Helen Foster was one of the main speakers at the Ireland & UK Moodlemoot 2012.

She is community manager of moodle.org. Moodle is an open-source application that educators can use to create effective online learning sites.

Over three-hundred delegates attended the Moot in Dublin early this week.

Helen spoke of the Mozilla Foundation and its development of the Open Badges Project.

Kyle pointed out the importance of debugging and solving issues at the network level, he provided a whole set of resources to do so, examples ranged from pure network debugging to connection testing and ultimately dealing with comcast customer support or how to contact sprint to get things done.

Richard Wyles wrote of this recently in the Moodle Lounge. Amongst other things he said

Learning today happens everywhere but it’s often difficult to get recognition for skills and achievements gained outside of formal education and training contexts. Mozilla’s Open Badges project is working to solve that problem, making it easy for any organization or learning community to issue, earn and display badges across the web. The result: recognizing 21st century skills, unlocking career and educational opportunities, and helping learners everywhere level up in their life and work.

The Badges for Lifelong Learning Competition brought together Web developers, designers and technologists with educators, online learning innovators and collaborators that range from NASA, the U.S. Department of Education and the Girl Scouts of America to Intel, Disney-Pixar and Motorola.

The goal: explore how digital badges can provide learners of all ages new ways to gain 21st century skills, harness the full educational power of the Internet, and unlock career and learning opportunities in the real world.