Digital badges for initial technology teacher education: a method for grading explicit soft skills.

Abstract

Soft skills encompass personality traits, social graces, communication, language, personal habits, friendliness, and optimism that characterise one's relationships with other people. Soft skills complement hard skills, which are about a person's skill set and ability to perform a certain type of task or activity. In education, the term 'soft skills' is often used interchangeably with transversal (cross-curricular) competences, i.e. those that are horizontal, cross-disciplinary, and not subjectspecific. The European Commission (EC) Eurydice Network identifies a number of soft skills, such as problem solving, social and civic competences, cultural awareness and expression, collaboration, innovation, etc. Strategically targeting the development of these skills requires the recognition of key qualities, the capacity to discriminate between these qualities and a mechanism to validly and reliability grade acquisition. Teachers and students alike must take cognisance of the sophisticated relationships between acquiring content knowledge and soft skills through specific ways of working and thinking