The following interview is with Daniel Hickey, the Director of
Learning Sciences at the School of Education at Indiana
University at Bloomington. Hickey was recently awarded a
$400,000 grant by the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and
Learning Initiative to study how digital badges, a non-
traditional mechanism to record and display achievements and
accomplishments, could be used to recognize, assess, motivate
and evaluate learning. In this interview, Hickey discusses the
value he thinks badges will bring to the higher education space
and warns educators about challenges badges could face. 1. Could
you briefly explain how your project will determine which uses
of badges are most appropriate? These are just an incredibly
diverse set of projects. In total, there’s about 30 projects,
and some projects with multiple aspects. What we’re really
trying to do is look at how their intended practices that they
outlined in their proposals—in the abstract—how those were
transformed and changed and perhaps even complet