Open Badges - a social innovation

Open Badges - a social innovation

If you are concerned with the future of education, you probably heard about Open Badges - a digital and visual representation of a skill or a set of achievements.

Our podcast guest for episode 13, Chiara Carlino, project manager at Cineca - the biggest University consortium in Italy, and communication manager at Bestr - the Italian open badge platform, shares with us her effort in making “a micro-certification” a norm in Italy. The ‘micro’ stands for a small or incremental level of achievement instead of a 3-years degree, for instance.

9 lessons from 9 podcast interviews

9 lessons from 9 podcast interviews

Last August, we launched the pilot for experimentQ podcast. This 6-month segment was designed to testing the format, fine-tune our research questions, give a taste of content schedule to potential partners, as well as learn the technical side of video and audio production. As I write this, I can say we had no idea of the number of details and work that go into organizing a 12-month podcast world tour, which by the way starts on March 1st, 2018.

From August 2017 to February 2018 we interviewed 9 innovators within the education space, and one more interview is on the way to complete the initial pilot goal of 10 guests. Below is what we learned, shortly, about the state and the changes happening in education.

Touchpoints - a tool for self-organized learning

Touchpoints - a tool for self-organized learning

There is a well-known concept in marketing communications called "Brand Touchpoints". You can read more about it here. Now, let's get to the main reason I set down to write this piece - our education system. It is my belief, that instead of putting children inside classrooms and trying to "educate" them into fitting some jobs, which honestly, we have no clue how they will look 2 decades from now, we can show what the life "touchpoints" are about and then empower children to design learning experiences around those points.

Let’s talk employability

Let’s talk employability

Beyond the individual dimensions of employment, this phenomenon became a key concern and KPI for most countries around the world, along with productivity growth. Providing jobs, or better said, avoiding the capital loss and social unrest that comes with the lack of jobs, is a huge governmental challenge. Traditionally, it was the concern of 2 major institutions — the Ministry of Education and that of Economic Development. But, being such a complex social issue, employment became the ugly frog in nearly every public institution’s corner. It definitely was not missing in the recent elections of USA, France, UK, and Netherlands.

Interdisciplinarity of specialization

Interdisciplinarity of specialization

The week of September 19th, 2016. Paris. I had the chance to attend my first lecture on genetic engineering, as part of SciencesPo' Disruptive Technologies and Public Policy course. 

In a nutshell, the course is focused on building bridges between the scientific world and those who are supposed to create future regulatory frameworks, either to save us from a sci-fi doomsday or to empower scientists in advancing human race forward (the line between the two efforts is apparently blurring)