What is Open Recognition, anyway?
Going beyond credentialing and the formal/informal divide
Members of WAO have spent over a decade working in an around digital credentials such as Open Badges. We’ve spent even longer in our work with learning communities of all types —both inside and outside of organisations and institutions.
Over this time, we’ve become increasingly aware that there is a spectrum of approaches when it comes to the use of badges. There are badges as credentials and badges for recognition. Badges as credentials includes approaches that are well understood and largely replace or augment existing certification practices. Badges for recognition, however, include approaches that remain somewhat confusing to many people.
As shown in the images in this post, recognition is something much wider and deeper than credentialing. Recognition is the reason why badges that will only ever be seen by the issuer and recipient can make as much sense as those that are proudly and publicly displayed. Recognition is the subtext that gives meaning to credentials.
While recognition may be easy to understand, it’s a concept that can be difficult to define. Recently, we’ve been working with Participate and the Open Skills Network specifically to address what we’ve been collectively calling ‘Open Recognition’. But what exactly is this? Are we all talking about the same thing, or is it an unhelpfully-ambiguous zeugma?
To help with our discussions around Open Recognition in the Keep Badges Weird community and beyond, we’ve come up with this working definition, based on the work of the Open Recognition Alliance and Open Recognition Principles for OSN:
Open Recognition is the awareness and appreciation of talents, skills and aspirations in ways that go beyond credentialing. This includes recognising the rights of individuals, communities, and territories to apply their own labels and definitions. Their frameworks may be emergent and/or implicit.
As with any definition, it’s a work in progress. However, it fits with our mantra of “good enough for now, safe enough to try” so we’ll be using it to help frame our upcoming discussions. One of these is the OSN Showcase on Open Recognition and Open Skills at which WAO member Doug Belshaw will be speaking as part of a panel session.
Please do join us, get involved in the KBW community, and provide feedback on our working definition of Open Recognition!
WAO’s members are 11-year advocates of badges. If we can help you with your badge project, get in touch!
