This is where it changes. Here's Tantek Çelik on an open, social web: "The answer is not to not 'only [be] relevant to geeks', but rather, reframe it as a positive, and be relevant to yourself. That is, design, architect, create, and build for yourself first, others second. If you're not willing to run your design/code on your own site, for your primary identity on the web, day-in and day-out, why should anyone else? If you started something that way but no longer embrace it as such, start over. Go Selfdogfood or go home." See also Ben Werdmuller: "I like the POSSE: (Publish Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere) approach very much – by publishing to something I directly control and then pushing out to sites like Twitter, Facebook and Google+." This is what I do (of course Google+ won't allow me to send my content in, but that's the new Google). #indieweb

As the website says, this is "a cross-browser extension which does three things:

1. Replaces social sharing buttons with elements
2. Activates elements
3. Allows you to take actions on selections you've made (demo video)

Watch a demo video or read the transcript." #indieweb

Here we go: "This is an IndieAuth login prompt. To use it, you'll need to:

• Add a link on your home page to your various social profiles (Twitter, Github, etc) with the attribute rel="me"
• Ensure your profiles link back to your home page.

Read the full setup instructions." From thwe web page: "IndieAuth is part of the Indie Web movement to take back control of your online identity. Instead of logging in to websites as 'you on Twitter' or 'you on Facebook', you should be able to log in as just 'you'. We should not be relying on Twitter or Facebook to provide our authenticated identities, we should be able to use our own domain names to log in to sites everywhere." See also RelMeAuth.  I should note that this doesn't work for me, and I'm pretty sure I've followed the instructions correctly. #indieweb

Presentation and paper from Air Mozilla on the subject of distributed authentication. "While the Internet was conceived as a decentralized network, the most widely used web applications today tend toward centralization. Control increasingly rests with centralized service providers..." The paper argues that decentralized authentication faces difficult hurdles and "presents recommendations for designers for working toward more achievable goals, with particular emphasis on the role of browser vendors." #indieweb

The argument in a nutshell for a distributed independent web (or 'indieweb'). "The only things all these services [Facebook,  Twitter and the like] really provide is basic web hosting with some sort of social layer. Making a good social layer is difficult, but web hosting has become extremely easy and cheap." See also Lessons Diaspora Taught Me from the same author (longtime readers will know I contributed to Diaspora when it was getting started). #indieweb

One of the problems with Yahoo Pipes or IFTTT is that they can turn it off whenever they feel like it - this is what happened to people using IFTTT with twitter recently. To replace these online services, Wired writes of Huginn, "a system for building agents that perform automated tasks for you online. They can read the web, watch for events, and take actions on your behalf. Huginn's Agents create and consume events, propagating events along a directed event flow graph." This is a bit of what gRSShopper does as well, though it looks to me like Huginn is much more fully developed. Huginn is built on Ruby on Rails. #indieweb

Announcement from Digg's Andrew McLaughlin to the effect that Digg is building an RSS reader. "We hope to identify and rebuild the best of Google Reader's features (including its API), but also advance them to fit the Internet of 2013, where networks and communities like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit and Hacker News offer powerful but often overwhelming signals as to what's interesting." Sounds good. They're building on their news.me platform, so they have a base to begin with. Related: Mike Seyfang links us to Tiny Tiny RSS, a server-based app based on the PHP Magpie RSS library. Related: a Tiny Wiki and Tiny Tiny Wiki. Related: Doug Peterson thinks he's good with a set of iPad reader apps.  #indieweb

If I had a simple way of reclaiming open learning I would do it. Though I'm not sure I'd be seeking out the MIT Media Lab as the place to do it (strictly my own bias, but I don't really associate MIT with 'non-commercial'). But anyhow, Jim Groom (who I still have faith in after all these years) descended into Babylon to chat with Audrey Watters and Philipp Schmidt on Jöran und Konsorten on Vimeo. "The theme that emerged," writes Groom, "is reclaim, as in reclaim the web, reclaim your data, reclaim open learning, etc. This is a topic very much in line with (and at least for me inspired by) Boone Gorges and D'Arcy Norman's Reclaim Project." See also coverage from Audrey Watters, as well as D'Arcy Norman, who writes, "Yes, there are silos and commodifcation and icky corporate stuff that would be easy to rail against, but what if we just let go of that and (continue to) build the web we want and need? Yeah. Let's (continue to) do that." Remember, that's how MOOCs originated, they were something we created to reclaim learning from the institutions. Until places like Stanford and, um, MIT, turned them into what they are today. #indieweb #reclaimopen

I guess I missed the news that the blog is dying. Readership on downes.ca reached a million page views per month in December, and meanwhile total readers at Half an Hour passed a million in 2013 (at which point I was slammed with spam) and is now close to 1.5 million. Still, as Jason Kottke writes, "the function of the blog, the nebulous informational task we all agreed the blog was fulfilling for the past decade, is increasingly being handled by a growing number of disparate media forms that are blog-like but also decidedly not blogs."

And Ben Werdmuller agrees. "Almost none of you will have found this link through a feed reader (although my stats show that some of you are using Feedly, Digg Reader, and even Livejournal's RSS feature). Most links will have come through Twitter and Facebook." Well, maybe. But offering linkbat was never, in my mind, the function of blogs. Not even this newsletter. Twitter and Facebook don't come close as a forum for non-mainstream-media ideas and opinions. As Werdmuller says, "The article isn't dying; you can think of the blog, or the stream, or the feed, as the container that the article sits in."

And that's what sets the stage for a post-blog future (don't worry, I'll still use blogs, because that's just me). The stream-based mass-media based container is about to change. We used to depend on the content stream, writes Werdmiller, "But we don't need that anymore. Not only can content be personalized, but the form of the content can be personalized. Facebook might agonize over the algorithm that decides which posts are surfaced, but in the future we can each have our own algorithms." Quite so.

