What Blockchain can do for Open Knowledge and Higher Education
The issue of trust in information and knowledge is at the forefront of debate at all sorts of levels. Issues such as “Fake News” and “The New Truth” are paramount in political and public debate, forcing a rethink about the role of journalism. Conspiracy theories are competing with official versions of events posing challenges to historical discourse. Money laundering and off-shore accounting and has eroded our trust in banking, while (fraudulent) reporting of non-existing revenues by companies such as Carillion and Tesco has shaken our belief that big accounting firms can be trusted to oversee accurate financial reporting by our nation’s major companies. And, finally, pseudo-science undermines people’s trust in real science. It appears that the institutions that for so long have provided the mechanisms that allowed us to decide whether to trust important information are no longer able to effectively fulfil this purpose.
At the same time, we have been witness to a revolution in thinking about the role institutions play in the control of knowledge and information for purposes other than trust. For example, institutions such as universities and academic publishers have been accused of restricting access to data, methods, publications and other scientific resources for competitiveness and power. Using their roles as curators of scientific knowledge to prevent activities that could degrade it, these institutions have also restricted the most basic access, to read and use, for the purpose of creating profit and influence.
So, it appears that the traditional order of centralised control of information and knowledge is no longer fit for purpose on account of its failure to instill trust and its tendency to put restrictions on access. But what is the alternative? Advocating open practice is well and good, but how do we prevent the degrading of information and knowledge by people with malicious intent? Take Wikipedia for example. According to the Wikimedia 2030 manifesto: “Now more than ever, the world needs shared human understanding, reliable information, inclusive spaces for public discourse, and advocates for free and open knowledge.” However, they go on to explain that: “… we’re aware of Russian hackers and social media bots sowing the seeds of dissent and disinformation to steer election results — and Wikipedia of course isn’t immune to these attacks.” So, clearly, maintaining reliability and trustworthiness of open knowledge and information is not as easy as it sounds.
Since technology, in particular Web 2.0, has led the way to making information and knowledge more open and accessible, perhaps technology can also provide a way to maintain its integrity. A technology that would allow us to decide who and what we can trust, or cannot trust, would make a giant contribution to maintaining a fair and transparent society. Blockchain has been hailed as exactly such a technology and the hype around it has reached astronomical proportions in recent times based on its promise of reducing, or removing altogether, the role of centralised institutions as guardians of truth. [1]
Blockchain technology has the potential to disrupt how students learn by offering a way of storing value, and attributing that value to an owner identity, in a way that cannot be tempered with. In HE, the value lies in knowledge. However, traditionally, students have been, for the most part, passive receivers of knowledge. With blockchain they can become co-creators of knowledge in highly interactive distributed learning situations focused on “the capacity to learn throughout life; to research, analyze, synthesize, contextualize, and critically evaluate information; to apply research in solving problems; and to collaborate and communicate.”
Take a typical assignment involving students working together to produce a group presentation. The whole class starts with debating how the learning outcomes for the assignment translate into what should be delivered. Groups can then form organically by individual students defining what parts they would like to work on and finding other students who have complimentary offers. Finally they decide on a schedule for delivery, breaking each part into smaller parts for rapid iteration. This can take place in an open environment in which students can deposit their work so that other students can enhance, merge and add to this without having to be worried about plagiarism. Blockchain simply keeps track of each student’s contributions to the project so that any rewards associated with the outcome can be shared proportionally.
Of course, such a reality is still some time into the future. Whether or not it will ever become reality depends very much on how well both students and teachers can make the switch to working in a way that puts agility, openness and consensus at the forefront of their approach to learning. So far, it has been the high-tech entrepreneurial sector that has been most keen to adopt this approach and it remains to be seen how widely it will catch on. Often the hype around blockchain has been driven by a perception that the younger generation has a completely different attitude to learning:
In my second blog on the topic of open knowledge and higher education I will share some of my attempts to improve students’ ability to discover, share, integrate and discuss by introducing them to the Toulmin model of argumentation [2] as part of a course on Social Media. The lack of enthusiasm with which these attempts have been greeted by students gives me grounds to be more than a little skeptical about the extent to which the statement above really applies. The evidence I have seen so far suggests that “fun and interesting”, and “trying new things, often at high speed” are synonyms for shallow and superficial analysis of the issues they are asked to analyse. However, if you have reasons to believe otherwise, please let me know.
Thanks for reading this blog.
Notes
[1] For those of you who are unfamiliar with Blockchain, a search on the Web for “what is blockchain in simple terms” will yield plenty of Web sites that offer explanations in layman’s terms.
[2] The Toulmin model of argumentation, developed by the British Philosopher Stephen Toulmin in his book “The Uses of Argument” (Cambridge, University Press, 1958), can be used to improve the analysis and construction of arguments in debate.
