This is the sixth post in a series featuring interviews with the 2014 Mozilla Festival “Space Wranglers,” the curators of the many exciting programmatic tracks slated for this year’s Festival.
For this edition, we chatted with Laurie Garrison, one of the Space Wranglers for the Open Badges Lab track. Participants in this track will challenge the conventional system of recognizing skills and learning, while celebrating achievements from Open Badge creators and issuers.
What excites you most about your track?
Last year our space was full of opportunities to create and design badges. This year we’re expanding on that by making sure that there will be lots of opportunities to earn badges throughout the weekend. We want to see badges escape from the Open Badge Lab and start interacting in the MozFest ecosystem, ideally providing inspiration for new connections amongst different disciplines, tracks and experts. There will be opportunities to earn a badge for connecting any device to the web on the Open the Web with Things floor, an Open Web Protector badge on the Policy and Advocacy floor, as well as a number of others.
For this edition, we chatted with Laurie Garrison, one of the Space Wranglers for the Open Badges Lab track. Participants in this track will challenge the conventional system of recognizing skills and learning, while celebrating achievements from Open Badge creators and issuers.
What excites you most about your track?
Last year our space was full of opportunities to create and design badges. This year we’re expanding on that by making sure that there will be lots of opportunities to earn badges throughout the weekend. We want to see badges escape from the Open Badge Lab and start interacting in the MozFest ecosystem, ideally providing inspiration for new connections amongst different disciplines, tracks and experts. There will be opportunities to earn a badge for connecting any device to the web on the Open the Web with Things floor, an Open Web Protector badge on the Policy and Advocacy floor, as well as a number of others.
Who are you working with to make this track happen?
We’ll have some impressive facilitators at work on our floor. The iDEA team (a new award for young entrepreneurs supported by the Duke of York and Nominet Trust) will offer the opportunity to create the badge that will be given to those who win the iDEA award. There will also be badge design with University College London staff, a workshop with the Think Big team, an opportunity to design a robot in Minecraft, Sci-Art storytelling with UNSA, mobile game design, wearable computing badges as well as sessions on the latest research and learning projects. We have something for all ages and every interest group!
How can someone who isn’t able to attend MozFest learn more or get involved in this topic?
Badges can be earned remotely before, during, and after the Festival. We’ll share challenges that will be recognized with badges in the lead up to MozFest. So badges will not only serve as documentation and mementos of participants’ experiences of MozFest, but will also help continue the momentum of MozFest after the event. In addition, we’ll be bringing a new, improved Badge the World website with us. We’ll be looking for more pledges to help us badge the world!
Inspired?
Head on over to the MozFest site to register!