Ben Werdmuller may have a startup invested in the concept, but his view of an indieweb is sound and something I support (see also, "domain of one's own"). "The idea is simple: instead of everyone giving all their information to a site like Facebook, they keep it themselves, but still get to communicate easily using all of the great user experience discoveries we've made. You can still share selfies, make friends, listen to music together and share links, but now you do it in a space that's really yours, and that you get to have more control over."

There's a lot of interesting work being done on open online learning these days (I can barely comprehend it all). This is an example: a project designed to combine the best of an xMOOC and a cMOOC. It sounds simple in practice, but the execution is something different - how do you combine groups and networks (collectives and connectives) in a single environment, especially when the one pushes you toward conformity and the other toward diversity? Here's one possibility: "Communal constructivism is not a new term, but one that is often left out of the discussion (except in a few cases). However, the idea is not that foreign since we often see this idea modeled in Reddit." But is that really distributed, the way a cMOOC would be? At a certain point, the movement to collect people into single-site courses collides with the movement toward things like indieweb and reclaim your domain.

David Wiley discovers Known and the result is magical. "Known is a publication platform that uses the "POSSE" publication model, where POSSE stands for "Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere". .. The POSSE model is just beautiful. It represents everything empowering about the Reclaim and Retain work. In fact, the more I wrapped my head around it, the more excited I got." See more about Known. This is the model - promoted here through everything from indiweb to Diaspora to syndication itself - that we've been taking about here for years. It's the basis for the personal learning environment. It's the basis for mesh networking. Welcome to the future, David. Maybe you want to read this (and this) and we can talk about breaking down the silos and building indie learning. Via Jim Groom.

I personally think that the line from Elgg to Known runs through Explode!, but that's not the way Ben Werdmuller tells it. "From the beginning, it was important to us that users got to control their own space," he writes. "They could choose their own theme, and hack it, if they wanted to. Most importantly, they could choose exactly who could see each and every post: long before Mark Zuckerberg declared that the age of privacy was dead, our research indicated that students felt more comfortable with web publishing if they could keep tight reigns over who could see their work." See also: the problem with OKCupid is not a problem with the social web.

Interesting. Compelling. Important. Known and Reclaim your Domain get together. Here's Ben Werdmuller: "I think Known is very clearly both a PLE and an eportfolio:

• Known profiles allow you to post to a space that represents you, using a variety of media, from any device
• Known's syndication feature lets you post to your own profile, while syndicating to external sites and applications - like your campus's Learning Management System.

Educators agree. The Reclaim Your Domain project is a particular evolution of eportfolio thinking. where members of a campus's community own the domains that represent them (just like indieweb!)." And here's Jim Groom, on pushing the Known syndication hub beyond RSS. He writes, "I've already referred to Known as an open, distributed Tumblr, and that's pretty apt. The minimalism and focus on publishing content quickly and easily makes it very compelling."

During my recent talk I discussed the POSSE model, which describes owned, bought and earned media(POSSE = produced, owned, seeded, social, earned). I now realize that what Diego Leal was looking for was this: "POSSE is an acronym/abbreviation for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. It's a Syndication Model where the flow involves posting your content on your own domain first, then syndicating out copies to 3rd party services with perma(short)links back to the original version."

OK, so I've played around with this a bit and think I've figured it out. It's what I think my Referrer System, which I built in 2002, would have become had it grown up (it peaked at 800K hits per day, and I didn't have the resources to sustain that). The idea here is that, if you read something and you want to comment, you comment on your own page, not the page you're reading. Then what happens is that your system sends the other system a notification saying you've added a comment (you can also send it manually). The other system can then do whatever it wants with that notification (a typical use would be to list your comment along with others under the article). None of the documentation I've seen so far is particularly clear (and as usual there us no Perl reference code). Here's an explanation and code from Ben Werdmuller, here's more from Indieweb, and here's a service that (confusingly) supports it called Bridgely. I hope it's successful, because it creates a distributed web, not one centralized on social networks.

Is an educational credential like a type of money? That's the core thought behind Doug Belshaws post that challenges traditional thinking on things like badges. Because, he argues, if they are like money, then they could be like something like bitcoins, generated through a cryptological algorithm called a blockchain, and hence able to be dispensed without being duplicated. "If we used the blockchain for Open Badges," he writes, "then we could prove beyond reasonable doubt that the person receiving badge Y is the same person who created evidence X. This would use a proof of work system." It's an interesting thought and one worth pursuing, I think.

First, the background: "A blockchain is like a place where you store any data semi-publicly in a linear container space (the block). Anyone can verify that you've placed that information because the container has your signature on it, but only you (or a program) can unlock what's inside the container because only you hold the private keys to that data, securely."

Now, the cool bit: "Ethereum announced its first developer release a week ago. What is Ethereum? According to the video it's a "planetary scale computer powered by blockchain technology." Why is this important? "This computing paradigm is important because it is a catalyst for the creation of decentralized applications, a next-step evolution from distributed computing architectural constructs.... a system with the benefits of a centralised, shared infrastructure but without the centralised point of control: if the data and business logic is shared and replicated, no one firm can assert control, or so the argument goes." Image: Etherscripter.

Another illustration from Bryan Mathers, authored a number of weeks ago. The subject of badges came up yet again (this time at OIF meetings in Tunisia) and I thought back to Doug Belshaw's proposal to use the blockchain to validate badges. But the blockchain - used to create digital currencies - is an obscure concept. This illustration helps a lot.

As Wikipedia notes, "a permissionless distributed database based on the bitcoin protocol that maintains a continuously growing list of transactional data records hardened against tampering and revision, even by operators of the data store's nodes." It might in time prove to be a significant invention. People have suggested the use of blockchains to recognize educational achievements. This article points to a couple of advances in the use of blockchains by financial institutions to maintain a common ledger system "to implement a fully decentralized payment system, in which copies of the ledger are shared between all participants, and a process is established by which users agree on changes to the ledger (that is, on which transactions are valid)."

