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All hype, no heart = blockchains in higher ed.
25 Years of Ed Tech is a serialized audio version of the book 25 Years of Ed Tech, written by Martin Weller of the Open University and published by AU Press. The audio version of the book is a collaborative project with a global community of volunteers contributing their voices to narrate a chapter of the book. Bonus episodes are a series of conversations called "Between the Chapters" to chat about these topics and more!
"In this lively and approachable volume based on his popular blog series, Martin Weller demonstrates a rich history of innovation and effective implementation of ed tech across higher education. From Bulletin Board Systems to blockchain, Weller follows the trajectory of education by focusing each chapter on a technology, theory, or concept that has influenced each year since 1994. Calling for both caution and enthusiasm, Weller advocates for a critical and research-based approach to new technologies, particularly in light of disinformation, the impact of social media on politics, and data surveillance trends. A concise and necessary retrospective, this book will be valuable to educators, ed tech practitioners, and higher education administrators, as well as students."
Credits:
Text in quotes from the book website published by Athabasca University Press CC-BY-NC-ND
BG music Abstract Corporate by Gribsound released under a CC-BY license. Track was edited for time.
Artwork X-Ray Specs by @visualthinkery is licenced under CC-BY-SA.
Audio book chapters produced by Clint Lalonde.
Between the Chapters bonus podcast episodes produced by Laura Pasquini.
0:03
Between the chapters, a weekly podcast discussion focusing on a chapter of the book 25 years of Ed Tech, written by Martin Weller. here's your host, Laura Pasquini.
0:15
Welcome to Chapter 24 2017 blockchain. I'm here with David Kernohan. Joining me to talk about blockchain, maybe not blockchain, block whites and all the things related to Ed Tech. And who knows what else we're talking about. So welcome, David. Great to have you.
0:33
Hi. Nice to be on the show. Thanks for having me.
0:36
So this chapter was covering a technology that I thought would never even enter into this book, Martin blockchain, I heard loosely on the periphery in 2017. And I really didn't see too many higher education institutions around the world, using blockchain really well understanding what it is. What did you remember about that time in 2017?
1:03
So 2017, I mean, it was a strange year in many, many ways. I remember it being particularly a stranger politically, that we were dealing in the UK with the aftermath of the vote to leave the European Union in the US, we were dealing with the idea of Donald Trump as an actual president of an actual country. And elsewhere in the world, we will looking at the kind of ideologies or kind of concepts that were very much we thought we'd left in the history and then something seemed to bring them back and a bit like those I wider political ideas, you could put the underpinnings of the blockchain in that. So I think pretty much everybody read a book or a article about blockchain at some point in 2017, or 2016. It was clearly being talked about by technology journalists by influences as the big coming thing in technology more generally, and popular party game at the time was to Google literally any activity and then the word blockchain afterwards and the chances are you would find a project. Probably an initial coin offering that suggested you can invest money in said project. Happily pleased to report that I never did.
2:38
It's like, Okay, so this is like when iTunes came out, and everyone had an AI in front of things, except this one's like mini Ponzi scheme with money involved and invest. Yes. Okay, great. Good. I'm on this episode, full disclosure, Dave and I are not going to explain anything about blockchains. I will reference a really good podcast I liked zigzag that second season explains manoush zomorodi explained blockchain in song and what the tech utopians bought into a pyramid scheme. So I will put a link to that in the show notes, you may go do some reading elsewhere. We're not going to get into it. But I will say the idea of having Ledger's and these kind of databases that are connected, I'm really connected to a previous conversation I had with Joyce on one of these episodes are our digital badges and micro credentialing because I think I thought when I read articles related to anything in higher ed, that blockchain was the hope we could leverage some sort of technology to offer credentials and and share what people learned done and upskilled into globally. Was that the hope and dream do you think?
