Harrison lsri blockchain 2017

Colin HarrisonLearning Sciences Research Institute / School of Education

University of Nottingham

The Blockchain: the most over-hyped technology since the invention of ‘hype’?

Hype in technology in education is not new:



“Fifty years from now, school as we know it will have atrophied from lack of interest.”


Roger Schank: “Fifty years from now, school as we know it will have atrophied from lack of interest.”

Hype in technology in education is not new:Google: “… will not exist in 50 years”

- The USA- Europe- Israel- The Church

Roger Schank: “Fifty years from now, school as we know it will have atrophied from lack of interest.”


The Blockchain:

“The most democratizing force in history” - Lawrence Lundy - Head of Research and Partnerships at Outlier Ventures, Europe's first dedicated Blockchain venture builder

“The Blockchain redefines what it is to be new because the medium and message create an entirely new reality and possibility space for how to do things.” - Melanie Swan, Founder, The New School for Social Research, New York NY

“It’s as important as the invention of writing” - Vinay Gupta- sustainability guru, 1st class

What is the Blockchain?

The Blockchain is an incorruptible digital ledger of transactions that can be programmed to record not just financial transactions but virtually everything of value.









What is the Blockchain?The Blockchain is an incorruptible digital ledger of transactions that can be programmed to record not just financial transactions but virtually everything of value.Blockchain is a combination of four existing technologies put together to create something new. These technologies are well-known:

• the entire record is distributed over a wide network of participating computers and so is resilient to loss of infrastructure;• it is possible to confirm the identity of any addition or modification to the record;• once a block has been added by consensus among participants, it cannot be removed or altered, even by the original authors;• the events are publically-accessible, but not publically readable without a digital key.

How the Bitcoin Blockchain works


How might it be useful for education?

•It creates ‘a new class of agreements between human beings’: agreements that are transparent, un-hackable, non-erasable, and shareable with anyone who can see the Internet

•Contrast this with our (failed) e-portfolio systems [Hartnell-Young, Crook, Harrison, etc., etc.], or with the £10 billion NHS privatisation of our health records

How might the Blockchain be useful for education?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcP78cLPGtE&feature=youtu.be

Mike Sharples and the OU team

Educational uses of the Blockchain:

•To store records of achievement and credit, such as degree certificates

•To act as a permanent e-portfolio of intellectual achievement, for personal use as a logbook, or to present to

an employer [BUT - it is proof of existence; it does notguarantee that the data held in the record is valid, authentic or

useful]•It could store ‘educational reputation currency’, which the OU calls Kudos [you pay me in Bitcoin for my teaching; I transfer some ‘Kudos’ to you….]•The iSpot wildlife site grants reputation badges to contributors; the OU is experimenting with <http://www.ispotnature.org/node/192722>•An Ethereum (smart contracts) version of this, with ‘badges’ showing course credit

http://www.ispotnature.org/node/192722

The EU ePortfolio project

• A Personal Ledger is public and write-only — it is also pseudonymous, i.e. their owner is only known to the network through an address, not their real identity • A Personal Ledger is a faithful record of all the transactions — recording of one’s assets, artefacts, evidence, publications, reflections, etc. • A Personal Ledger can record any type of data, automatically (by a programme) or manually (by the owner or a member of the network) under the control of its owner • A Personal Ledger is resilient and is for life — one can have more than one ledger and move data from one to another (just like bitcoins move from one wallet to the next). • A Personal Ledger is the repository from which the owner can build (manually or semi-automatically) a range of ePortfolios — to support learning, self-assessment, peer assessment, expert assessment, accreditation, employment, self-employment, etc.). • A Personal Ledger is public, it is therefore possible for a variety of services to exploit their contents and add to them — e.g. data analytics could allow service providers to notify the owner of a Personal Ledger of employment, business or learning opportunities.

How might the Blockchain be useful for education?

Inspired vision or dystopian nightmare?



What are some of the problems withthe Blockchain?

•It uses massive amounts of computing power (the Bitcoin hash rate has been increasing 37% per month; at this rate it will consume the same amount of electricity as Denmark by 2020)<https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bitcoin-could-consume-as-much-electricity-as-denmark-by-2020>

• Currently, the amount of hashing done by Bitcoin mining software equals about 50 billion laptops working 24/7 (53% of which is done by the five biggest ‘ASIC pools’)•The only ‘mathematical certainty’ is that there is NO software that can’t be hacked- given enough computing power•Other problems?

Colin HarrisonLearning Sciences Research Institute / School of Education

University of Nottingham

The Blockchain: the most over-hyped technology since the invention of ‘hype’?