Human recommending and badges in my HCI course
The #chikul13 students have been working on their assignment since last Tuesday. As one of the student blogs summarizes the idea, the core idea of their application is:
Someone recommends something to someone else
So, they will design, build and evaluate an application that enables one person to suggest a book, a movie, a course, etc. to another person. Incidentally, it would be interesting to hear about your experiences: how do you typically give or receive recommendations?
(No, we’re not considering software generated recommendations – this is about one person making a recommendation for another person.)
We’ve also started to experiment with badges - as another student tweeted:
Being 'rewarded' with badges is really motivating and on the other hand just fun! #chikul13
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Sander Voeten (@SanderVoeten) March 02, 2013This is still a bit in the early stages, but we’re quite excited to experiment with the mozilla open badge system…
So far, students have done brainstorming sessions and developed storyboards. Next Tuesday, we will evaluate paper prototypes in think-aloud tests. You’re very welcome to leave comments on their blogs (or here) if you want to influence their work!
Kevin Delval is one of the thesis12 students in the HCI-group and his thesis topic his gamification. He mentioned in the first presentation (november) that badges are a flawed system. The relevant blogpost is here: http://kevindelval.wordpress.com/2012/10/15/the-relevance-of-consciousness-design-dimensions/
Can you tell us what actions you took to overcome some of the problems a badge system can pose?
Good to raise this issue, but actually, I don’t think the blog post says that badges are flawed. I would rather summarise the post as ‘gamification is tricky’. The idea is that we research how and when exactly badges can contribute to the success of a course like #chikul13: in that sense, this is an experiment in which all of you participate. (It is also a concrete example of the sort of thing we study in this course…)