3:55
So? I quickly learned in 2017, anytime I read the word blockchain, I would mentally replace it in my head with slow, inefficient, distributed database. Because that kind of basically what it is it's like a massive Google Sheets in the sky that you can store information on that people can change it, and people can see where the information has been changed. So that kind of legibility of if something has been altered or not, was a big part of the blockchain idea. And certainly the time when loads of people were talking about online, blockchain, I suppose records of learning achievements. So if you happen to do a 15 credit module about oceanography somewhere, then that would be on your record, and that would be an immutable part of that. Even if you went off and did something else and the provider in question actually closed That would still be a thing that you'd be recognized. But there's lots of other technologies that could do that, that could retain these learner records in a visible and retrievable way. And all of them relied on you trusting somebody or something like say, you could imagine in some countries that the government would just keep a record of all the accredited learning a person had done. And if you trusted the government to do that, right, then if anybody queried your qualifications, you could just point them to that. The common model in he is that universities tend to persist in some form, even if they might change the way they look or their name. So you can point somebody to your university and say, Look, I got a degree in this, if you don't believe me, you can ask these people and they will confirm it. For me. blockchain was a way of doing that without having to trust anybody other than the people who wrote the initial code. I suppose that's a use case, but it is a narrow one in that, I mean, most of the things we do as humans require that we trust somebody or something. I mean, right at the moment I trusting you that you're going to edit this contribution, and not make me sound stupid, I'm trusting zoom, the technology to convey my words accurately to you, so you can hear them and recall them. And even trusting the people who made my microphone that it makes my voice sound nice. And the idea of starting from a perspective that you can't trust anything at all is, again in wider political terms are really, really weird. starting point. So that for me was the stumbling block with the idea of the blockchain because I kept reading about it and thinking, Okay, who are these people that don't trust anyone or anything apart from code? Who are they? What do they do?
7:24
It's funny that you say that, David, because not funny haha. But funny, odd because I'm with you on this idea of trust. I think blockchain was a hope that there was transparency, reducing fraud. In 2017. I'm going back to my blog, Martin recommended a book that I read that's called the death of expertise by Tom Nichols. And in that book, it really was talking about separating the credential from being competence and distinguishing between peoples who have a passing thing and maybe a blog to the right on, versus those were verified journalists like yourself. So the idea of expertise and examining who has it. What does expertise mean, I think that all came into question in 2017. And so maybe that's why blockchain came on there. Because things are changing online. We saw some breakdown in earlier platforms, infrastructures. We saw our systems of politics, also being challenged from Brexit to the US election to other platforms, putting out information, whether it was fake news, misinformation, or other kind of rhetoric around it seems like a peak, a lack of trust is when 2017 happened. So maybe that's why blockchain was that was the year is what I'm thinking about. Because I'm wondering why we doubt expertise these days. And those would be include our institutions that we learn from, whether it's an academic one, it's one that's an organization institution or another accrediting body. So this is like going to a third party saying we don't really trust them anymore. Can you come up with our ways that we can identify this person's learn, they have this skill, they have this credential, and they can take it mobily with them in any interoperable environment. So it's really interesting that I think the combination of the time of the year and why people hopped on the blockchain train, dare I say that and what that means is it's good call it
9:32
