Towards an Open Recognition Wallet
Note: this post builds upon ideas we presented at ePIC 2024, and a couple of in-depth posts about using Open Recognition to map real-world skills and attributes. You don’t need to have read those first, but they may provide more context in case you have questions.
Now that the latest version of the Open Badges specification is aligned with the Verifiable Credentials data model, there’s a new way to store your credentials: digital wallets. Instead of your badges or credentials being stored on someone else’s platform (usually the issuer’s) you store them on a wallet on your mobile device. In other words, you, as a learner or earner are fully in control.
This approach will be familiar to anyone who has ever paid for something using their smartphone, or used a digital ticket to attend an event or access public transport. The difference in this case is that the wallet is also a portfolio of your achievements. It’s a personal showcase of who you are, what you know, and what you can do.
It’s still early days for digital wallets, but now that even the UK government is getting in on the act, now is the perfect time to be thinking about what an Open Recognition Wallet might look like. It’s also a good time to consider this as the Digital Credentials Consortium hands over stewardship of the open source Learner Credential Wallet to the Open Wallet Foundation.
Open Recognition, for those who need a reminder, is the community of people who hold fast to the original vision for Open Badges, as outlined in this Mozilla white paper. These days, we define it as:
“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.” (Badge Wiki)
So what might an Open Recognition Wallet look like in practice? How might it differ from one that, for example, is to store your passport, driving license, or payment cards?
Core Principles
This post is a conversation-starter for the community. Perhaps, based on the original Open Badges vision, and our evolving understanding of Open Recognition, a wallet should:
- Recognise learning across all contexts, not just formal education
- Empower individuals to control and showcase their diverse achievements
- Be inclusive of often-marginalised and excluded groups
- Support lifewide and lifelong learning pathways
- Enable recognition from multiple sources, including self-issued and community endorsements
Key Features
E-portfolios and badge backpacks have been around for a while now, so how might an Open Recognition Wallet build on these? Here are some ideas:
1. Flexible Recognition Capture
- Support for self-issued badges
- Mechanisms for community endorsement
- Semi-automated recognition and achievement tracking
2. Community-Driven Endorsement
- Semi-automated peer recognition
- Transparent endorsement processes
- Storytelling functionality by adding contextual info/evidence
3. Learning Analytics Integration
- Privacy-preserving, on-device data analysis
- Insights into potential future directions (life/career)
- Skills alignment with multiple taxonomies/frameworks
4. Social and Engaging Design
- Ability to customise both interface and look of portfolio(s)
- Community-building features to encourage solidarity
- Storytelling capabilities for achievements
5. Technical Foundations
- Based on the latest version of the Open Badges specification
- Available on every platform (potentially a webapp?)
- User-controlled, granular data sharing
A Multiplicity of Wallets
While it’s entirely possible to use the same digital wallet for Open Recognition as for passports, driving licenses, and other identity documents, it probably isn’t likely. As with badge platforms, various entities will build wallets that suit their customers or communities. Wallets that become mainstream will likely come from Big Tech or governments, though nonprofit and educational institutions will continue to innovate in the space.
In the same way we use multiple social networks to reflect different aspects of our personality and to connect with various networks, I can imagine multiple digital wallets that showcase nuanced portfolios of skills and attributes, depending on the context.
Differentiating Factors
I’d love to see the Open Recognition community’s thoughts on this. For me, the main differentiating factors for an Open Recognition wallet are:
a) A focus on holistic recognition
The original Open Badges vision helped support the concept of Connected Learning. This is an approach which is participatory, learner centred, interest-driven, and inclusive. While usually focused on young people, there is no age limit to interest. No upper bounds on inclusivity.
By recognising all of the contributions we make to the world, all of the positive behaviours we exhibit, we can create a much more holistic, three-dimensional view of who we are and what drives us. This is not merely so that we can provide better data points for employers looking for labour, but so that we can “find the others”, create communities, build solidarity, and make the world a better place.
b) Celebration of diverse learning experiences
Learning happens everywhere, but it’s only usually captured in formal, pre-determined ways. Capturing important smaller, more granular, and diverse learning experiences is important. That might be related to cultural awareness, to privilege and power, or just how to fix your washing machine by watching a YouTube video.
Not every learning experience will be captured, but it’s important that they can be, and in terms that chime with the Open Recognition exhortation to allow people to use their own labels and definitions. After-the-fact alignment with pre-existing skills taxonomies is less important than validating knowledge, skills, and behaviours in ways that make sense to the learner.
c) Community-driven validation
One of the most exciting things about the latest version of Open Badges is that it allows you to ‘endorse’ a learner’s credential after it’s been issued. One way of thinking about this is as an evidence-based recommendation system where the value of the credential increases over time.
For example, I might make a New Year’s Resolution to be more helpful to a particular community. I could self-issue the ‘Community Helper’ badge, and this would serve as a repository for community members’ endorsements of my assistance. A similar idea is explored in these blog posts. A digital wallet that can explicitly show the value that an individual is bringing to a community is incredibly powerful and valuable.
Next steps
I know that Nate Otto is building something which feels close to what’s described above. The digital wallet side of things, however, is not handled by the ORCA platform, but rather left to the user to decide. I’m all for user choice, but I would love to help bring into being a default and muched-loved place for Open Recognition badges to live.
If you’re part of the ORE community, why not bring your thoughts on this to our next community call. And if you’re not, but this kind of thing interests you, why don’t you join us?
