Tag Archives: badges

Retreating on the Grades

By alex | Published: 8/21/2011
Heading into a new semester and assembling the syllabi (well, one–the other, once again this term, is in the hands of the students), I’ve decided to give up on my short-lived “no grades” policy. At least nominally. What happened? Well, at least pedagogically, I was fine with it. To recap, I was concerned that students […]
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A pass

By alex | Published: 3/17/2011
I don’t care about grades. It’s not that I hate them, but I do hate that students seem so captivated by them. At least at the undergraduate level, and for students who were aiming for law school or med school, where the GPA seems to have a strong effect on admissions, I kind of understood […]
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What makes up a badge?

By alex | Published: 12/2/2010
One of the discussions I was particularly excited about at the Barcelona Drumbeat Festival was using badges to indicate certain skills, abilities, capacities, traits, or accomplishments. The idea here is what you might find in Boy Scout merit badges, or Foursquare badges, or Stack Overflow badges: a quick way to see what a person knows, […]
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