I've discussed Bitcoin and blockchains on this website before. This article is about the failure of that system, at least in the case of Bitcoin. The reasons are on the one hand technical, but on the other hand, the result of human failure. In a nutshell, the production of new Bitcoins has essentially been monopolized - At a recent conference over 95% of hashing power was controlled by a handful of guys sitting on a single stage - and these people have an incentive to prevent growth, creating an artificial scarcity, even to the point where delays and congestion are causing the network to fail. There are measures that would fix the problem, but discussion of them has been banned in Bitcoin forums and conferences. If it reminds you of, say, the economy of New Brunswick, or any small economy dominated by a few very large companies, it should. Democracy and diversity build networks and economies; authority and centralization destroys them.

I'm addressed the topic of blockchains a couple of times recently, mostly in relation to badges and certificates. But as Audrey Watters writes here, it may be too early to determine whether there's any 'there' there. "But with news this week that Sony plans to launch a testing platform powered by blockchain and that IBM plans to offer 'blockchain-as-a-service,'" it might be time to take the phenomenon more seriously. Blockchain is the technology behind digital currencies and they basically register transactions in an unchangeable way. Watters has questions and you can leave a comment there.)

I am in agreement with Alan Levine: " being badged is a passive act, even with blockchain secure authority, it is done to you. As important, is what you do yourself, in active tense, to demonstrate your own evidence. Get badged, yes, that's one part of showing what you have done. But get out there, get a domain, and show the world what you can do. That is evidence." Nobody would care what I have to say if all they saw were a few badges. But once I put my papers and articles out there, then they seen, and they decide for themselves whether I'm worth reading.

Audrey Watters on #indieweb in education: ""Indie ed-tech" offers a model whereby students, faculty, staff, and independent scholars alike can use the "real-world" tools of the Web – not simply those built for and sanctioned by and then siloed off by schools or departments."

Don Tapscott was given the liberty to edit an issue of the Toronto Star as his response was to put a picture of himself on the front page. He has also jumped on to the blockchain bandwagon. I think it's interesting technology, but I thing there are more interesting forces at work under the surface. Consider, for example, Fermat. "60+ full time contributors now collaborating to develop global open source platform that will launch the 'Internet of People.'" This is something that very much bears further investigation. "The great thing about this Internet of People, in contrast with the current web, is the option of freedom from third parties. This brings several advantages in terms of privacy, cost reductions and removal of arbitrary rules." This is very much the goal I had for LPSS (though taking a very different approach). Now in my world, this goal has been explicitly rejected. But focusing on the superficial doesn't change the undercurrents of long-term technology development. The personal will prevail. It is in the process of prevailing.

I spent a good part of the day exploring this (and the rest of the day exploring the awesomeness of Windows 93). What we have here is really a two-part story, the first about Ethereum, and the second about Dao itself. To the first: according to the website, "Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference." Basically, it enables developers to create their own blockchain 'currencies' (which may or may not have financial value) which can be used in a variety of applications.

This leads us to the second part of the story, Dao, which is one of those applications. Basically it is a 'distributed corporation' that receives investments, chooses projects, and pays for their development; some of these projects return revenue to Dao and others don't. The key here is to prevent the corporation from being taken over and milked for value by large financial interests. As they say, "The idea of an organization without the need of headquarters, which exists almost outside of physical space, unseizable by force, which doesn't belong to any individual or group, and which has the ability to execute itself and self-regulate, would have sounded almost religious just a few decades ago." I wonder whether we could run science and education like that.

Look at the elements of what we're calling here "Uber U" (quoted):

• A mobile app that enables a user to connect to a central hub, which then connects student needs with available tutoring or other forms of help from around the world
• A tracking system which enables fees to be charged and transferred between the student and the tutor.
• Online assessments which can verify the competence and skills of the student and their identity.
• A blockchain system which records all aspects of every transaction so that the credential awarding institution can verify that learning took place.

It would have been nice to be working toward this. Had things worked out the way I planned, we'd be sliding easily into this new vision with LPSS. But of course these concepts will move forward in any case, even while others fritter away working on enterprise LMS technology.

Unlike Don Tapscott, I'm not going to transform myself into a blockchain expert. But some people will, and if you are one of those, here is a list of blogs that might get you started.

Some of the issues: the choice of bitcoin rather than ethereum; using a link to view certificates rather than public-private key pairs; leaving the possibility of certificate revocation in the system; privacy and transparency around blockchain; the right of the user to curate the certificates being shared; and whether the use of certificates can be tracked. There are three repositories: the certificate schema, defining the data structure;  the certificate issuer; and the certificate viewer. The developers have released version 1 of the code to the community.

Is it really much of a leap to imagine evaluating people this way? Ask yourself whether this sounds like exam grading: "it's extremely difficult and nearly impossible to break down aesthetics as a hard set of rules. Our vocabulary for defining what makes a good photo is very limited." So, what we have here is a tool that evaluates and organizes your photos in order of goodness (sadly, for an Apple environment only, otherwise I'd test it on my Flickr photos). The Medium article itself is a puff piece, but there's a good commentary and discussion by Meri Walker on Facebook. (p.s. why would we need blockchain credentials if we could just assess each person in real time based on their actual work? I ask you!)

Not long ago I linked to and described the DAO, a bockchain-based corporation employing a system called Ethereum to create 'smart contracts' to crowd-source startup funding. This week the system was hacked barely weeks after being launched, with millions of 'ethers' worth $US 50 million drained from its accounts. Today a second attack drained even more money. More. Now, maybe - maybe - the transactions can be rolled back. "A 'soft fork' in the code that would essentially blacklist the address with the 3.6m ether in question; a 'hard fork' that would actually return the funds to their state prior to the attack; or do nothing and let the system sort itself out." If this works, the overall result could actually be good for Ethereum - you can't profit from hacking if it can simply be rolled back? In the short term, though, the value of Ethereum currency is collapsing. Related: transcript of an interview with the alleged attacker.

