Assignment: Badges. Badges are the future of education. With a badge, you can express your skills in a visible and authentic way. Without a badge, you’re just another worthless drain on society. Better get yourself a badge.
Here is my badge: I work with computers, I am an animal lover, I am a twin, and I am an artist. I earned this badge by simply being me.
For this week’s DS106 Design assignment I chose the assignment Merit A Badge. The instructions don’t explicitly say to create a badge, but that’s the impression I got from the assignment.
Achievement Name: Surviving the Fourth Trimester
Badge for earning the achievement: Surviving the Fourth Trimester
Criteria to earn this achievement; Successfully raise a baby past the age of three months.
The first three months of a baby’s life is often called “The Fourth Trimester”. This is because the baby doesn’t really do much except eat, sleep, eat and poop. I called this stage “The Potato Stage”. After three months is when babies really start shining. They can hold their head up to some degree, smile a lot, giggle an make cooing noises.
To create this project I first started by gathering the images I needed. I searched for copyright free or images that had a license that indicated that I could use and share (see attribution below). I found all of my images on Pixabay, Wikimedia Commons and Flickr.
I then manipulated some of the images in GIMP. I mostly removed the background color. Some people would use the lasso or magic scissors tool to select their image and press delete on the background so it becomes transparent, but I have found a better way! Because I wanted to preserve the shadow on the baby I used the “Color to Alpha” command. You can find a nice tutorial here.
After I removed the background color, and changed the star colors to be different (they were all yellow in the original image), I put it all together on one Canvas and exported it as a .png. If you export it as a .jpg it will not keep the transparent background.
Have you earned this achievement?
| Attribution: Baby in center: By Talitha Souza (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons Teething ring: Alicia Voorhies, Creative Commons license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/ |
ScottLo recently expressed the desire to be compensated for his fine work with a badge for his webpage. I found that there is a badge assignment!
ScottLo Badge of Radio
And I thought that everyone in the ds106zone should have a badge.
For all ds106zone participants
I found a website that makes all kinds of badges, with tools to modify quite a bit. http://www.says-it.com/badge/. Plus they are gifs, so I used Gimp for animation. The possibilities are nearly endless.
Will you make more badges for everyone?
Merit a Badge: Badges. Badges are the future of education. With a badge, you can express your skills in a visible and authentic way. Without a badge, you’re just another worthless drain on society.
Better get yourself a badge.
I created this assignment in the wake of the hubbub surrounding badges. For those of you who aren’t as embedded in education debates as I have come to be, proponents of the system want to be able to give people badges as a way to indicate competence in a certain field. For example, if you take an Excel class, you might get a “badge” for that.
Critics argue that this is stupid, that we already have badges in the forms of resumes, degrees, and certificates, and (most importantly) that the badge system is not the game changer in education that is touted to be. Maybe instead of developing badges, education think tanks could work on a system that would get poor kids better education. That might actually do something. You know, just sayin’.
Anyway, the point is: You need a badge. So, let’s get you one!
Summer of Oblivion
Did you survive the DS106 Summer of Oblivion? If you did, then wear these badges with pride!
The Wheel of Oblivion:
Put this badge on your website, or print it out and pin it on your shirt! No matter what you do, you’ll be letting others know: You looked into the Oblivion and made it out the other side.
(Get the JPGs here: http://flic.kr/s/aHsjwht2Z6)
