Mark Fisher

Lecturer and TLT Director in Philosophy
College of Liberal Arts
Founding Co-Editor, Public Philosophy Journal
2014 TLT Faculty Fellow
Focus Area: Using Digital Badges and A Domain of One’s Own

Mark is working with Teaching and Learning with Technology on a project that brings together a variety of interests and initiatives. Mark coordinates the Teaching with Technology certificate in Philosophy, and part of his Fellowship involves re-imagining the certificate through digital badges. Mark is specifically targeting graduate students in Philosophy, allowing students to put into practice the skills they acquire through the T.W.T. certificate.

We are interested in developing badges for specific areas of competence and expertise in teaching philosophy with technology. We think this will address some barriers to participation in, and eventual completion of, the program by increasing the perceived benefits of getting started and then providing a clear structure of expectations, incentives, and rewards at different stages along the way.

Once students earn a badge, what happens next? We should support some method for students to publish their badges to something similar to an e-portfolio or website. One method students can use is to create an eportfolio on something like sites.psu.edu, that will publish to each student’s Penn State personal web space. This represents a small challenge; when a student graduates, the university only maintains her webspace for a fixed amount of time. This requires each student to migrate everything from their PSU webspace to a different digital home after graduation.

Enter a Domain of One’s Own (based on a similar project from the University of Mary Washington), a pilot project in Liberal Arts, that allows graduate students to have their own domain names and web hosting. Students will be able to create subdomains, install software supported by the hosting service, and control their own webspace.