These are all ways blockchain could be used in education (though a lot of detail would have to be added) but I'm not sure I agree with the context. Introducing the piece Donald Clark says he created a Napster like system for learning resources in 2001 but "the public sector organisations just didn't like innovation and stuck to their institutional silos." He predicts a similar reaction to blockchain. "The biggest obstacle to its use is cultural. Education is a slow learner and very slow adopter. Despite the obvious advantages, it will be slow to adapt this technology." Why would he expect these new systems to work within traditional institutions? I did the same sort of thing in 2001, but by not waiting for institutional approval helped create the first MOOC. It is only after an idea is demonstrated that it will change culture and be adopted by institutions. The same is true for business and enterprise software. It has nothing to do with education or the public sector, and everything to do with large organizations and culture in general. Image: Cable Green.

I think you can view this article on LinkedIn without signing into LinkedIn - if not, please let me know. Kathryn Chang Barker writes, "LinkedIn can and should be in every secondary and university classroom in the world, but it needs to add one more tool – an ePortfolio." I have no doubts about the benefit of an ePortfolio - or, morewidely construed, a Personal Learning Record - but does it have to be on LinkedIn? That said, the appeal for Microsoft has to be undeniable. "Already Sony is working on an education and testing platform powered by blockchain. Already Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerburg have produced personalized learning systems with algorithms.  Already machine learning is managing our curriculum and careers.  This is a chance for LinkedIn and Microsoft to create an innovative space in the middle of these innovations."

This is another useful attempt to help people get a base-level understanding of what a blockchain is and does. Transactions are encrypted and put into blocks. "A block is the 'current' part of a blockchain which records some or all of the recent transactions, and once completed goes into the blockchain as permanent database."

Encrypted currency like bitcoin works because everyone agrees that a transaction has taken place. In the case of the blockchaain, everyone agrees because the record of the transaction can't be changed; it's encrypted and stored in the block. But does everyone need to agree for us to be able to say everyone agrees? Probably not; a good interconnected subset of users will do. And that's the idea behind the mechanism of the blockgraph, the system employed by Swirlds as an alternative to the blockchain. Now, will this eventually replace blockchain? It's too soon to tell, but it does open the door to the idea that more distributed (and hence, faster and less susceptible to failure) mechanisms can be deployed. But a lot depends on whether the algorithms hold up and whether the technology can be practically implemented. Here's the white paper (25 page PDF) describing the hashgraph, which is some heavy reading. Here are the developer resources and SDK.

This is a very clearly written description of blockchain technology and how it can be used in education. It mostly quotes from John Domingue, director of the Open University's Knowledge Media Institute. See also this position paper from Domingue and three other authors and an article by Robert Herian on trusteeship in a post-trust world, and a webcast by Hugh Halford-Thompson on how blockchain technologies will change industries. But of course the best proof is in the demo, and the web page has a number of videos illustrating what the blockchain running on Etherium could enable, including conference registrations, reputation systems, and open badges. It's easy to become enthusiastic about blockchains, but it should be kept in mind that a blockchain is nothing more than a ledger; the actual work takes place outside the blockchain environment. And we should be careful not to overvalue things that can be represented in blockchains, and to question whether we actually need the representation. Do students need badges, or job offers? Do contractors need reputation points, or trust?

This is a pretty good list, and Irving Wladawsky-Berger adds commentary to each of the ten items listed in this World Economic Forum (WEF) report (website, 18 page PDF). Here's the list (quoted):

• Nanosensors and the Internet of Nanothings -  could have a huge impact on the future of medicine, architecture, agriculture and drug manufacture.
• Next Generation Batteries - make mini-grids feasible that can provide clean, reliable, round the clock energy sources to entire villages.
• The Blockchain -  potential to fundamentally change the way markets and governments work is only now emerging.
• 2D Materials - applications, from air and water filters to new generations of wearables and batteries.
• Autonomous Vehicles - potential for saving lives, cutting pollution, boosting economies, and improving quality of life for the elderly.
• Organs-on-chips -  allowing researchers to see biological mechanism behaviours in ways never before possible.
• Perovskite Solar Cells - it is easier to make, can be used virtually anywhere and, to date, keeps on generating power more efficiently.
• Open AI Ecosystem - help with a vast range of tasks, from keeping track of one's finances and health to advising on wardrobe choice.
• Optogenetics - light can now be delivered deeper into brain tissue, something that could lead to better treatment for people with brain disorders.
• Systems Metabolic Engineering - list of building block chemicals that can be manufactured better and more cheaply by using plants rather than fossil fuels.

If you want to predict the future, here's my slogan: carbon, carbon, and carbon. New building materials such as carbon fibre will the products we use stronger and lighter. Graphine and similar compounds will revolutionize electronics and power storage. And biotechnology will revolutionize medicine and help us build advanced organic-based processors.

You will want to have a look at this video from the Institute for the Future and ACT Foundation. It describes The Ledger' as it is used in education to define 'edublocks'', which in turn are basically blockchain credentials. What's significant is that it enables anyone to give  learning credits to anyone. I have to think that this is the beginning of a huge debate: "The idea of a 'national learning economy' isn't new—America has been moving in a direction where work and education are integrated, rather than sequential, for the past several decades. The ACT Foundation defines this as the new American Dream, or a way for workers to 'achieve greater life satisfaction and economic security.'" See also: the Learning is Earning blog, press kit, Audrey Watters on the Ledger, the HyperLedger Foundation, Women's Learning Studio, Kathy Moore.

