Bestr Steering Committee 3/5: Serge Ravet, ADPIOS

Serge Ravet is Innovation Director a ADPIOS, a not for profit organisation created in 2010 to address the issues related to identity construction in a world where digital and networked technologies colonise an ever increasing space in our lives. 

I have accepted to join the .Bestr Board as it is a great honour and opportunity to contribute to the success of a pioneering enterprise — and learn from it!

Bestr is exactly the kind of initiative Europe needs to address a series of issues that we are facing regarding education, employment and social inclusion.

To solve our problems, we need more than the means to "read the world through the word" (Freire) but rather citizens equipped to write the world. Open Badges, at least in my understanding, can provide citizens with the means and the power to act, the capacity to write tomorrow's world, a Read/Write World where we are all co-authors of our future.

I like to think of Open Badges as Lego™blocks (a more actual metaphor could be the Minecraft™ blocks) with which we can perform bricolage. With Lego™ we are free to design many different objects, buildings, spaces and landscapes, either from a plan or from our own imagination. Some like to build fortresses others museums, some battleships others spaceships, while still others imagine things that never were — and probably never will be!

To understand the unique contribution of Open Badges, we need to differentiate between assimilation and accommodation, between using them for things we were already doing and using them to transform the way things are done, changing our representations of the world.

For that, we can use the acid test of challenging questioning: what can we do with Open Badges that we could not do before their invention? Is what we are doing really new? Is it transformative? Who is the real beneficiary?

My contribution will be from someone who is both a devoted Open Badge ambassador (to the world) and a reflective rebel (within the Open Badge community), a trait shared by other board members with whom I am looking forward to supporting Bestr's efforts at providing us with the means to write tomorrow's world.