Why We Want to Bring Blockchain to SXSWedu

By Katherine Prince

Blockchain: A New Architecture for Education?: Blockchain could enable new ways of coordinating learning, collecting student data, and issuing credentials. This panel explores its potential to provide a new architecture for personalized learning.

Vote for our panel using the SXSW PanelPicker.

Education conversations can easily get stuck in a logjam, constrained by current structures and policy frameworks to relatively limited reforms that don’t go far enough to meet students’ needs for a rapidly changing and increasingly complex future. So when we see something come along that promises to open new options for coordinating and credentialing learning, we start asking questions about what that could mean in ten years’ time.

We’re at one of those junctures today. Blockchain and smart contracts have intriguing potential to bring more distributed coordination to education, especially when combined with shifts toward more open and transparent cultures. We want to explore their potential at SXSWedu next March. Here’s why.

1. It’s pretty exciting to think that these distributed technologies could provide a new architecture for education, giving educators, learners, and families more options for personalizing learning.
2. That kind of impact is not a given. Blockchain and smart contracts could also be used to optimize the performance of current approaches, perhaps so much so that the guise of innovation distracts from true impact on student learning.
3. We need to balance speculation and hype with educator experience and wisdom.
4. We need their use to be guided by compelling visions for learning.
5. We also need to anticipate and begin navigating potential pitfalls around equity, data security, credentialing, and student privacy.
6. We need to situate exploration of these emerging technologies in a range of cultural contexts.

By voting for KnowledgeWorks’ “Learning on the Block” session at SXSWedu, you can help expand the debate while these potentially game-changing technologies are young enough for education stakeholders to shape their use in learning. Please help me, KnowledgeWorks Director of Strategic Foresight Jason Swanson, research guru Mike Courtney of Aperio Insights, and blockchain pioneer Ben Blair of Teachur secure a panel session on blockchain and the future of education.

Voting is open through September 2. All it takes is a few clicks to help bring this future-focused conversation to SXSWedu! How’s that for distributed authority?

And thank you!