Now You See It—a site (and book) all about the science of attention—posted this piece, furthering the conversation about badges. The topic is the possibility that badges could replace standardized tests.

Look around in the blog archives while you’re there. With posts titled The History of Distraction, 4000 BCE to the Present, how could you go wrong?

Of course, it’ll cost you—you’ll need to give it some of your valuable, undivided attention.

With Mozilla’s Open Badges project entering the arena, the promise of getting/awarding educational credit in the Web environment is a big step closer to reality.

What problem does this address?

Think of it as the challenge of designing 21st Century Report Cards—as this blog puts it.

Here’s an excerpt: “…thinking about how little information report cards actually report to kids and their families. Honestly, I get more data about my performance when I finish a Scrabble game on my iPad.”

And what exactly is Mozilla’s solution?

See how Mozilla describes it.

The New York Times Learning Network asked a while back, What’s the Coolest Thing You’ve Ever Seen in a Museum?

Well, to paraphrase Art Linkletter—Kids say the most professionally relevant things.

Read through the dozens of responses and see for yourself. What’s clear is that individual museum items, stories, and experiences make indelible impressions.

Here are a few a samples—”The coolest thing I ever ‘heard’ at a museum was an audio tour of a Chuck Close exhibit by the artist himself. It’s like the walls had ghosts.”

Sara mentioned “The coconuts from Monty Python and the Holy Grail”.

And one kid talked about what he’d like to see in a museum, admitting, “I never gone in to a museum the closest thing to a museum i ever gone to was my grandpa’s house.”

The subject is Games.

To that end, MHS is working on prototyping with the ARIS system—in partnership with members of the Games+Learning+Society group at UW Madison.

And MHS plans to take what it learns and apply it more broadly—to other exhibits and historic sites.

More as this project develops.

Development of the MNopedia project took many familiar turns, and maybe an unusual twist or two along the way.

Creating a resource like this, from within a large institution like MHS, requires—of course—quite a bit of brainstorming, negotiating, and various forms of communication among the many parties with vested interests.

In addition, with this being a Legacy project—funded by many, many pennies from Minnesotans and others through state sales tax—we were determined to give the public a real role, both initially and on-goingly.

We were also conscious of the need to establish a strong foundation—technically, and in many other ways—so the project (and its partnerships) could grow to the point that the content truly becomes comprehensive enough to be called encyclopedic, and that the resource would be capable of receiving and reflecting many perspectives.

What follows is a technical description of the project written while in production:

The MNopedia was conceived not as a Web site, but as a pure content resource, capable of informing many possible products—the first of which being a browser-readable site for use on desktop and laptop computers, tablets, mobile phones, and any device that enables basic Web access.

Now—after quite a bit of hard work by many people—the Minnesota Historical Society’s MNopedia project has launched.

Take a look—and PLEASE use at least one of the many means of providing feedback. Now more than ever, the success of MNopedia depends on your ideas, suggestions, corrections, etc.

And spread the word. The bigger the crowd, the better the resource.

Here—captured with an iPhone—is an example of AR the old-fashioned way.

From the Chik-Wauk Museum and Nature Center