This post is connected with IPT 690, a graduate seminar course in Instructional Psychology and Technology at Brigham Young University.

On October 9th, we heard from the winners of this years best research paper, best teaching assistant, and best student project.

First up was David Dean, who won best student project for the year.  His project was MandaClu, a mandarin Chinese translation web app which David built.  I was amazed at the execution on this project, and while there wasn’t great UX or UI to the project, I was really amazed that a student could pull off a project of that complexity.  David’s justification for the project was well thought out, and his reasoning really spoke to the many different uses that a person can take with the app.  The app can be found at http://www.mandaclu.com.

The second presentation was from Dan Randall, who spoke of the digital badges project that he has been working on in conjunction with IPT 286.  While I have heard Dan talk about this project in several different venues, it was nonetheless good to hear more about his justification for the project.  While I am really all about alternative credentialing, I’m still not sure if badges are the model that can be taken seriously by businesses and colleges.  I would love to see this same concept re-framed as something else — something that is closer to a traditional degree/certificate/credential.

The last speaker was Bryce Bunting, a PhD student who has been doing research around peer mentoring at the undergraduate level.  While that’s not a particularly interesting area for me, he did discuss legitimate peripheral participation, which is a learning theory that I have a lot of interest in.  I think this is something that I would like to look more into — particularly in its application in workforce education.