I think so. Um, so as person from, from a great britain who lived through 2016 and 2017. I can't start this without quoting, prominent politician over here, Michael Gove, who said is a part of the Brexit campaign that people have had enough of experts. And that although I don't think it was quite the cultural watershed moment that we would paint it, I think was a bit of a wake up call for people who like either to consider themselves experts or to refer themselves as experts, for it was no longer really enough to be able to point to a qualification or a position and say, I know what I'm talking about, because of this, that the way social media was fragmenting and other people were disappearing into their bubbles, it meant that you might have a reputation for expertise in a particular bubble. That's not necessarily transferable to another bubble, even though you might see it as linked. So a case in point, recently, my background is an open educational resources, open learning resources, I've worked on them, I've campaigned on them for getting on for 13 to 14 years now. So I like to think I know a little bit about them. But I was talking to somebody else about them on popular social networking site. And they, their immediate starting point was doubt my expertise was to say, okay, who are you to talk about this stuff? I got this expertise from over here. Why are you telling me what's happening and what I need to know about and it was a really angry response, it was like, you've come into my bubble, and you're claiming expertise. And I can't recognize that expertise. So there is something about the way we present ourselves online, that a lot of people started to wear their expertise lightly. Even if they were an expert in a particular domain. There was a sense a few years prior to that, that if you were an expert in a particular domain, you were an expert in lots of other things and could just get a generally pontificate on anything that took your fancy, there were lots of academics that I saw lots of people in education technology that kind of did that, that because they'd had a few conference keynotes or such like they felt like they could pronounce on global politics, or we're starting to see it now on the terrible year that Nate Silver is having in talking and writing about the covid 19. pandemic. He's an expert in statistics. He's not an expert in epidemiology. And in trying to pass across that specific boundary of expertise. He's hit problems. So I mean, yeah, I think there has recently been a rethinking of the idea of trust, a rethinking of the idea of expertise. It's got good points, because obviously, nobody needs to hear more white male academics pontificating about everything that crosses their mind. But it's got its bad points in that it stops people from feeling like they can apply approaches from one area of inquiry insights that way, I mean, I imagine you probably could derive some insights from Nate Silver's kind of Bayesian statistical models into the way the pandemic is playing out. It'd be interesting. I'd like to read it, but it's not the whole answer. So it's that humbleness, I suppose that we started to see. And we started to live more visibly, I think, at that point in history.
14:03
Yeah, I think you're right. The article that I read that year, also, that I included in that my blog post is around the idea of you said the word influencer. They're called thought leaders. And so the word thought leader or guru or something, Shama, I was like, please stop the idea that you could develop. And we could have, you've elevated people's voices and ideas and platforms, on these platforms, like a blog, a podcast, Twitter, wherever, and they became pretty active and out there and public intellectuals almost took a second step back, even though they have the expertise, the training, the years of time putting in labor effort, understanding, they realize that people aren't gonna listen to them that way. And I think I wrote at the end, and I continually think this though, that I might know a bit of something, but I'm also still learning so maybe it's asking questions of where people are, and we know that we're Gonna sway people to understand a new concept, an idea, a bit of knowledge, or anything by saying, this is right, I'm right. I'm the authority, it's gonna ask, Where are you coming from? And what does this mean for you? And what do you understand about it before jumping in on any given topic, so I put like, maybe I need to ask more questions. And this is probably why I host podcasts, because I want to know what people are thinking because it's not a black or white right or wrong issue. There's so many nuances and gray in between that we never talk about, and never get voiced out in certain social media platforms. Like you can have a great YouTube video that someone's hot take and spirals down a rabbit hole, you could have a great lead and community on different platforms, Reddit, Facebook, and they think you're the experts. But that's just the one bubble that's been filtered in and you're in a vacuum almost. So who knew we were just diving off this on the blockchain? Great, David, this is a great.
