“The badges are another way to tell the story of who you are and what you know,” Dr. Yowell said.

“What people are learning in school is often not connected to the world of work,” she said. “Badges can fill that gap. They can be a kind of glue to connect informal and formal learning in and out of school.” If valued, they might also inspire students to accomplish new tasks.

Digital Information Fluency (DIF) is the ability to find, evaluate and use digital information effectively, efficiently and ethically. DIF involves knowing how digital information is different from print information; having the skills to use specialized tools for finding digital information; and developing the dispositions needed in the digital information environment. As teachers and librarians develop these skills and teach them to students, students will become better equipped to achieve their information needs.

Supporting communities before and after you graduate: Members of alumni present at the meeting also expressed dissatisfaction with not being able to communicate with UAL after they leave. Graduates saw the point in which they leave the course as the time when they need the most support and connections with their past study and their future professional careers.

How can we accurately measure and categorize a student’s 21st century skills? The MacArthur Foundation hopes to solve this problem with a new competition that calls on participants to create what is known as a digital badge.

Up until now I don't think that, collectively, we've done a good enough job so far at surfacing examples of people using badges imaginatively and creatively. That's why I asked Ruth Schmidt, who's been working with the Digital Youth Network in Chicago, to share some documents thy she showed in a session at the Mozilla Festival last weekend. As you can see, one of the documents shows broadly four different types of badges. The other shows a retrospective analysis of the social network DYN has been using with students, and how badges would fit into their existing structure.

Our Certified Membership Scheme is known as CMALT. " ...During yesterday's start up meeting I had several conversations with project people about CMALT, which is ALT's peer-based professional accreditation scheme for learning technologists. CMALT is already factored directly into at least one DL project, but if other projects
want to discuss its investigation, development, or use as part of a project, please get it touch and we will do our best to help.

Personal learning networks have always existed, but modern technology has put a new spin on how and where we connect with others. These days, personal learning networks, or PLNs, extend far beyond friends, family, coworkers, college classmates, and teachers, and can encompass experts and learners from around the world in just about any given field.

DIAL focuses on the development of digital literacies in Arts Higher Education with the primary goal of improved graduate employability.

Early last year the ESRC/EPSRC Teaching and Learning Research Programme published ‘Digital Literacies’ (Gillen and Barton 2010) useful overview of the theoretical background. It traced the conceptual evolution of the term from its origin as a synonym for ‘IT skills’ through the addition of ‘soft skills’, in an academic context mainly criticality and evaluation and on to the Web 2.0 notion of the student as a consumer/creator/collaborator. The latest manifestation revolves around the idea literacy as a ‘situated practice’ i.e. it is intimately linked to the specific context of use and cannot (should not?) be considered in isolation.

Many learners enter further and higher education lacking the skills needed to apply digital technologies to education.