On May 11-12, 2016 The REAL Design Lab in the Kaneb Center for Teaching & Learning at the University of Notre Dame hosted the AAEEBL 2016 Midwest Regional Conference with a theme about how digital portfolios and badges could work together. To see the conference details, program schedule, and published slides click here.

One of the big problems we have seen so far with early conference badging is that they turn out to be what Chris Clark calls “warm-body” badges. These badges don’t have any meaning or value besides “I have been there and got the t-shirt.”

The conference committee and badge design team had a goal to model good quality and practice with conference badging. In addition, we wanted to recognize and motivate presenters to “micro-publish” their presentations so we could share their work with a larger community that could not attend the conference. So we created the AAEEBL Midwest Regional Conference Presenter Badge.

Click here to see verified page on Credly.

To read the presenter reflections and view their slides you can either click on the evidence link in their digital badges above or see our badge directory of presentation materials here

To look under the hood and see how we pulled this off see the concept map below:

Click to zoom in

This hack of using LinkedIn Pulse (blog post) turned out be an effective platform for participants to share their public reflections, publish their slides (using Slideshare which was just bought out by LinkedIn) and also gave them a place to showcase their earned digital badge.