges by looking to the history of other technologies, as I’ve tried to point out in my answers to the first two question prompts.

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Tom Reeves on Things and Problems

I’m at AECT this week, the annual meeting of the professional association for academic educational technologists and instructional designers. This is my 15th year attending the conference, and (with the exception of the Open Education Conference) this is my favorite conference each year. These are “my people,” and so I was much more nervous than … Read more