Good article discussing the emerging distributed framework (a la resource profiles, now known as trusted data ecosystems) for digital identity. Two specific technologies are discussed: a blockchain enabled system called Enigma, and a lighter weight framework called OPAL. "Enigma, is a decentralized computation platform enabling different parties to jointly store and run computations on data while keeping the data completely private... a much simpler and easy-to-deploy version called OPAL (OPen ALgorithms) will soon be ready for pilot testing in a few European countries.

This is the first of Audrey Watters's series on trends in education for 2016 and it's pretty good, even if I disagree with the main metaphor. She depicts 2016 as "a terrible, terrible year" because of the celebrity deaths, bad election results, war and killings. My own observation is that it's business as usual with a bit of a demographic kick as the post-war baby boom reaches its inevitable conclusion. But her observations about the danger of quackery in ed tech are spot on, and she lists a number of 'trends' as indicators: chatbots, blockchain, Pokemon Go, 3D printing and wearables. If your pundit gushed about one of more of these this year, there's a good chance they're a quack. Not because they're failures. But because they're fads, and quacks jump on fads (trying to be the 'first' and make a name for themselves, as Dean Groom pointed out earlier this week.

These concepts don't all relate to education, and their importance most certainly isn't limited to political life, but it's a good list and educators should be aware of all of them. Here's the one-minute version:

• Scepticism - "a willingness to evenly assess the scientific evidence available."
• Iatrogenesis - illness "brought forth by the healer," like the opioid epidemic
• Social cost of carbon - the damage each ton of CO2 emission costs society
• Clean coal - expensive, but "captures the carbon dioxide and buries it"
• Gene drives - increase a gene's chance of being inherited
• CRISPR - being widely used to manipulate DNA with extraordinary precision
• NgAgo - new tech which might manipulate DNA with even greater precision
• Confrmation bias - the tendency to select information that supports our existing beliefs
• IPFS - makes copies of everything instead of relying on links
• PFOA - unregulated cancer agent turning up in drinking water
• Neonicotinoids - the pesticide that caused widespread bee colony collapse
• SETI - search for extra-terrestrial intelligence using powerful new tools

Now you's caught up. :)

I agree with Nantium OÜ that "decentralization will lead to a more fair society where monopolies lose their stranglehold over some of our key economic sectors (and possibly even government sectors)." I'm less convinced that trust is a key part of this, but I'm willing to listen. In any case, what OÜ has done is to create a (beta) trust mechanism for Ethereum. Basically, it uses the same mechanism for trust as it does for payment: "you can file a complaint through an Ethereum contract that will ultimately penalize the other party's score." This mechanism has already been suggested for credentials, such as academic achievement or badges. I'm more inclined to think that trust (and achievement) will be derived by AIs mining publicly accessible data. But we'll see.

I amde a small contribution to this as one of the "49 experts". The top three over all were mobile, microlearning, and video. I can't criticize that list too much, except that I would have pegged it as the 2016 list, not 2017. My own predictions were mobile, subscription-based learning, and e-learning platforms. The full e-book (101 page PDF) is available but the textual content is pretty sparse. My full comments: "These are core trends, not fads like VR or blockchain. They reflect both the demand for wider (and cheaper) access, plus the rise of new distributed technologies that make it possible. The crucial (but non-sexy) word for 2017 is 'provisioning'."

This is an overview article of the potential of the blockchain in higher education. We've covered the blockchain in OLDaily before. In a nutshell: a transaction (contract, credential, whatever) is encrypted in a block, and the block is added to a chain of encryptions. So the transaction is public and verifiable, but secret and secure. It's tempting to imagine a network of competencies, badges and blockchains, as Doug Belshaw did last year, but the Tapscitt version is a lot more conservative: "a student receives a custom learning experience from a dozen institutions, while the blockchain serves to track the student's path and progress."

There's a lot of history behind this one, but essentially the split is between the original developers, who want to keep the size of a block limited, and Bitcoin miners (ie., the people who actually encrypt the blocks), who want the size of the block to grow. This can happen in distributed systems. It's not necessarily a bug; think of it as being like mitosis, where a simple network begins to develop into a complex network. But the short term message is risk. Lots of it, because this sort of thing hasn't happened a lot yet (though it has happened to Ethereum).

I'm sure Don and Alex Tapscott don't want to read this, but Tim Bray (who has a long history of internet standards development) has called the recent attention being paid to blockchain "an over­pro­mot­ed niche sideshow." He writes, "I’ve seen wave after wave of landscape-shifting tech­nol­o­gy sweep through the IT space: Per­son­al com­put­er­s, Unix, C, the In­ter­net and We­b, Java, REST, mo­bile, pub­lic cloud. And with­out ex­cep­tion, I ob­served that they were ini­tial­ly load­ed in the back door by geek­s, with­out ask­ing per­mis­sion, be­cause they got shit done and helped peo­ple with their job­s.That’s not hap­pen­ing with blockchain. Not in the slight­est. Which is why I don’t be­lieve in it."  [Direct Link] [Wayback Link]

I could tell you that this article describes distributed data management as defined by Leslie Lamport’s invention in The Part-Time Parliament (33 page PDF) known as the Paxos algorithm, and the master election protocol called Chubby. But it's better to say that this article is an accessible description of different ways people can keep their records up to date. The systems described form the basis not only of modern file management but also distributed blockchain record keeping in systems like Ethereum. But even better, the article is illustrative of the kind of thinking it takes to work through an intractable problem in a methodical way.
[Direct Link] [Wayback Link]

Ben Werdmuller expresses a key element of what (we hope) will be the future web. "Media is core to democracy, which means a more decentralised Web — one where publishing, sharing, and being found are all free and open — is in all of our interests. By making social functionality part of an independent Web, we remove the single points of failure — and points of control — that make the Internet so brittle for media businesses." The IndieWeb is not nothing. Here's the beginning: 2300  "of the most active IndieWeb sites, sliced and diced and rolled up in a few useful ways: Social graph API and interactive map, SQL queryable dataset and GUI analytics."

