The Inspiration
It was September, and in recent months Mitt Romney’s candidacy and other events had thrown Mormonism into the media spotlight. All sorts of things were being said about Mormons and Mormonism, some of them true, some of them not. As practicing Mormons, we decided that the world needs more information about Mormonism and less misinformation. At the time we were also doing research on badges, a new Internet phenomenon. We thought, what if badges could be used to spread information about Mormonism and correct misconceptions? What if a regular person or even a journalist could earn a badges to learn basic facts about Mormonism and then display it online to show their credibility when they participated in online discussions about Mormonism? We decided to create a series of “Mormon Badges” to educate curious people who want accurate information about the fastest growing American religion.
The First Badge
Many people still believe that Mormons practice polygamy, even though the Church ended the practice over one hundred years ago. We wanted to use our first badge to correct this misconception. Our “Mormons and Polygamy” badge required users to read two web pages published by the LDS Church and take a short quiz to test their understanding.
Reflecting and Rethinking
After publishing our first badge, we wanted to step back and reflect on our goals for Mormon badges. We realized that it was more important to us to educate people about what Mormonism is than about what it isn’t. With this in mind, we chose the founding or “restoration” of the LDS Church as the topic of our next badge, instead of choosing another misconception to correct.
We also began thinking about other ways that badges could be used in the Mormon community.
New Applications
Though we had previously focused on how badges could educate non-Mormons about the Church, be began to explore how badges could be used with Church members. We saw badges as a way to bridge a gap between the youth programs of the church and the social media platforms that the youth are already using.
We pictured the Church’s Duty to God and Personal Progress programs awarding badges for requirements completed and the youth then sharing those badges through social media to encourage each other and share the Church’s message with non-members. We created a prototype badge for the Faith #1 requirement in the Personal Progress program. When we explained Personal Progress badges to a few young women we knew in the Personal Progress program, their responses were positive.
Another youth-directed badge application that we imagined was a system of badges to reward youth for memorizing important verses of scripture in the Seminary program. We also began to think of ways that badges could be used in proselytizing to train future missionaries and to help people investigating the church by gamifying the process of learning key Mormon beliefs. Yet another idea was awarding badges to Family History Indexing volunteers for completing certain numbers of batches.
Presenting to a Wider Audience
Our mentor in our badge efforts, Dr. Gideon Burton, arranged for us to present during a session of the Mormon Media Studies Symposium. We created a Prezi presentation to share with people what badges were and how we saw them being used in the Mormon community. Our presentation went smoothly and we received some useful feedback from our session attendees. Their responses were often positive, but they also asked some important questions, such as “Won’t displaying badges online lead to unhealthy competition and showing-off between members?” and “Can’t other people fake badges? How will you show which badges are authentic?” Answering their questions helped prepare us to respond to potential doubts of our next presentation audience: a member of the Church media department.
Results of the Mormon Badges Project
Through our experiences with badges, we’ve learned a lot about where badges are already being used and even more about how they can be applied in the future on a wider scale. As we’ve built and tested different prototypes such as our badge on polygamy, on the Restoration or our Personal Progress badge, we’ve seen that there is a huge potential for using badges outside of strict educational settings to encourage learning and provide clear rewards and credentials.
Through our specific badges we not only learned how to harness the new badge technology and interface, but we also were able to see the importance of developing and tailoring content for the medium of badges. Our biggest lesson came through the shift we made away from our original idea of controversies, and we really think that the key to successfully integrating badges into the LDS Church is through focusing on the central doctrines and ideas of Mormonism rather than on the negative elements. We have also learned how vital the social media aspect of badges truly is, as this allows those who have earned badges to be able to begin a conversation with friends and family about what they’ve learned. Through sharing through social media, the learning that begins with badges is able to be reinforced, and perhaps additional learning will be motivated as questions arise. Rather than just learning in isolation, we have come to see that badges facilitate learning that is more social and more lasting than other types of online learning.
What we’ve Learned, Future Application of Learning, and “Passing the Torch”
What we have learned from this project has been both promising and intimidating. We’ve learned that gamification is a powerful tool; it motivates learning and achievement by tapping into that natural human inclination to play. We’ve caught the vision of just how effective badges can be (and have been), and just how great a fit they would be for the Church. We’ve learned just what it takes to design a curriculum and issue badges, as well as developed many intuitive and innovative ideas for how badges could be implemented into the current framework of the Church (i.e. Personal Progress, Duty to God, missionary, and CES). We’ve also learned what it takes to move our ideas forward and present them to individuals that can help move them forward in a way that we never could alone.
And that’s really what we’re trying to do now. The survival of the Mormon Badges idea is linked to the Church’s adoption of their own badge platform. This platform would necessarily link to such obvious choices as mormon.org and lds.org profiles, but could extend as far as Facebook and Google+ social networks. We are interested in “passing the torch,” if you will. We would love to see others more capable than ourselves carrying on our ideas in the way that would best benefit the Church. This week the Mormon Badges Project will present our ideas to Jared Covington, who works on social media for the Church. As we prepare to graduate and go separate ways, we hope and pray that someone will catch the vision that we have had for the Mormon Badges Project and hopefully use their influence to suggest to Church leaders the benefit of implementing badges in existing programs.
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