Thoughts about Badges and Identity...

Thoughts about Badges and Identity...

by Jason Neiffer -
Number of replies: 5

Hello all,

My name is Jason and I am a curriculum director of a state virtual school in Montana, USA.

Philosophically, I see badges as an exciting prospect to create permanent "digital transcript" of work as large as degrees and as small as small a tutorial or brief workshop.

I sat through a demo of badges implementation in Moodle 2.5 at a Moot in Montana, USA last week and have also explored BadgePress in WordPress and also LearningDash/Credly systems.

Here is a question I think we need to come up with an answer to this: badges seem somewhat universally tied to an email address. That makes sense as one of the few personally identifying pieces of data we have.

That said... if you are using this framework in a University or K-12 infrastructure, the Moodle account is usually associated with an assigned K-12 or university address email address. It seems to me that those addresses are temporary and fleeting. We need to build functionality into this implementation of badges that allows students to direct their badge to a personal backback so that they can keep their records over time.

Do I understand the issue correctly?

Thanks,
Jason

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In reply to Jason Neiffer

Re: Thoughts about Badges and Identity...

by Emma Richardson -
Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers

But you can.  You can tie badges to your Mozilla backpack and you can use whatever email you like with the backpack - it does not have to be the email that you use with Moodle.

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In reply to Emma Richardson

Re: Thoughts about Badges and Identity...

by Simon Coggins -

That's right, the email address you use for your backpack can be any email address you like. However there are a few issues here:

When you import a badge into a backpack the email address assigned to the badge must match. To get around this in Moodle we use the email address used to connect to your backpack when baking the badge, or fall back to your moodle email if that isn't set. This ensures badges exported from Moodle can be imported if you have connected to your backpack.

The problem is, if you are issued several badges which are tied to your Moodle email, and then you manually download them and try to add them to a backpack that uses your personal email it won't let you (because the emails don't match).

I think this can be solved by allowing a user to validate multiple email accounts within their backpack. That way a user could maintain control over a personal backpack but still import badges baked using their "work/school" email.

There is an open badges issue about it here where I've posted my thoughts but it hasn't really progressed unfortunately:

https://github.com/mozilla/openbadges/issues/42

A second way to interpret your comment is that you'd prefer badges not to be tied to any email address. I know Mozilla have designed their spec to support other identity "types" other than email, but email is the only one supported at the moment. 

Hope that helps,

Simon

 

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In reply to Simon Coggins

Re: Thoughts about Badges and Identity...

by Randy Thornton -
Picture of Documentation writers

"this can be solved by allowing a user to validate multiple email accounts within their backpack."

Agree, and I hope this could be solved using the Persona ability to associate multiple emails with your Persona identity. Seems to me an obvious solution would be, on upload of the badge to the backpack, if the email does not match, query Persona whether that email is an already validated alternate one.

(That may cross the 'authentication vs. authorization' line for them, but if so, I'd say then there's no point in using Persona for applications like backpacks then.)

Personally, I consider this a blocker for using Moz Backpack until addressed.

I can imagine all the privacy/policy issues trying to collect the email address for someone's backpack in Moodle. If someone has connected a backpack, that's one thing, but people should not be required to put that info in Moodle (or any other application) in order to be issued valid badges.

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In reply to Randy Thornton

Re: Thoughts about Badges and Identity...

by Simon Coggins -

Hi Randy,

Personally, I consider this a blocker for using Moz Backpack until addressed.

I'd encourage you to post your thoughts the the Mozilla issue linked above. It should be reasonably straightforward thing to resolve within the backpack.

Simon

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In reply to Simon Coggins

Re: Thoughts about Badges and Identity...

by Randy Thornton -
Picture of Documentation writers

 

Simon,

I will do that. Also,  I will be presenting on badges with two of the Mozilla staff at upcoming Portland Moot. I will make sure they know how important this is to get working.

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