This week I am attending the Open Courseware conference.

One of the most popular poster sessions was on the Mozilla/P2PU project to create an open infrastructure for badges. The project is currently a small project but is conceived to be an open infrastructure to let educational communities create and distribute badges and individuals to display these badges on profiles throughout the web. If this works it could have a lot of advantages and self-taught learners demonstrate their capabilities in the job market and on the web.

from their wiki: The project in a nutshell:

• Today's learning happens everywhere, not just in the classroom. But it's often difficult to get credit for it. Mozilla and Peer 2 Peer University are working to solve this problem by developing an Open Badges infrastructure.
• Our system will make it easy for education providers, web sites and other organizations to issue badges that give public recognition and validation for specific skills and achievements.
• And provide an easy way for learners to manage and display those badges across the web -- on their personal web site or resume, social networking profiles, job sites or just about anywhere.
• The result: Open Badges will help learners everywhere unlock career and educational opportunities, and recognize skills that traditional resumes and transcripts often leave out.

Solution Grove clients that are differenciating by being leaders in social media and social education may want to be early adopters of this technology.

Sugar Labs and the OLPC community may find this project useful for their independent learners and as incentives and encouragement as they help young Sugar users move towards becoming developers and contributers.

Definitely a project to watch!

#OCWCGLOBAL