This is a daunting post, and the article it summarizes is more daunting still. But don't worry about following all of it. Here are the main things. First, in addition to 'public' blockchain networks, like Bitcoin, there can be 'private' blockchain networks, used (for example) for internal recordkeeping. Blockchain's immutability and transparency make it attractive for this purpose. Second, in non-public settings, you don't need such an elaborate mechanism for adding a block to the bockchain. In public settings, you use something called Proof of Work (PoW), but this "consumes a lot of energy and computing power, as nodes spend their CPU cycles solving puzzles instead of doing otherwise useful work." As a result, third, "Applications for security trading and settlement, asset and finance management, banking and insurance are being built and evaluated." There's also some exposition of the different levels of a blockchain ecosystem.

According to the website, "Hyperledger Fabric is a platform for distributed ledger solutions, underpinned by a modular architecture delivering high degrees of confidentiality, resiliency, flexibility and scalability." Basically, it's a mechanism for implementing biusiness functions supported by blockchain for security and verifiability. "Hyperledger Fabric 1.0 offers a modular architecture allowing components, such as consensus and membership services, to be plug-and-play. It leverages container technology to host smart contracts called 'chaincode' that comprise the application logic of the system." Now of course it's years between the development of a cross-platform specification like this and widespread implementation, but at the same time, development work in learning technology that is beginning now will implement this approach (if not this specification exactly, then something very similar).

Hackers robbed Ethereum of $31 million of Ether. "They found a programmer-introduced bug in the code that let them re-initialize the wallet, almost like restoring it to factory settings. Once they did that, they were free to set themselves as the new owners." Eter is crypto-currency, like Bicoin, but Ethereum uses this concept to allow people to create contracts, and it was one of these contracts that was hacked.

From the website as Fabric 1.0 is released: "Hyperledger Fabric is a blockchain framework implementation and one of the Hyperledger projects hosted by The Linux Foundation. Intended as a foundation for developing applications or solutions with a modular architecture, Hyperledger Fabric allows components, such as consensus and membership services, to be plug-and-play. Hyperledger Fabric leverages container technology to host smart contracts called 'chaincode' that comprise the application logic of the system." A lot of this will be invisible to future application developers, and doubly invisible to users.

This is a pretty good introduction to blockchain, now characterized as "any distributed electronic ledger that uses software algorithms to record transactions with reliability and anonymity." More specifically, "blockchain is a self-sustaining, peer-to-peer database technology for managing and recording transactions with no central bank or clearinghouse involvement." There are some good examples of how blockchain may sustain a variety of recordkeeping functions, but the 'strategc perspective' is strictly basic advice: identify opportunities, evaluate, run pilots, and scale.

TechCrunch reports that "Sony said today that it has finished developing a digital system for storing and managing educational records on the blockchain." It's now looking to commercialize the technology. The idea has been around for a while, but this is the first concrete development. "The system is managed by Sony Global Education, and is built on top of IBM Blockchain using IBM's Cloud and The Linux Foundation's Hyperledger Fabric 1.0 framework."

This is a short post (6 page PDF) with one-paragraph descriptions of innovations at open universities around the world. Together, the set provides others with a sort of menu of options they can follow. Most usefully, each one has a link you can follow. Some of the items aren't eactly innovations (such as the Switching from Moodle to Azure item). Others are more aspirational than innovative (such as the Use of Blockchain in credentials). It's hard to describe closing support centres (as at OU) as an innovation. One institution (Open Universities Australia, the former Open Learning Agency) simply names itself as an innovation, which seems a bit over the top. But in areas like libraries, accessibility, loyalty, mobile learning, assessment and community there are some genuine innovations.

People have using blockchain for certification for a number of years now so it's no real surprise to see MIT's new digital diplomas. "Using a free, open-source app called Blockcerts Wallet, students can quickly access a digital diploma that can be shared on social media and verified by employers to ensure its authenticity. The digital credential is protected using block-chaintechnology. The block chain is a public ledger that offers a secure way of making and recording transactions, and is best known as the underlying technology of digital currency Bitcoin." More.

This is a long (136 page PDF) and detailed report on blockchains in education. The authors work slowly and deliberately in their pursuit of accuracy and clarity, which results in a presentation that will be easily understood by most readers. There is a wealth of examples in the document describing use cases, scenarious and pilot projects, and companies involved in the space. The study is a result of a literature serach, desk reserach and interviews. The recommendations display a knowledge of both education policy and blockchain technology. I have no objections to any of the conclusions and recommendations, and would indeed underline some, for example, this: "Only 'fully-open' blockchain implementations can reach the real goals and promise of blockchain in education. By this, we mean solutions whose fundamental components include: a) recipient ownership; b) vendor independence and c) decentralised verification." It's still early days; there's a call to bring experts in the space together to create the necessary agreements, and this should probably happen sooner rather than later. The publication is a Science for Policy report by the Joint Research Centre (JRC), the European Commission's science and knowledge service.

This is a pretty thorough debunking of the idea that blockchain technology will disrupt industry. Kai Stinchcombe looks at several putative use cases - payment and banking, anonymous transactions, micropayments, bank-to-bank transfers, smart contracts, distributed ledgers and storage, stock transfers, authentication - and in each case shows that the hard parts are not addressed by blockchain. For example, blockchain is no more efficient than the existing system of payments and banking, but with none of the protections. Meanwhile, it turns out that anonymous banking helps criminals and terrorists a lot more than it helps society in general. And so on and on. "Blockchain enthusiasts often act as if the hard part is getting money from A to B or keeping a record of what happened. In each case, moving money and recording the transaction is actually the cheap, easy, highly-automated part of a much more complex system."

