My name is
Emily Rimland. I am the Kalin Librarian for Learning Innovations at
Penn State University Libraries and my
fellowship project is working with digital badges, so specifically
librarians are really interested in information literacy
skills. That's the idea, that students can find and evaluate
site information correctly and effectively, so we're interested in using
the digital badges to deepen
students' information literacy skills. So that's how we're exploring;
we're exploring that and using that for digital badges.
"Great! And then it's broken up into two series of questions. I have a handful
of questions on your projects, the badges, and then we'll just get into some generic
fellows program kind of questions. So the first
question is: what's success
look like for this project? So ideally, when the project's over, how will
students be kind of interacting with this two or three years from now?"
I think success looks like students using the badges
whether - it'd be great for them to discover them on their
own and just want to do it and learn more, that
sort of thing. I imagine we'll have some of that. But then also adoption
by course instructors, who say this is an important skill. I need my students
to have it. Maybe they don't have time to teach it in class or they don't have
the knowledge or just think the badge is a good way to deliver that
information so they're having their students complete the badges along with
the course. So that would be what success would look like in a couple of years, and I think
fellowship will have a lot more information
out there. We'll have better badges for instructors to
use. We'll have a gateway to the badges. It's going to help facilitate
the adoption of the badges. "So it got me thinking:
general education's going through
the whole revitalization, or however you want to phrase
it. Do these play a role there, do you think?
Specifically, the badges that your project are about?" I think I've heard some
involved with general education on one of the subcommittees, and
they have talked a lot about being
able to - prior learning assessment - and students being able to incorporate
skills from different places, or badges have been
mentioned already, so I'm really optimistic about that, that it's even part
of the conversation. A lot needs to happen before that,
before they actually enter the detailed discussions. And then
I really hope that information literacy, our specific
information literacy badges, can be part of that, because information literacy's going to be
part of general education, but the library here doesn't
offer - or students aren't required to have an information literacy course
as part of their gen. ed. It's supposed to be integrated, you know, with the rest of the curriculum, but
I think the badges would be a great way to deliver the information literacy skills
that are part of general education, so I really hope so. "It seems like
a key skill that they have to get somewhere, or else they're not going to be very
successful when they get out of here. And I saw in the Chronicle yesterday
the federal government is now starting to pilot programs that will
provide financial aid for students not in
or not enrolled in credit-based programs, so now
theoretically, if badges do start to proliferate,
and be adopted, it seems like the government's saying we are
entertaining the idea of providing aid for people that want to put together series of badges and things like
that. So that might open up even more." Yeah, I didn't see that
higher ed article, but I've read that, about the government being interested and not just
like see time, traditional credit-bearing courses
and giving credit for other things, so I agree that it opens
the door for badges and some other things. "Credit hour's just such a
weird thing in this day and age."
There's got to be other ways. "Well, Kyle Peck always - one of his
presentations essentially says, this was created, you know,
in 1902 or 1903 as a way to measure
almost retirement time for an instructor, so it was all based
on how do you measure the amount of time a teacher spent teaching? So then you can
kind of reward them and track them over time and help them figure out
when it's the right retirement age." Completely backwards. "Now it's the foundation
of everything we do, which is very very strange. So outside
of this project, what are some other ideas you're exploring or thinking
about in terms of badges and how the library might
leverage badges and other scenarios?" So outside of this project we're
looking at possibly badging our open house, which is a big event we have
every year. It's for resident students, where they
come learn about the physical layout of the library and learn that we're friendly people and
we have lots of great things. It's a really successful event; we've done it for
eleven years, but we're possibly looking at badges to supplement
that or, you know, if a student can't make the actual event, maybe
they transfer or something like that, they could do the badge
instead. Also, as a way for World Campus students to have a similar-
I mean, it's not going to be the same, because it's not in person, but some type of
equivalent to the open house. So we're definitely interested
in like I said, badging the open house, something similar with
the tours we do. We do a ton of tours through the building, especially with the knowledge
commons opening two years ago. So
possibly using a badge to certify those students
who have done the tour - that way they don't have to do it multiple times for a class or
couldn't relate to the open house as well.
So those are two cases we're looking at outside the badge set
that we currently offer. "Yeah, the World Campus thing's
interesting, especially with the growth projections.
How do you get those students engaged with a physical space here in University
Park?" Yeah, and we've so many World Campus staff tell us that
the World Campus students come here for graduation and they
finally - some of them have never been here before - they finally see the campus, and they are just astounded at
the scale of campus, including the library, and so to give them some kind of
experience where they can get a sense of how great
this campus and university are, it'd be really nice. If we can do that
a little bit through badging, that'd be really cool.