MediaKron Meet Badges: Building Learning Narratives through Digital Projects

Editor's Notes

• #15: I’m Michael Evans, and I teach at Dartmouth College. In winter quarter of 2015 I taught a course called Science and Religion in American Media that incorporated MediaKron activities within an overall course badging scheme. Mike will talk more about badging specifically, though I’m happy to answer questions later as well. Mostly I want to show you how we used MediaKron to achieve very different kinds of learning objectives within a single course (or “class,” for our unamerican friends). The learning objectives in the course were distributed across four key areas: digital media analysis, digital scholarship, critical engagement, and cooperative leadership. We used MediaKron in three areas.
• #16: First, we used MediaKron as the digital platform for training in the basic skills involved in digital media analysis. A basic learning objective of the course was to gain competence in digital media acquisition, production, curation, and composition. So I collaborated with our media services librarian to design a sequence of exercises in MediaKron. First, students attended a hands-on intro to MediaKron workshop to learn the basics. Second, students did individual in-class assignments in which they added images, video, and text on a theme of their choice to MediaKron. Third, they collaborated on their own time in small groups to create a Story that curated selected images, video and text from each group member’s prior assignment into a common theme. Fourth, each student provided feedback on a survey about their experience. Finally, each student made a 1-minute long video in which they reflected on their experience with MediaKron and how it affected their learning and competence in dealing with digital media.
• #17: Here is a deceptively simple example. Adding an item in MediaKron means thinking about what tags are and why they’re important, what details might be needed now and in the future for this resource, how we should cite and refer to source material, and what the implications are for things like URLs that go stale, or for alternative search terms. These fields become learning opportunities for students to experience many of the decisions that go into handling and analyzing digital media.
• #18: Another area where we used MediaKron optionally was Digital Scholarship, by which we mean generating digital publications that integrate original analysis and commentary with archival textual, video, and interactive content. As you can see, there is a sequence of activities that are basically teaching students how to do a project. Students were not required to use MediaKron, and many did not, instead using a variety of other tools they had experience using, such as iMovie to make a movie, Prezi to make interactive presentations, Tumblr to make photo essays, and so forth. But some did use MediaKron for their digital scholarship projects, either because it was flexible enough to combine different things, or because it was capable of doing something really unique.
• #19: An example of the latter is this “Science Fiction through the ages” timeline. One of my students is a huge scifi fan who also studies religion, so she went out and put together what is essentially an annotated bibliography that visualizes the distribution of fictional stories about the future over time. So we start with the epic of gilgamesh and then once the printing press hits we go nuts. But one of the things you spot immediately is how much fiction about the future was religious early on, and became less so later on. Pretty interesting insight.
• #20: The third area where we used MediaKron was Critical Engagement. Basically I got sick of traditional exams and was casting about for a useful alternative. So we came up with Learning Timelines using MediaKron’s timeline features. This was not in the sales brochure, but it turned out to be really interesting and unconventional use of MediaKron.
• #21: In a learning timeline, students create a timeline of their own learning in the course. They start with the module learning objectives. For each learning objective they add items that most helped them achieve that objective (images, slides, videos, readings), then write short texts describing how those items helped them achieve the learning objectives. This is already pretty useful. They’re narrating their own experience in the course over time. But I also had them find non-course resources that they think would have been better at helping them achieve the learning objectives. They used the Comparison feature in MediaKron to compare them against the assigned course material, and wrote short essays on why that other material would be better. So as you can see, maybe, here are the learning objectives, here are the various resources and descriptions, and here are the comparisons. If you’re interested in developing metacognitive skills in your students, this is one interesting way you can do it. Happy to talk about that more in Q&A, but for now I’ll hand off to Mike to talk more about the badging pieces in the course and beyond.
• #22: I’m Mike Goudzwaard, BIO, Badge Integration Officer and Learning Designer at Dartmouth College. I work with faculty like Michael, academic departments, and co-curricular programs on learning projects at Dartmouth. Some of these projects involve badges. Often in conference sessions we hear about projects that have been completed. In the last portion of our presentation I want us to explore some further possibilities for badging and MediaKron. What if we scaled up these badges beyond the course?
• #23: What if you had a curriculum, such as Information Literacy that spanned multiple courses? Penn State’s Information Literacy badge constellation badges savvy searching, information critic, and informational organization. If you want to know more about this project, you can talk to Heather Hughs from PennState
• #24: Through this collaboration with Boston College and Dartmouth to use MediaKron in a course, we asked: What if a MediaKron badge, or Digital Media Analysis badge at Dartmouth or at Boston College could be part of a shared system?
• #25: Suppose you were going to offer a MOOC, where learners analyzed and created meta data in a massive film archive, using MediaKron. If you want to survive this novel experiment, you better have some saavy TAs with some experience in Digital Media Analysis and using MediaKron. Suppose you could search the Digital Media Analysis and MediaKron badge holders from Dartmouth and Boston College to find qualified TAs.
• #26: Small badges
• #27: Lead to a big badge
• #28: Lead to new capacity for other courses and projects
• #29: Through this collaboration with Boston College and Dartmouth to use MediaKron in a course, we asked: What if a MediaKron badge, or Digital Media Analysis badge at Dartmouth or at Boston College could be part of a shared system?
• #30: 2 minutes to write 2 minutes to share
• #31: I’m Mike Goudzwaard, BIO, Badge Integration Officer (& Learning Designer) at Dartmouth College. I work with faculty like Michael Evans, academic departments, and co-curricular programs on learning projects at Dartmouth. Some of these projects involve badges. Through this collaboration with Boston College and Dartmouth to use MediaKron in a course, we asked: What if a MediaKron badge, or Digital Media Analysis badge at Dartmouth or at Boston College could be part of a shared system?