Digital Media and Learning Competition names YALSA a finalist in Badges for Lifelong Learning Competition

CHICAGO — The Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), a division of the American Library Association, is a finalist in the HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Badges for Lifelong Learning Competition. YALSA is an official collaborator in the 4^th Digital Media and Learning Competition, held in collaboration with the Mozilla Foundation. A full list of collaborators, as well as Stage 1 and Stage 2 winners, can be found at www.dmlcompetition.net.

YALSA has been paired with a winning badge design/technology team to work collaboratively on developing a badge system to be judged Feb. 28 and 29 at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. The 2012 DML Competition winners will be announced on March 1 at the Digital Media and Learning Conference Mozilla Science Fair in San Francisco .

The Badges for Lifelong Learning Competition is designed to encourage the creation of digital badges and badge systems that support, identify, recognize, measure and account for new skills, competencies, knowledge and achievements for 21st century learners wherever and whenever learning takes place.

Collaborators, such as YALSA, create compelling learning content, activities or programs for which a badge or set of badges would be useful for recognizing learning that takes place in a particular area or topic.

Winning applications represent a wide array of public and private institutions and organizations from around the world, including museums, non-profits, after-school programs, research institutions and for-profit companies. Proposed content for badge systems address a breadth of topics—from the promotion of civic engagement and community volunteerism, to STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics) learning in and out of the classroom, to digital literacy, to workforce preparedness and beyond.

Full information can be found at www.dmlcompetition.net

For more than 50 years, YALSA has been the world leader in selecting books, videos and audiobooks for teens. For more information about these awards or for additional lists of recommended reading, go to www.ala.org/yalsa/booklists. For more information about YALSA, please contact us via e-mail, yalsa@ala.org, or by phone, at 1 (800) 545-2433 ext. 4390.