16:01
Yeah, this is what we need to get away from actually explaining the blockchain to people. But I do want to talk a little bit about the politics underlie the blockchain, because that really fascinates me. And I think it was in 2017. I wrote a blog post about that on my blog. I think it was the start of the year. And we started the previous year that looked into the world of the alt right, and the rise of kind of Neo fascism. And it is possible, it's not always true. But it's possible to situate the world of blockchain which is the idea of the lack of trust, the idea of libertarianism, the idea of being outside of the control of government and having that kind of radical freedom, the economic ideas around the gold standard and the permanency of, of money. All of that feeds into the world of the cryptography messaging groups of the early 90s, which is where the roots of the idea of blockchain really kicked off the idea of a currency that eventually became a Bitcoin, of course, that was immutable was in many ways, actually non fungible in the you could track and understand the background of each individual coin. And that was a deflationary that there were there was a fixed amount, and there was nothing else, all of all of it is from that particular playbook have that weird American mindset of kind of radical libertarianism that kind of became the alt right. The other concept I think about with respect to that is the idea of, I think it was tracing that melon cotton, we came up to it the idea of the roaming autodidact. So these are people that have generated their expertise outside of the traditional mode of going into higher education or having work experience that I've just actually gone and read lots of stuff and kind of chucked it all together into what they feel like might be a co parent philosophy. And from that, you get a lot of these weird ideas about the lack of trust, the kind of almost anger towards the settled idea of academia and the university. So you've got all that distrust, and you've got these weird other ideas from this kind of grab bag of historical sources that are not as what you would see as people who've been through academia that have not been properly contextualized or balanced. So a lot of that kind of thinking showed up in the kind of politics that were around in 2017. And we saw finally inflaming into the scenes in the capital in the US in 21. The, the many other violent scenes that we've seen in the US and elsewhere. Add to that all of these ideas are also play are also in the underpinnings of the the blockchain. And that for me I think is really interesting,
20:14
the blockchain idea in this chapter because we talked before and you said this well is Mars, just sharing about the blockchain, but not how it was really applied in academia and higher ed is maybe there to dismantle systems that are lacking trust these days, as you said, and they're also bucking against systems because people are feeling that they're not part of whatever education formal education systems offer. And so I think the idea that you just said, right, that I know didact, like, I'm gonna learn what I want to learn, and I can become an expert, and I'm empowered in these platforms and spaces, whether it's starting their own economy with a Bitcoin, whether it's starting their own. And we've seen this other platforms like I think of the storm front and the alt right. But these weren't new things in 2017, they just hit a fever pitch. And we knew that and there should be no surprise that we've had a storming of the Capitol in the US. And we have in many parts of the world populism coming up of I deserve this. And I need to take this back. And the sense of nationalism looks different in every country, but it's still there. And, and putting people into the other is still there. What happens in America and probably in the UK is, is just put on TV and in media more. And so we just talk about it more, not that it's good or bad. It's it's just brought up more than other people want to sweep under the rug. But there's these sentiments that people want to take back, what's theirs, what they think belongs to them. And it's such a weird time that I am glad that Martin put this in. He doesn't talk about the politics like we are now. But it's saying like, this is the underpinning of what people are feeling in society and the politics, economics and whatnot. And it means something though,
22:17
it does this the sense that almost in some parts of society, not in all societies, it's kind of a pulling away from the existing structures. I mean, we're talking about the right a lot. We see this a lot on the radical left, as well, of course, the kind of rewriting of ideas of anarchy to a lesser extent, you see it in the movement to defend the police, which is another thing that plays into and plays where So our idea of authority, and where authority is situated, and how people enact and use and experience that authority. I mean, obviously, if you're in the US, or the UK, for that matter, and you're black, you have a completely different experience of the police than you would if you were white, and I comfortably middle class. And that's another aspect of the same thing that we are really taking a solid long term cultural look at these structures that we've built. And we are starting to think about what it would be like if we pulled these structures away. A book here that I keep thinking about is called a libertarian walks into a bear, which is by Matthew hunger, what's happening came out last year, and it looks at the experience of a town that decided okay, it was going to have no taxation. So it was going to have no public services, but everybody was gonna look out for each other. And it I mean, this came from kind of a libertarian perspective, but you could easily see it as an anarchist. community would probably act in the same way. And then I mean, this is a town in I think it was in Vermont. And all these, all these bears start turning up and stealing food and destroying things. So the books actually about Okay. What does this community that's suddenly faced by an external natural risk, but it doesn't have any structures to support I mean, what does that actually do? And that point, how does it respond is absolutely fascinating. But that kind of feels like what we're starting to see now, let me move. I mean with the, the pandemic, even though we are in the midst of this way, questioning the structures that we have were questioned in the idea Republic services. As they are currently constituted, we are still having to deal with something that's outside of a particular community of a of a particular society that is an international issue that does not discriminate really in any way other than it preys on those who are weakest already. And you think at some point, there's going to be a reckoning between these two trends that I mean, possibly the conversations that started in 2016 or 2017. And of which we are seeing the blockchain as an aspect or an indicator of that. That's going to have to stop in some ways and we're gonna have to think, okay, there are certain things that we can only do as a society as a community that has a defined public services and a defined idea of the public good.
