BADGERING: “Mozilla Is Doing a Hack Job on Open Badges,” charges Kerri Lemoie, a co-founder at Achievery and active contributor to the Open Badges project. For one, “there is no Open Badges Team at Mozilla.” Despite all the well-intentioned buzz around badges over the years, she writes, a current lack of leadership and support for continued development of a common technology infrastructure has left a loyal community feeling a bit shafted.
In his response post, Doug Belshaw, who formerly worked on Mozilla’s digital badging team, shares that “All was not what it seemed in badge land. Politics and personalities threatened to shipwreck the nascent badges community.” Still, he remains optimistic about its future. Citing the Gartner Hype Cycle, Belshaw says the Open Badges project has passed the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” and is on the way to the “Trough of Disillusionment”—two painful, but necessary steps for any new technology. He expects “full adoption to happen around 2021.” We shall see.
