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Mozilla Launches Open Badges Project

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Today we announced Mozilla’s Open Badge Infrastructure project, an effort to make it easy to issue and share digital learning badges across the web.

More and more people are looking at badges to show skills and achievements online. Mozilla is currently developing its own badges for things like Javascript courses at the School of Webcraft. We’ve also talked to groups as diverse as 4H, NASA, PBS, P2PU, Intel and the US Department of Education, all of whom plan to develop digital badges.

Open Badges is a response to this trend: an open specification and APIs that provide any organization the basic building blocks they need to offer badges in a standard, interoperable manner.

If we’re successful, the benefits to learners will be tremendous. Open Badges will let you gather badges from any site on the internet, combining them into a story about what you know and what you’ve achieved. There is a real chance to create learning that works more like the web.

Also, this sort of badge collection may eventually become a central part of online reputation, helping you get a job, find collaborators and build prestige. This is another reason Mozilla wants to build an open badge format: it can show the real potential of open identity tools on the web.

Released today, the first Open Badges beta was developed by Brian Brennan and Erin Knight, with support from Dan Mills and Ben Adida in Mozilla Labs. It includes a badge format spec, APIs and reference implementation for ‘badge backpack’ software. It also builds on other Mozilla open identity technology like Browser ID. Our first implementation will be as part of School of Webcraft, an initiative Mozilla runs jointly with P2PU.

Today’s announcement coincides with the launch of a $2 million badges for learning competition funded by MacArthur Foundation and run by HASTAC. Earlier this week, MacArthur approved a $1 million grant to Mozilla to work on the Open Badges Infrastructure, a platform that will be used by all winners of the competition.

US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, MacArthur Foundation VP Programs Julia Stasch and Mozilla Executive Director Mark Surman spoke at the competition launch in Washington DC earlier today. Here is the MacArthur Foundation press release.

53 comments on “Mozilla Launches Open Badges Project”

  1. Ping from Firefox | Pearltrees on

    […] Launches Open Badges Project Open Badges is a response to this trend: an open specification and APIs that provide any organization the basic building blocks they need to offer badges in a standard, interoperable manner. If we’re successful, the benefits to learners will be tremendous. Open Badges will let you gather badges from any site on the internet, combining them into a story about what you know and what you’ve achieved. There is a real chance to create learning that works more like the web. Also, this sort of badge collection may eventually become a central part of online reputation, helping you get a job, find collaborators and build prestige. This is another reason Mozilla wants to build an open badge format: it can show the real potential of open identity tools on the web. Miscellaneous Get an nsIPrintSettings instance. Set printSilent to true and then, instead of using window.print(), get nsIWebBrowserPrint and give the nsIPrintSettings instance as an argument to the nsIWebBrowserPrint. print(). In cases when nsIXULRuntime is not available (older SeaMonkey versions), you can use nsIHttpProtocolHandler .oscpu or navigator.oscpu (this will also provide you with the OS version, not just its name): New in Firefox 4 Starting with Mozilla 2/Firefox 4, the old nsIExtensionManager implementation was replaced by the new AddonManager . Downloading files To download a file, create an instance of nsIWebBrowserPersist and call its nsIWebBrowserPersist.saveURI() method, passing it a URL to download and an nsIFile instance representing the local file name/path. Before calling nsIWebBrowserPersist.saveURI() , you need to set the progressListener property of the nsIWebBrowserPersist instance to an object that implements nsIAuthPrompt . Normally, nsIAuthPrompt expects a prompt to be displayed so the user can enter credentials, but you can return a username and password credentials directly without prompting the user. […]

  2. Ping from Digital Courses, Which Direction? | HatchTheAware on

    […] to get started. This is the where it all started. Mozilla announced the Open Badges Project on September 15th 2011! So far, there is a badge for just about everything, and there sure have […]

  3. Ping from Codeacademy, ou l’alternative à codeschool « nerdycode on

    […] Mozilla : https://wiki.mozilla.org/Badges & blog Mozilla . VOUS AVEZ ADORÉ ? VOUS ALLEZ RIRE MAIS CET ARTICLE VOUS […]

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