Evaluating the Credibility of Badges

Noticing that several of my classmates (Katie Cannon Wilkie for instance) have expressed interest in badges,  I’m going to continue learning more about them.  I think the idea of badges is a great one, but the question is, can it work?  We’ve discussed possible difficulties in having people accept these badges as legal tender in accreditation.  Professor Burton in particular has posed some issues with credibility online in a recent post.  So in this blog post I’d like to explore credibility—generating some preliminary ideas about how badges might gain credibility.

Today I found a research article on EBSCOhost from the Journal of Communication.  The researcher, Miriam J. Metzger, investigated the way Internet users evaluate credibility online.  She found that users in her study increasingly used social and group based methods to evaluate the credibility of online content.

Early on in her paper I found a paragraph that stated clearly for me the basic problems in determining credibility online:

“These concerns are reflected by Callister (2000), who argued that standard conventions of determining credibility break down in cyberspace. Traditional solutions

to credibility include granting credibility to some representative believed to provide reliable information (e.g., the government) or granting it by credential (e.g.,

expertise). This works, he says, only when there are a limited number of sources

and when there are high barriers for access to public dissemination of information

because these conditions create a meritocratic filtering process.—only those with

something of merit to say are published, put on the air, or allowed to teach/practice. . . The Internet presents a very different environment—one of information

abundance—which makes traditional models of gatekeeper oversight untenable. In

such an environment, people must defer to external sources of knowledge on a very

large scale, resulting in a ‘‘radical externalization of the processes involved in trust

assessment.” (Metzger 412)

To summarize, because there are so many sources of information on the Internet, traditional methods of judging credibility (relying on credentialed) are less useful.  Badges are a good example of this problem.  Because anyone, not just accredited organizations, can create badges, there has to be a new way to evaluate if a particular badge issuer is credible.  I’ve mentioned in a previous post that the badge itself will contain a link to the issuer’s website.  This helps, but users still need ways to evaluate whether that website proves issuer credibility.

Metzger’s study participants reported that they used a lot of social media to evaluate claims, such as customer evaluations and user ratings.  Another quote from Metzger’s article:

In the words of Madden and Fox (2006), socialcomputing tools and applications can ‘‘replace the authoritative heft of traditional institutions with the surging wisdom of crowds’’  The result may be a shift from a model of single authority based on scarcity and hierarchy to a model of multiple distributed authorities based on information abundance and networks of peers. (415)

Could user ratings help give credibility to badges?  I think so, but there would be a lot of trial and error involved.  For instance, an employer might have to hire someone based on their badges and see if they really have the skills they claim.  Once several employers had done this and posted comments, then new potential employers could begin to discern which badges and badge issuers were reliable.

Now here are some questions for my classmates: How do you evaluate credibility online?  Do you think that “the wisdom of crowds” can really discern credible from non-credible information, especially as related to badges?

Still interested? Here’s the link to my social-proof seeking comment on a P2PU blog post about badge credibility: http://info.p2pu.org/2012/08/15/what-if-people-make-bad-badges-p2pus-plan-of-action/#comment-654715909