Mozilla has announced its Open Badges Infrastructure project, which allows constant tech learners to showcase their skills and achievements.

As a developer, there is always something new  to be learned, so having some recognition, something to show that you've passed another milestone or mastered a new skill is an attractive idea.

Mozilla Open Badge Infrastructure, Beta 1 of which has just been published, has been conceived as an alternative accreditation system to support learners everywhere and that will support badges issued from multiple issuers across the Web.

According to openbadge.org:

Learning today happens everywhere, not just in the classroom. But it's often difficult to get recognition for skills and achievements that happen outside of school. Mozilla's Open Badges project is working to solve that problem, making it easy for anyone to issue, earn and display badges across the web -- through a shared infrastructure that's free and open to all. The result: helping learners everywhere display 21st century skills, unlock career and educational opportunities, and level up in their life and work.

Mozilla's aim is to provide an infrastructure to standardize the process whereby individual learner collect badges from multiple sources and that this needs to be open and as decentralized as possible to give learners control and to support the entire ecosystem. Certified badge issuers will be allowed to award badges for activities such as after school programs, online learning and job training. The API can then be used so that you can allow users of your web site to display their badges in a "Badge Backpack".

Mozilla's Open Badges project is supported by the MacArthur Foundation and is being promoted by the fourth fourth Digital Media and Learning Competition organized by HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science Technology Advanced Collaboratory) which is on the theme Badges for Lifelong Learning.

More information:

Technical documentation and source code for the infrastructure

Digital Media and learning competition 4.

Open Badge documentation and source code

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