Badges can be seen as recognisable tokens of status or achievement. But tokens don't work in a vacuum, they depend on other things to make them work. Perhaps looking at these may help us understand how they might be used, both for portfolios and elsewhere.
18. Having prepared the ground, I'm now going to address in more detail how levels of competence can best be represented, and the implications for the rest of representing competence structures. Levels can be represented similar to other competence concept definitions, but need different relationships.
17. The discussion of NOS in the previous post clearly implicated assessability. Actually, assessment has been on the agenda right from the start of this series: claims and requirements are for someone "good" for a job or role. How do we assess what is "good" as opposed to "poor"? The logic of competence partly relies on the logic of assessability, so the topic deserves a closer look.
15. Discussion suggests that it is important to lay out the argument in favour of optionality in competence structures. I touched on this post 7 in this series, talking about component parts, and styles or variants. But here I want to challenge the "purist" view that competence structures should always be definite, and never optional.
14. Earlier this week I was at a meeting where we were talking about interoperability for abilities, and there was much discussion about the niceties of representation. Human readability is significant — whether the representation reflects what is in people's minds. The same logic can be represented in radically different ways that are still logically equivalent (and so interoperable); there remains the question of what is identified by identifiers.
13. My recent thoughts on how to represent the interplay between competence definitions and structures seem to be stimulating but probably not convincing enough. This post tries to clarify the issues more thoroughly, at the same time as introducing more proposals about the structural relationships themselves.
12. One of the keys to a fuller understanding the logic of competence is the interplay between, on the one hand, the individual definition of an ability or competence concept, and on the other hand, a framework or structure containing several related definitions. Implementing a logically sound representation of competence concepts depends on this fuller understanding...
11. Having discussed, defined, and mapped the principal features of the concepts of ability and competence, we are left with the challenge of working towards "the practical implementation of such competence structures" (ninth post) by looking at the "detailed structure and relationships of ability concepts and structures that contain several of them" (tenth post) and working towards a particular formalisation that represents those concepts adequately for the uses that are envisaged.
10. In this series of posts I've used many terms as a part of my attempts to communicate on these topics. Now I offer definitions for or notes about both the concepts I've used in the blog posts so far, and related ones drawn from a range of other work, and I link to posts where the ideas behind these concepts are discussed or used prominently. Then, towards the end of this post there is a map of how the concepts I've used relate to each other.
