Todor S. Simeonov

СУ “Св. Климент Охридски.

Имейл: teo.simeonov@gmail.com

Abstract: There are many evidences of how education is conducted, partially or entirely, in the virtual environment. Nowadays, the processes of acquisition of new knowledge and skills, and fostering the proper motivation in the learners have to fully comply with the ‘avalanche’ of new technologies that flows over the education. The digital badges have a dual role – on one hand, they are the new technology, and on the other, they appear as a tool to help educators in need of finding an effective method to motivate learners in the virtual space. The current paper aims at examining the nature of digital badges – their creation and their use in virtual environment from a rhetorical viewpoint. For the purpose, a corpus of 20 digital badges from different virtual educational platforms has been subjected to visual analysis.

Keywords: digital badges, virtual environment , new technologies in education, visual rhetorical analysis.