Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

12.8.11 | The Badges for Lifelong Learning Competition announced 60 winners of stage one this week, part of the annual Digital Media and Learning Competition.

The Mozilla Foundation and HASTAC, with support from the MacArthur Foundation, will award up to $2 million in grants for the innovative use of badges—a new assessment tool used to identify skills developed in all kinds of learning environments.

Now in its fourth year, the competition is designed to find — and to inspire — the most novel uses of new media for learning.

You can see a list of the stage one winners at dmlcompetition.net. Here’s more from the press release (pdf) about how the competition works:

Stage One applicants were asked to submit ideas for compelling learning content, activities, or programs for which a badge or set of badges would be useful for recognizing learning that takes place in a particular area or topic. Winning applications represent a wide array of public and private institutions and organizations from around the world, including museums, non-profits, after-school programs, research institutions and for-profit companies. Proposed content for badge systems address a breadth of topics—from the promotion of civic engagement and community volunteerism, to STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics) learning in and out of the classroom, to digital literacy, to workforce preparedness and beyond. Winning applications are available for public perusal and commenting at

Based on response in Stage Two, winners of Stage One may be paired with winning badge design/technology teams for the opportunity to work collaboratively on developing a badge system to be judged in Stage Three. Stage Two, which seeks badge system design and tech proposals that respond to Stage One winning content or content from one of the Competition’s official Collaborators—including the Department of Education, the Department of Veteran Affairs, Microsoft, Intel, NASA, the American Library Association and more—opens on December 12, 2011. Full information can be found at http://www.dmlcompetition.net.

Stay tuned for more on Mozilla’s Open Badges project in the coming weeks. We have story on deck that includes insight from Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, and HASTAC Co-founder Cathy Davidson on what this new model for assessment and accreditation may mean for learners, teachers and the future of the internet.