Badges

I attended some of the TCC Online Conference April 17-19. One of the features of this year's conference was the introduction of badges. Jonathan Finkelstein gave a great presentation about badges and the potential for using badges as markers/rewards for progressing through a course. Great idea! The conference had a series of badges. I worked my way through the first step toward the first badge: Complete 15 tweets or a 300 word blog post about the conference. I did 15 tweets covering the first three sessions I attended and got my 25 out of 75 points toward the first badge. Check! Well, that was it for me. No way to spend the time to get all the badges or most of the badges or parts of badges... The list of activities seemed daunting, so I just didn't go for it. Then... I spent the three days of the conference feeling guilty that I was not fully participating. I should have worked on the badges. (Also disappointing: I'm having trouble with my graphics card/driver - or something - on my desktop which has resulted in trouble running Second Life and playing DVDs. I had to skip the Second Life sessions.)