Learning with the Fang

While messing around with some flickr and photoshop mashups for Beth Kanter’s 50th birthday ‘competition’ I got to thinking…

Thinking about ways to run ‘competitions’ where the aim is to maximise the amount of recognition for every single ‘contestant’.

You see, recogniton is a key pillar of the LearnDog vision – we have often thought about being more like the Duke of Edinburgh awards or Scout Badges and less like competition ‘winners’ – where every player wins a prize (recognition not some worthless trinket). We also kicked around ways to quantify recognition through schemes similar to Achievements or Points in online games et al.

Beth has based her 50th birthday ‘competition’ on ideas from the Creative Commons ‘Swag’ contest we both entered last year. This competition offered a rather trivial prize but created a strong sense of connection and recognition (at least between Beth and I). The comments that we left on each other’s flickr photos constituted a form of ‘peer recognition’ – something that can be easily scaled. The e/mail I recieved from Prof Lessig was recognition from the ’subject matter expert’ – something that is harder to scale but not impossible.

LearnDog would love to help find ways to dramatically increase the amount of recogntion kids get when they publish digital work – these ‘competitions’ provide some clues on ways this can be done.

Fang – Mike Seyfang – LearnDog

technorati tags:recognition, competition, rewards, points, achievements, birthday, emix