We Do, In Fact, Need Some Stinkin' Badges

a reminder of how little has changed

Apr 24, 2023

A musical tour of the badges and the gym leaders who might grant them to a player. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DBFx9c7Pec — This is from roughly 2016. There are a lot more now.

I spent all day last Friday at an Open Space meeting about High Impact Practices in education at UNCG. Based on a lot of research begun in the 1990s — almost 30 years ago now — there is good evidence that the list of eleven practices in the link above show consistent benefits for students. One is good; two or more in a multi-year college experience are synergistically better.

Since then, there have been a lot of workshops, and a lot of articles about why college faculty don’t adopt these practices, and how to encourage them. Continually left out of those sermons is the fact that the majority of college classes are now taught by part-time “adjunct” faculty, who have no set teaching schedule, no job security and no benefits. The Atlantic profiles one slow downward spiral, a promising young historian named Thea Hunter whose body succumbed to the high stress of the adjunct lifestyle:

Some professors soar; adjuncts flap and dive and flap again—

until they can’t flap anymore.

To its credit, UNCG — and especially the Biology department where I work — relies on lecturers. We are salaried, full-time faculty, with benefits. That is several rungs up the caste ladder from adjuncts, who are in some ways even below graduate students. I’ve been an adjunct at Houston Community College in Texas, and at GTCC here locally, and at Guilford College, whose Quaker values required them to pay us better, and invite us to sit in on faculty meetings — but not to vote. Even there, the caste system was rigidly in place.

It’s not complicated; the pie is shrinking, and the tenure-track faculty, like all people who have privileges, are dedicated to maintaining their own personal slice of that pie. Consistent hypocrisy around this issue is one of the reasons that I left the university system back in 2014. Entrepreneurs are a lot more honest about their motives. They are dedicated to growing the pie, mostly for themselves but also for everyone else.

The rest of this week’s newsletter is a reprint of an article from roughly 2016 that I never managed to sell. It’s been up on LinkedIn for a couple of years.

Apparently I posted it 730 days ago. **That** they save (or recalculate daily). Image from LinkedIn.

Recent developments with my company, Agnosia Media, have got me thinking about it again. Enjoy.

Open Badges and Science Fiction

As I stood in my kitchen this morning, after a bowl of Raisin Bran, singing to myself

'Have Gun, Will Travel' says the card of a man

A knight without armor in a savage land …

(along with a mental projection of Corey Feldman from Stand By Me) and thinking about an online course I'm working on, a column came to me – Open Badges and Science Fiction. Writing this opening was the way I recalled it from whatever memory hole it had fallen down while I was listening to NPR on the way to the coffee shop. I know Cumberbatch's Sherlock can just sit in a chair and access his memory through sheer force of will, flicking away facts and formulas like they were bad matches on Tinder; but mine has to be tricked, or maybe tickled, into yielding up its secrets. The rocks in my stream of consciousness are mostly underwater.

This is not necessary. The memory room (sometimes called the memory palace) mentioned in “The Hounds of Baskerville” is an ancient technique, first described by the Greeks, for enhancing the semantic recall of the neocortex by leveraging the spatial memory of the hippocampus. What I mean is that the hippocampus is full of maps, and the fact that Green Joe's coffee house (where I'm sitting right now) is across Battleground Avenue from Buxton Chiropractic at 2912 could be used as a cue to help me remember … I dunno … something I have to do on the 29th of December (?). I've never personally invested the two or three weeks of effort supposedly required to make the technique work (though I do regularly memorize lists of student names for my classes), but basically what one does is imagine a familiar room and store mental images in specific locations. For instance, I might store my sister's phone number in a specific magnet that she gave me on my refrigerator.

These kinds of techniques are used in all sorts of genre stories, not just detective stories but in comics and science fiction as well, but they're most often used as markers of the exceptional character, the outlier, not as common social innovations we can all use. Similarly, they are not taught by any formal educational institution I've ever been involved with. The baby versions – making mnemonics out of acronyms, like ROY G BIV to help kids remember the visible spectrum – those are taught, but not the really impressive stuff. There are books on how to do it, and a community of people who practice the techniques, and a World Memory Championship, but no college classes. Meditation and lucid dreaming are similarly ignored. That academia has not embraced such practical skill sets is one of the things wrong with it.

Of course, I just admitted that I don't use them, either ...

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What does this little rant have to do with science fiction? What I'm encouraging authors to do is to think more broadly about educational systems that we take for granted. It's routine for inventors to say that SF influenced them to think about cell phones, or some other technical gadget. But look at the Firefly movie sequel Serenity. The best education available in the future is a classroom, sitting outside with a holographic desk and blackboard? I realize that the scene could be taken as a negative comment on how conservative the culture of the inner worlds is. That's fine; but where can I find a positive example of what the education of the future could look like? The other most common SF learning techniques are robo-tutors (The Diamond Age) and direct encoding of memories (Dollhouse). Really? That's it? Three examples (of which the robo-tutor looks like the most fun)?

I'm currently becoming kind of involved in one community that is building tools to change education. They're called Open Badges. If you're a Pokemon fan like my kid, you know that Pokemon trainers like Ash Ketchum (or Red, from the manga) do not spend their young lives in classrooms. Instead, they travel the known world, collecting badges from gym leaders with whom they have engaged in ritual combat. They don't fight directly; they battle teams of super-powered “pocket monsters” that they've trained themselves or traded with another trainer (there doesn't appear to be any way to buy a Pokemon, but that's another issue). In the manga and the TV cartoon, these badges are physical objects. In the video games, they are digital files, stored on the kid's DS or whatever system s/he's using. Open Badges are like those digital badges, but with an audit trail embedded in the metadata baked into the image file, so that an auditor can contact the organization who issued the badge and confirm its authenticity. They can potentially be used for anything, from attending a public service event to defending a Ph.D. thesis.

Nothing I've ever seen indicates that the whole Pokemon world works in this decentralized way. Presumably the various Professors and Nurses and Pokemon Rangers sit in classes to develop their expertise, at least part of the time. It's a question that the Pokemon Authors are apparently not interested in and never address. But what if the whole educational world did work like the Trainer system? What if doctors and nurses could collect their credentials one procedure at a time, transparently and verifiably? Artists and academics in our world already list their awards and publications at the professional level, but what if everybody did this, in a way that allowed comparison and ranking? Could top scientists become celebrities like top athletes are today?

Of course, any system that can be imagined can be gamed, manipulated, and cheated – and therein lie a whole other set of stories. Badges might be a way for governments to track people, if they were granted for attending a political rally, for instance. They could be faked in various ways. Maybe some kind of shadow economy would spring up around the fakes, with enforcement and punishments and even violence in extreme cases. Or maybe not. Maybe the Open Badge economy will be so well-designed, so robust, that it engenders perfect cooperation and universal trust, so that “we all live in a Pokemon world.” That's up to the writer.

If this topic seems a little dry to you, you are correct. Academics love this stuff; we can debate the future of education, or scientific publishing, or anything else on Reddit for a long time, suggesting all kinds of interesting ideas that spark the imaginations of other academics, who write papers about them – read by still other academics, who don't necessarily do anything with them. That's why we need artists. Artists inspire inventors and adventurers and doers, while they're young and impressionable, outside the classroom, as my beloved superhero comics inspired me to love science, even though they had no scientific validity whatsoever (I mean, seriously, Spider-Sense?). Artists make dry topics juicy. And we need more of that.