Why Blockchain? That's the key question. "In this case," writes David Kernohan, "the problem is trust." For example, what do you do if you don't trust your bank? "Cryptographic encryption (hiding information using the power of really difficult maths) lends anonymity and security, but the openly visible nature of transactions lends reliability." Except - it doesn't. In the cases where the currency fluctuates wildly, or where millions are stolen from user accounts, or where falso contracts are executed, you find quickly that there is no more reason to trust the digital currency ecosystem than there is to trust banks or governments. And maybe a lot less reason. "You don't need Wonkhe to tell you that investing in a hugely volatile financial product with no reliable – or even regulated – way to withdraw your money is probably a bad idea." Yeah.

This is an alpha release of an application that uses blockchain technology to link the data in your various accounts around the internet.  "Most people have dozens of profiles online, many of which include information that is not up to date, resulting in lost time and opportunities. dock.io solves this by connecting different websites and apps you use, allowing you to save information to one source, and control how and where your information is used across the web," wrote Remote.com CEO Nick Macario by email today while announcing their partnership with Dock. I like the idea of Dock.io but it feels skeevy because of the way it offers me money to invite people to connect. I get the sense that Dock wants to centralize all my information (and then what, sell it?) and my concern about that is precisely why my information is scattered across multiple services.

Count me as being among the punk rock rebels on the internet - even though my punk anthem might be something like Walking on Sunshine. As Laura Balkan says, " I want to be able to be in a society where I have control over my information, and other people do as well." And she adds, "Being a woman in technology, you can see how hideously unequal things are and how people building these systems don't care about anyone other than themselves." The story focuses a lot on the technical means being employed to create  the indienet - distributed data and blockchain, for example - which may or may not work. But the tech isn't the objective, the outcome is. "If we want a more diverse, open, decentralised internet, developers are going to have to wave goodbye to the idea of huge platforms that will supposedly make them rich. We've kind of been brainwashed into this Silicon Valley idea of success," he says. "You know: 'Unless you've made a billion dollars and you're on the cover of Forbes magazine as the next king, you're not successful.'" The point isn't to create a unicorn. It's to create an idea.

"Exit through the gift shop." The phrase says everything that needs to be said about the commercialization of culture and heritage. The same phenomenon seems to be inhabiting Ed Tech and things like the #EdTech discussions, suggests Dean Groom. "The culture of online discussions (especially those being directed by individuals (they call themselves 'founders') is to repeat the most popular 'trend' statements, rather than make any real effort to evaluate claims," he writes. Things like personalized learning and blockchain are more marketing slogans than they are concrete ideas, he suggests. Well, as long as you didn't read that here...

Just open-sourced: Colony. This is a link to the Colony white paper (55 page PDF), also just released. "The Colony Protocol allows developers to integrate decentralised and self regulating division of labour, decision making, and financial management into their applications... The Colony Network consists of a collection of contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. At the core of the network will be a ColonyNetwork contract. This contract is primarily responsible for managing the reputation mining process." Right now I wouldn't invest any money into any of these schemes, but it's interesting to watch different iterations of this new technology be tested.

Interesting commentary from Steven Johnson, quoted here: "We spent our first years online in a world defined by open protocols and intellectual commons; we spent the second phase in a world increasingly dominated by closed architectures and proprietary databases.  We have learned enough from this history to support the hypothesis that open works better than closed [but] the only real hope for a revival of the open-protocol ethos lies in the blockchain." I'm not sure I agree with this but I'm not sure I disagree either. Image: Andrena.

We've all heard about blockchains, but what are they? It can be a complicated concept. The best way to learn, of course, is to roll up your sleeves and build a blockchain engine. That's what I did. (See also: Enterprise blockchain projects on GitHub).

This is a fine example of informal learning. Haseeb Qureshi steps the reader through a series of references and resources that will take you to a decent understanding of blockchain (if you master all of this, you could probably get a job in the field). The pedagogy is far from perfect (at one point he says " I recommend watching more than one video explanation to get the idea seared into your head", which isn't exactly how learning works) but there's plenty of hands-on work (for example: "I recommend working through all of the CryptoZombies tutorial... (a) Codecademy-esque tutorial" and "The 'hello world' of Ethereum is building an ERC-20 compliant token. I recommend this guide as a first tutorial to walk you through the process." This isn't light work; it could take months, maybe years, to complete all this. But that's part of the point: informal learning isn't just reading some things and watching some videos. It's hard.

The idea of blockchain-enabled alternatives such as DTube is that viewers can pay for content directly through tips or subscriptions, thus avoiding the tracking and advertising pervasive on platforms like YouTube and Google. But a quick look at DTube shows the risks as well - scam links in the comments, for example, or unsavory videos on the home page. Yes, it can be worse than YouTube out there.Still, as the article notes, " The less centralized platforms keep more power—and potentially, privacy—in the hands of creators and users, says Ned Scott, who runs the Steem-based social network Steemit." That's why I'm on Mastodon, not Facebook, and distributed marketplaces like LBRY (read more).

The script for the On-Demand Education Marketplace (ODEM) reads like it came straight from the Christensen playbook: "The platform reduces costs and improves access to premium education by directly connecting educators with students and eliminating inefficient and costly intermediaries." The idea is that you have to buy cryptocurrency to do this (I don't see why online payments wouldn't have worked as well). Mostly, it's a recommender system. "ODEM uses artificial intelligence to seamlessly manage complex requests, organizing complete educational programs around the world." It then uses Ethereum to manage smart contracts between educator and learner.

D-CENT (Decentralised Citizens ENgagement Technologies) is "a Europe-wide project developing the next generation of open source, distributed, and privacy-aware tools for direct democracy and economic empowerment." "The EU-funded project started in October 2013 and ended in May 2016." Here's the white paper (15 page PDF). The tools include: Decisions, to let people sign up to receive notification of recent decisions; Mooncake, an event notification system; Objective8, a policy drafting tool; Consul, a decision-making tool; Your Priorities, a citizen social networking tool; Agora Voting, a voting tool; Freecoin, a blockchain reward system; and Stonecutter, an authentication and identity management tool. You can find demos of all the tools here. Spinning off from D-Cent is Yetta, a digital currently, which launched last fall. The D-Cent Twitter feed is active.

