Hyper busy. Here’s a thing. We had a staff meeting last week that I hated. I wrote a response to it, with the intention that it goes nowhere. Someone came in to talk to us about virtual “badges” we can award to our clients for doing good work, or for participating in our programming.
The area of badges is interesting to explore. The issue of extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivation and the reenforcement of either is probably a safe starting point: will badges serve to promote greater participation in professional development opportunities? Maybe. That would be nice.
Human motivation (and its values and properties) is complex. Inventing symbolic reward structures for the purposes of encouraging a desired group behavior is controversial. It might be useful to instead consider the “badge” idea in terms of its acting as a “symbolic recognition system” itself and how strongly the education community has pushed in that direction over the last 20-30 years, and what the results have been.
At our “badge” staff meeting, the Ph.D. example was more telling than probably anticipated by our guest. The title “PhD” was presented as a kind of nebulous symbol itself that had no readily identifiable criteria for being awarded (as elicited from the room). The exercise was a nice–if accidental– demonstration of the problem of what symbolic recognition from the academy has become. The point was that, since we don’t know off hand what the criteria for the PhD (in his case) was, how do we know what practical meaning to ascribe to it? Well, aside from the fact that we could look it up on the publicly accessible departmental web page (duly entitled: Requirements for the PhD), there’s an issue at stake about how the meaning behind “PhD” has changed over time.
Historically, the dissertation *was* the value of the PhD. The main criteria for its completion was for the candidate to exert maximal effort to mobilize and employ their best intellectual abilities and skills for contributing and communicating new ideas and perspectives and solutions to a field. It’s a “terminal degree” because the dissertation itself represents a culminating event after a long period of intellectual preparation. The PhD was synonymous with the dissertation, a piece of work that usually translated directly into your professional life: it became the book, the series of articles, the thing that qualified you for that position in that place. The response to that comment by our guest at the badge staff meeting was something along the lines of: “…unfortunately that’s not what dissertations are for any more…”. That is a living example of the problem of symbolic recognition mechanisms as they now exist in education: the cumulative dilution and possible devaluation, on a wide scale, of the various symbolic representations of ability. How has it happened that we don’t know what value to ascribe to a PhD from Columbia?
We might call it “badge inflation.” We have PhDs who do not consider their dissertation to be very telling of their abilities… or even their interests, and merely the “badge” they believed would hold a certain value as they look for jobs. It’s increasingly the case that their dissertation is not even related to the jobs they’re applying for. We have more unemployed PhDs now than seems possible, and over 35,000 PhDs on food stamps (according to NPR), and yet the applicant numbers are off the charts, still. Most PhD’s do not wish to join the professorate. So why do so many still seek to add that title to their name?
Such is the case with the failing MBA programs, the diminishing value of BAs and MAs, of grade inflation, of “title inflation” and “badge life”. As people increasingly and problematically pursue and invest in the “badge” rather than the educational purposes of the programs they choose, the symbols lose their meaning. The result has been that people now strongly question the value of those programs (especially monetary value, but not only that). Evaluators, such as employers, increasingly look for other ways to learn about a person’s abilities and talents because the sea of MAs (as badges) paints no clearer picture of a person’s abilities these days than what could be assumed of a BA. The applicants themselves look to other ways of demonstrating their abilities and interests as every candidate comes to realize their BA/MA/PhD, stamped along the top of their personal snapshot, exists in a stack of similarly stamped snapshots– digital or otherwise.
Creating ever more “badges” will not move us forward when there’s yet a bigger, unnamed problem ungirding the whole issue of qualifying an education or an educational experience– whether described as “professional development” or “competency” or “qualification” or whatever other label. In short, if even “PhD” is more valuable as a label pursued for its potential representative power versus actual representation of ability (since no one seems to care about dissertations any longer as long as you have the “badge”), how would we not see the manufacture of ever more badges as part of the problem of dilution and devaluation? Have we not experienced a very logical “gaming” of the entire accreditation system itself, fueled by an economic system that looks to measure and represent people by tick marks and badges rather than contributions? And overall, how well would we say that has been working?
When asked for the goals of inventing a badge system for recognizing informal instruction, the answer provided in the badge staff meeting was something along the lines of: “to recognize skills that people develop that right now are unrecognized [in symbolic form].” But the reliance on symbolic recognition we’ve pushed for and built up over decades has already caused a shift in practice and pushed the mandate of academic credential accumulation in a questionable direction– so why would we continue pushing in that same direction? People are increasingly exploring new ways of getting recognized for their abilities, and it’s not by showing ever more symbolic representation, but rather actual creative work produced: here’s the tool I made, here’s this problem I solved and how I did it, here’s this book I wrote (…so please consider me for the position). We see this in industry all the time: employers care about what you can do. Symbolic representations in the form of degrees, badges, titles, etc. are less meaningful now, even to the point of being highly suspect on paper. In the IT world, it’s an even larger issue, as they seem obsessed with certificates– Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, etc. In the programming world, however, those highly standardized and official “certificates”– each of which requires rigor and study and much effort and commitment, are not looked upon with much confidence. As quoted by one of our own programmers, as soon as you get into actual programming, the MCSE badges (and the like) do not help describe a candidate’s real skills or abilities very well, and in fact can make them look weaker overall than other kinds of evidence of ability, on paper or off.
To recognize and support and promote a faculty member’s skills in teaching with technology, the solution could be to grant a badge they can display on their digital CV. Clicking the badge takes you to Mozilla (for “traceable provenance”) where you’ll see a definition: “Granted by the Learning and Teaching Technology Institute of Supertech University, the badge holder effectively improved the educational outcomes of a course using an innovative new media intervention.”
How is the invented symbolic recognition described (by following the invented badge trail) more descriptive or informative than if the faculty member literally described something important they did directly on their CV or bio page or wherever:
*Effectively transformed a core course, “Introduction to Evolutionary Biology”, with a newly designed, learner-centered, problem-based pedagogy using a suite of educationally driven technologies.
*Student ability to solve transfer problems improved over previous years and student evaluation feedback indicated marked improvement in student satisfaction and perceived value of the course. (See case study, “Improving Freshman Performance in Evolutionary Biology with New Media Tools”, published in http://www.professorjoeshmo.blogspot.com)
The example above could conceivably be represented by 20 different badges that, on their own, communicate extremely little: the “problem-based learning” badge, the “learner-centered pedagogy” badge, the wiki badge, the blog badge, each with their own requirements and criteria and so on, each with a different full page in Mozilla. But without the “thing contributed”, the thing done with the skills represented by those badges, of what value is that list of symbols? Of what value is the PhD without the dissertation, the BA without the thesis. We’ve moved away from work contributed towards “badge” held, and now we reward badge accumulation as if it were the goal, rather than the means.
While it’s all worth exploring and experimenting with, I can’t help but imagine the faculty with the 35 badge bio page and how gimmicky that might look after just a couple years– compared to the faculty who can describe– yes with actual words– what they’ve accomplished in their teaching practice, perhaps highlighted on a page we create to celebrate their effort and classroom achievements.
“Hi, you might think I’m all cuddly, but in reality I can bite you in half. But I wouldn’t do that to YOU.”