26:27
Yeah, Martin, you start a lot up in me as I'm thinking about this. Now I'm like, this is why I'm reading outlawed by Karen North which is like a Handmaid's Tale Meech, the Wild West fiction novel. Also, while I'm reading think, again, by Adam grants, like I think we started questioning what we thought to be true. And this last year, pandemic, social racial unrest, and everything else that's coming out. That's inequity in our society that we thought was okay, or just maybe people ignored because that was easy and comfortable for people of a certain class, gender, race, are now going maybe we aren't doing it right. So, Martin, your chapter, although not written intentionally for a pandemic has brought up some things. But from this chapter, he's not really talked about this. And you mentioned this earlier, David about blockchain itself other than the hopes and dreams of this magical solution.
27:28
Yeah, he deliberately doesn't do that. Because all of the hopes and dreams have turned out to be largely false. That alone in 2016 2017, there was lots of experimentation, about the use of blockchain and all kinds of spaces. As far as I've been able to find out. There's nothing that really has happened that's come anywhere close to having a lasting impact on the way we live. I mean, even on the idea of I mean, it's a big current debate in the UK, probably as elsewhere the the idea of the vaccine passport. You think, Okay, this needs to be an immutable, publicly visible and transparent record of which people have been vaccinated in which people have not that could potentially be used in helping private businesses decide which people and which people not to admit to certain events. You'd think that would be the kind of thing that people would be shouting that this is a blockchain solution. You look at the the current arguments around trade in Northern Ireland after the exit from the European Union and the massive problems that that is causing. And again, I think there was an actual rifle minister, I think, actually Martin well equipped thing that says, I'm not sure what the solution to this is going to be. But it is possible it could be blockchain. So the fact that we've not heard that recently, and the fact that all of the early experiments with blockchain appear to have fizzled out, it suggests that that hope was, as we predicted that the time was kind of misplaced, that it was another big shiny, technological seeing, like artificial intelligence, like the reusable learning object, like the iPad that was supposed to revolutionize everything that actually ended up not.
29:48
Yeah, I wonder, I want to know what non fungible token NFT that we would write about if Martin was in this writing this chapter. Now. I was
29:56
just wondering if we needed to talk about NF T's now. These are flat out the strangest thing I've ever come across. So, I mean, the idea is you're not use, it looks like an art market that you're kind of buying a digital work of art, you're actually not you're buying a receipt that says that this is a work of art that you in whatever sense that this is meaningful actually own artwork. It doesn't preclude other versions of that artwork being sold, it doesn't conclude, preclude the fact that you will probably see the artwork all over the web as a digital image. But it's trying to say something about ownership, and there's no actual ownership, which I just don't understand why people would want to pay money, and in some cases, a lot of money, to have the right to say, okay, in certain ways that I am not actually able to define I own this picture of a cat on a skateboard. But you don't really own anything, you just own a receipt.
31:19
So you're saying that my face is a Marten collection I'm going to put out there to the NFT world and higher ed to buy is not going to sell is it's the same as
31:27
any market. I mean, if you can convince somebody that is somewhere valuable. I mean, I know Martin has an only fans account, and he does a lot of images. Via that. If you can convince people that an image of Martin Well, the right to like, claim that you in some way on that is valuable, that you can sell it. It's just it kind of concerns me that is being touted as an alternative way of funding the arts. Because a lot of the time the people that are selling the tokens are not the people that are actually creating the artwork.
32:15
That's true. So I'm not going to get into the NFT market. I will say the the NF t skit on Saturday Night Live was quite good and very informative. So if you want to learn more about that I'll put in the show notes. So before we wrap up the conversation, I was wondering, is there anything we should have the community think about? We all I would like to pose questions to Martin or anyone listening? What are some things we should be thinking about that? Maybe blockchain did not provide us but it's something we should consider now going forward? Especially because I think some of these technologies are still going to be imposed in some of our systems and academia or not organizations or institutions. What are some things you're thinking about doing?
