😎 Back(pack) to the Future - Digital Credentials with Soul

Happy Thursday!

A big part of the future of education is digital credentials. How do we verify learning and accredit experience to enable new opportunities? 🧐

As soon as I started learning about the digital credential world, there was one name that kept coming up: Simone Ravaioli. 🇮🇹

This energetic, friendly Italian is the credential party host, connecting people and organizations working in the space with optimism and vision.

That's why I was excited to work with him in this week's essay to answer a question: what is missing in today's digital credentials?

The answer: culture.

Digital credentials need to be culturally relevant and professionally recognized to gain widespread adoption. 🙌

This week, the WC3 published the new version of the Verifiable Credentials (VCs) and Open Badges 3.0 will be aligning with VCs in the next few weeks.

While the standards are being built, VCs and the decentralized identifiers (DIDs) that accompany them currently lack culture.

Only when people truly care about digital credentials will they be fully used as both a signal and antennae to create opportunity and enable human flourishing.

So how do we make these digital badges as exciting as a Girl Scout badge, letter on a letterman jacket, or the latest brand? 💅

The answer may already be here in the form of Open Badges.

That's what Simone and I wrote about this week: what we can learn and use to add culture to our credentials.

I hope you can read and share it to help add a bit of soul to the credential world.

Simone's vision is clear:

Cheers to that! 🍷

-Scott

Back(pack) to the Future - Creating Digital Credentials with a S… — Scott David Meyer — ed3.mirror.xyz

Digital credentials should be culturally significant and professionally recognized, like Open Badges. They create opportunity as a signal and antennae.