Superlectores

Agatha Christie read about 200 books every year, so she could be considered a superlectora. Theodore Roosevelt, the American President read at least a book every day and sometimes two or three. I had not heard about Badges (Insignias) as a kind of reward for students. The concept is new to me. First I didn't take it very seriously, especially in connection with reading: it seems to me that the reward for reading a book is... Reading the book! The pleasure we derive from this input of information and imagination is reward in itself. At any rate, I started checking out the badge-making sites and the first one our course recommended was MakeBadges. It's an easy little program and I created badges for the above-mentioned Superlectores. I saw that under Icon you can upload any image you like and it will appear inside the badge. You can even adjust the size of the image. Together with the old look of the photographs you immediately get a pretty cool badge! Then, of course, I considered this a little bit too easy. For the purpose of AbiesWeb I thought of a badge for Readers who, when they finish a book, write a short synopsis, or summary that can then be attached to the data of AbiesWeb and become available to potential readers. 

Then, there would have to be some kind of control and feedback from the part of the teachers. I'm talking, of course, about my own school, which is an EOI and therefore the Blurbs should be in the language that the specific reader is studying (or the language of the book they are reading). Every student that produces a Blurb (This is the English name for the description on the back cover of a book, often written by other authors, in which an opinion about the book is given or a summary of the plot (without revealing too much so as not to spoil the story), or some comments from reviews in the papers. The students should write a little about their opinion of the story and also about the linguistic aspects for their level: whether the book is easy to follow, the number of difficult words that had to be looked up in dictionaries, the grammatical structures that are used, etc.

It occurred to me that perhaps we could design a badge for every student who contributes and writes some kind of a blurb. These students would receive the badge Vassal of Blurb (a Vassallo) as the badge that rewards the effort and a more distinguished badge for a blurb of exceptional quality for one reason or another. I was thinking of Prince and Princess of Blurb.  I started designing a little bit myself and first I thought that I should use the image of Shakespeare and a crown, perhaps and got the following result that you see here. That looked pretty ridiculous (as I'm sure you will agree) so I abandoned the idea and came up with the golden badge with the golden banner and the old books with the names Vassal, Princess and Prince. This, too, looks horribly tacky, but as I'm not completely partial to the idea of the badges I decided to use those and to print them, as it were, on imitation parchment. So the design is my own and I'll print a single badge below. For my Plantilla I printed all three badges. I should perhaps explain that, unlike the badges for Christie and Roosevelt, these badges I designed in CorelDraw and then exported them as PNG images.

I included the fields of the Description, Criteria and Evidence to comply with the instructions of the task as shown in the Plantilla. Under Description I wrote (in case the image is hard to read) The badges are formed by golden shields and banners with a stack of old books depicted in the centre. The three badges are identical but for the names Vassal, Princess and Prince at the top. The Vassal badge is for participants while the Prince and Princess badges are for outstanding production. We can think of students who have produced more than 10 blurbs and become princes and princesses. I'm not so very happy about using Royalty, but there could be a superbadge that acknowledges the exceptional quality of Blurbs, or exceptional number of blurbs (say 20) and thus become King or Queen. Here's the Parchment:

I used an old imitation parchment background for a more interesting look. I'm not saying that it's beautiful, mind. Here goes the Badge of Blurb by Jan Bliek

For the Criteria I wrote:

The badges will be rewarded to all participant, that is readers who provide the system with some kind of cross-reference contribution in the form of a short synopsis that we call Blurb here. Special badges will be awarded to those contributions that stand out because of their quality bot in Language and in ideas.

For the Evidence I wrote: The production of the blurbs will be monitored by the teachers available in the library. They will assess the production and evaluate the writing on grammar an, vocabulary and structures, but mainly on its personal quality and intensity, for which the badges Prince and Princess are particularly applicable. I’m sot sure how these badges are allotted to the students inside AbiesWeb, for example, or whether this is something that’s made visible outside Abies

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I later read a few things about the insignia in

Una insignia no es un simple fichero de imagen

And I think I understand the concept a little bit better. It's a bit like a chip in your ear that contains meta-data, isn't it?

I also earned my own badge doing this course