33:01
Something in terms of this conversation, we've touched on the idea of trust, we've touched on the idea of societal and cultural structures and our trust in those and the way that they enact the authority or the position that they have? And we've talked about the idea of expertise. I mean, all of these are things that blockchain was supposedly set up to solve. And of course, did not. But all of these still remain alive issues. And the the, the big question is, are we going to continue to expect and to see people putting their faith into these kind of constructed cultural entities? Or are we going to see something else start to happen and have to respond to that? And how do we as people that are tangentially around the higher education space that are tangentially around that the technology space enact that trust? I mean, people are, are lied to, in this in these spheres. Quite a lot of the time. I mean, you have to read the work of somebody likes hora goldrick Rab to understand the way in which higher education more generally lies to people about this support, they could be offered about the opportunities that they will gain. And technology literally lies to people all the time. I mean, I We talk there's yet another Facebook scandal. I don't think anyone now trusts Facebook. And and but yet a lot of people still use it. So how do we see the position of trust going forward? after this? Who do we trust? Who do we expect people to trust? And why do we expect them? to do it?
35:36
Yeah, I think we're gonna have continued needs to for verification, and sharing what we've done and trust is a huge issue, right? And there's part of the blockchain that I don't think it's translated and my secret library itself, is that interoperability. Where will things transfer down the road? How do we store these credentials, and also thinking about digital assets or smart ways that we could design them? I think some of that trust issue also means talking outside of our own institutions and organizations. So there is a lot of calling from the ivory tower to other places, instead of working with other places. And that's something that I have done for a while until I left, higher ed, I was like, why aren't they thinking more about privacy? Why aren't we talking more about data exchange? It's because we're not talking across our verticals, even at our own organizations and institutions. So if you're on campus, who are you talking to across your org about some of these concerns, it probably doesn't happen, because we're very siloed. This doesn't change when you enter the corporate sector. Same same, it just means that you have to make the efforts to not just chip from your tower, but talk to people and make actions and plans that we could create these levels of verification, shared records. We just don't do this a lot. And this is what this chapter reminded me because it builds on like that portfolio, e portfolio chapter, the digital badges, the same issues threaded between all of these is, how are we going to set the ground rules implement some sort of system or practice that can be understood in this global economy and the world of work, because this is not an issue that's going to just leave in a four year or two year degree. It's going to mean like more for the world of work as we continue to upskill and learn. And so I think this is the challenge that higher ed is going to face in the coming years is ongoing relationships with learners of all kinds. And we haven't solved it. I don't know if blockchain will solve it. But it will be an issue still.
37:51
Yeah.
37:53
I think you're absolutely right. And I know we're kind of running out of time in this conversation. But you touched on the idea of long term storage of digital artifacts, which although we do have the Internet Archive, and there are various national and local instances of projects like that around the world, it's still not a problem that we have solved. How do we decide which digital artifacts are something that we should spend time and money on? preserving for future generations? And how quickly can we do this? Given a lot of the time that we're dealing with stuff that's actually really ephemeral?
38:47
Well, we've solved no problems here, but we put a
38:50
lot of numbers.
38:51
Yeah, we're gonna put some questions out to the ether, I think. Thank you so much, David. I'm really grateful that we can have this conversation and if it's a starter for some, yeah, I really appreciate it. I'm going to be thinking about this for a while and hopefully our listeners will as well. And maybe maybe they have answers. I hope they have answers.
39:09
If they have this is like an address that they can write in and tell us.
39:14
Yeah, you can add us add on Twitter or dm. There's a link on the website, the 25 years of a tech.ca. We are also taking your audio input. So if you want to send an audio clip, you can write us send a clip tell us where we're wrong and debunk us. That's fine. Happy to take that. Hey, thanks again, David.
39:37
Okay, thank you.
39:42
You've been listening to between the chapters with your host Laura Pasquini. For more information for to subscribe to between the chapters and 25 years of ed tech visit 25 years dot open ed.ca