Mullett's Corner

Well, I spent last week tinkering with the Open Badges Generator that I worked on. I managed to implement a couple of features that I was keen to get in, specifically referencing each issued badge with a unique ID rather than a row number. I had a little scout around stack overflow  and found a nice little chunk of code by 'thoughcrime' which generated an 8 character random string. This would create me my uniqueID I was after. Here's the snippet: function genRandomString(len, bits){   bits = bits || 36;   var outStr = "", newStr;   while (outStr.length < len)   {     newStr = Math.random().toString(bits).slice(2);     outStr += newStr.slice(0, Math.min(newStr.length, (len - outStr.length)));   }   return outStr.toUpperCase(); } I did have to change the whole flow to accompany this new addition though, so the auto-email that was sent with the dynamically generated URL had to be amended, the querystring capture in the do...

Before I go into the actual event and what went on, I thought I'd take a moment to say how wonderful what little of York I saw was. Stepping off the train into Eboracum, walking past ancient Roman settlements and towering parapets was truly a sight to behold, often in stark contrast to the modern architecture that now sits quite comfortably next to the old. The still very grandeur Roman structures still had a place in the bustling city of York, very much like the scene I witnessed on the train up there; two young lads both reading next to each other, one with a kindle, one with a paper book. A common theme I picked up on during the Google Apps for Education European User Group 2014 (GEUG14) ... and breathe... event. The old and the new. GEUG14 took place in The Ron Cooke Hub in the Heslington East Campus of University of York. The Ron Cooke Hub - University of York Pretty impressive place! I met a rather enthused  +Tom Smith  to whom I had to apologise ...

So, the rationale for building this system came from a need for our institution to be able to issue Open Badges , an initiative backed by the Mozilla foundation for standardising the issuing of badges for 'verifying learning'. All the systems that allow you to issue badges to users are all tied in to big and bulky VLEs such as BlackBoard. So what happens when it's a face to face session? How can we issue a badge to a user when they aren't in the ecosphere of the VLE or institution for that matter? We didn't want to have to worry about usernames, registrations, training on another system etc So I had a scout around to see what was about. I came across work by  +Martin Hawksey  where he used Google Sites to wrap up Mozilla's Open Badges Issuer api and a Google Form to serve this api with the correct badge details.  Fab, this is 'sort of' exactly what we wanted. I mean 'sort of' in the greatest respect to Martin's work, simply put, I...