Speaking of badges, good news folks: the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning is a Stage 1 winner in the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Teacher Mastery badge competition (whew, that was a mouthful).  Our proposal is to develop a badge system for an online professional development community in which teacher-learners develop their skills as history educators, instructional designers and peer collaborators. We are working with game developers and education researchers on the Stage 2 proposal which describes the functionality of the badges in more detail. And, if all goes very well, we’ll be heading to San Francisco at the end of February to pitch the project in front of a live panel of judges. Whatever happens, we are learning the ins and outs of badging as a way to motivate and recognize life-long learning.