What is the Blockchain, and why is there so much hype about it? More importantly, how might it be useful for educators?

1. Colin Harrison
Learning Sciences Research Institute / School of Education
University of Nottingham
The Blockchain:
the most over-hyped
technology since
the invention of ‘hype’?

2. Hype in technology in education is
not new:

3. Hype in technology in education is
not new:

4. Hype in technology in education is
not new:
“Fifty years from now, school as we know it will have
atrophied from lack of interest.”

5. Hype in technology in education is
not new:
Roger Schank: “Fifty years from now, school as we
know it will have atrophied from lack of interest.”

6. 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.”

7. Hype in technology in education is
not new:
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

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. How the Bitcoin Blockchain works

15. What is the Blockchain?
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

16. How might the Blockchain be useful for education?

17. 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 not
guarantee 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

18. 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.

19. How might the Blockchain be useful for education?
Inspired vision or dystopian nightmare?

20. What are some of the problems with
the 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?

21. Colin Harrison
Learning Sciences Research Institute / School of Education
University of Nottingham
The Blockchain:
the most over-hyped
technology since
the invention of ‘hype’?