Via Downes, today, a link to a Chronicle of Higher Ed story asking: “When Professors Print Their Own Diplomas, Who Needs Universities?, and which reports on the distribution of ‘personally guaranteed’ certificates by open educator David Wiley to participants who were not formally enrolled in, but were allowed to participate in, (and were ‘unofficially’ graded on) an open course that ran last year.
Hopefully I’ll get a chance to ask David about that tomorrow. because I think this sort of ‘personal vouchsafe from a credible source’ could be a powerful ingredient in an “Open Achievements API”.
The post goes on:
But plenty of folks outside of higher education might jump in. Imagine the hosts of the TV show Myth Busters offering a course on the scientific method delivered via the Discovery Channel’s Web site. Or Malcolm Gladwell, author of the best-selling Tipping Point, teaching an online business course on The New Yorker’s site. Or a retired Nobel Prize winner teaching via a makeshift virtual classroom set up on her personal blog.
By developing credibility or ‘authority metrics’ (“AuthorityRank”?!) that reflect the extent to which there are legitimate grounds for an agent to ‘bestow an award’ on an individual on the grounds that the individual has demonstrated some competency or understanding in a particular area, we might be able to build a trust based framework for ‘qualifying’ an individual’s capabilities in a particular area with a given degree of confidence.
An Open Achievements API would provide a structure for declaring such achievements, and different ‘qualification platforms’ could compete on the efficacy of their authority ranking mechanisms in terms of positioning themselves as ‘high worth’ qualifying engines (cf. “good universities”).
It’s late, I’m tired, and I have no idea if this will make any sense to me in the morning…
OUseful.Info, the blog... 
Fascinating idea, thanks for posting this
Very interesting! I’m convinced that there are many cases in which a “personal vouchsafe” is (or ought to be) of greater value than an official qualification.
Thinking about it, this could evolve into a genealogy of authority, of the kind which often exists informally within crafts communities. Here’s an amazing example which I came across this week:
http://www.celtscot.ed.ac.uk/fiddle/teachertree.htm