This article describes an initiative in the UK called Blockchain for Peer Review, " a protocol where information about peer review activities (submitted by publishers) are stored on a blockchain." Although this may appear to make sense, argues  David Rosenthal, "implementing it with a blockchain is effectively impossible" because of GDPR. The reason is that the proposal would store personal information about reviewers in a permanent fashion, and GDPR requires that "people must be able to demand that their personal data is rectified or deleted under many circumstances." More. But you can't unspend money after having spent it, you can't unvote after having voted in an election, and you can undo your ownership of a car after it caused an accident. And, I suspect, you can't unreview an article after it has been reviewed.

This is a survey article describing how blockchain is being used for various applications. "The killer application for blockchains is probably something we haven't thought of yet: something new and different that will surprise and astonish us when we invent it." See also: What is a blockchain? Related:Why blockchain isn't magic and it won't fix every problem you have.

The idea of blockchain has caught the imagination of decision-makers recently not only in finance but also in government and education. This article is a pretty good overview of how blockchain technologies might be applied in education (specifically, to support competencies and credentials, beginning maybe with badges), along with an outline of some of the costs and limitations of the technology. Some of the major differences between government and educational applications and financial applications include the use of 'permissioned' ledgers, which limits who can add data to the blockchain, and interoperability with government and educational data systems. See also: Cross-Platform Scaling:The Way Forward for Businesses on Blockchain.

The first problem is scalability, which shows up immediately in the amount of time it takes to verify that a transaction is authentic. Visa performs 40K transactions per second, while Ethereum and Bitcoin are capable of between 7-15 per second. You see the issue. The energy cost is another factor, "currently around 180 million KWh for just 200,000 transactions." Again, you see the issue. A third issue centres around hacking; while the blockchain itself is secure, the systems around it might not be. This is how the recent Ethereum hack worked. Choice is also becoming an issue; "there are dozens of different networks you can employ, each with their own features and capabilities." Where is this headed? The article suggests (and it's hard to disagree) that we'll see more emphasis on private blockchains; "pragmatists understand that businesses need solutions that are both scalable and flexible to their needs, even if in being 'permissioned' they aren't true to Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto's original vision." Oh well, I guess I'll just go play with cryptokitties.

It's hard to dispute this proposition: "We believe the issue of survivability to be as important as that of privacy and security. As such, we believe that interoperability across blockchain systems will be a core requirement." There are numerous reasons why dependence on one single blockchain system might be a bad idea. But if there are multiple blockchains, they need to be able to interoperate. There's a parallel to be drawn here between the creation of a computer network, which connects all computers, and an inter-network, which connects networks of computers. The article concludes with five 'desirable features' of interoperable blockchains: independently verification, binding signatures for gateways, multiple reliable 'paths' between blockchains, a global resolution mechanism for identifiers, and identifiable gateways.

The author of this post correctly points out that the original indieweb principles were too technical for most people. He thus drafts a second set of indieweb principles that are also too technical for most people. But this page gives us a nice set of starting principles (quoted):

• When you post something on the web, it should belong to you, not a corporation.
• Your articles and status messages can go to all services, not just one, allowing you to engage with everyone.
• You can post anything you want, in any format you want, with no one monitoring you.

The third principle has the potential to be problematic, but I read it this way: you are responsible for your own posts. Nobody's spying on you, but nobody has to listen to you either, and if you broadcast, you are responsible for the consequences. Here's my previous coverage of Indieweb.

There is no such potential, writes Eric Hellman. " All the good attributes ascribed to magical 'blockchain technology' are available in 'git', a program used by software developers for distributed version control," he explains. "The folks at GitHub realized that many problems would benefit from some workflow tools layered on top of the git, and they're now being acquired for several billion dollars by Microsoft, which is run by folks who know a lot about that digital crypto stuff." The details are complex, but yes, he's right, to a point: "if you have a problem where you need to reach consensus (or disagreement) about information by the usual (imperfect) ways of humans, git repos are possibly the Merkle trees you need."

"SNHU partnered with Learning Machine for its digital diploma project; the software company co-developed Blockcerts with the MIT Media Lab in 2016." I'm seeing quite a bit more of this sort of thing, though I have to say I think that digital certificates are the least interesting application of these new technologies to online learning. But in any case, there's this: "In some ways, this is piloting what a modern transcript would be: digital, portable, owned by the student, can be verified using the encrypted assets. Employers ... don't need to call up SNHU and verify that information, it's self-verified."

As the Class Central report suggests, this article reminds us of Audrey Watters's outline of blockchain in education dating from April of 2016 (where she wrote "One Bitcoin is currently worth about $415" - heh). "Decentralised trust systems may well be the future but I don't see that it solves a core problem," writes Chris Fellingham. "Edtech...  does not have a problem of trust in its credentials — it has a problem of credibility in its courses." It may be that the decentralization blockchain enables might be valuable, he writes, but it may come with a cost, just as decentralization of news media brought with it the scourge of fake news.

I consider myself very firmly in the camp of the indieweb. But I wouldn't exactly say that I'm part of the indieweb community. And definitely not a citizen. So I don't define indieweb as a community. It see it more as an attitude and a loose set of values a number of people have in common (I won't say 'shared values' because that implies some sort of order). I see digital literacties as important. And some of these other things as important - owning your own data, making tools for yourself, open source, data agnosticism, plurality and fun.

"You are going to hear a lot about Woolf University over the next year or so and possibly much longer," predicts Tony Bates. The reference is to a white paper titled Building the First Blockchain University (58 page PDF), which Bates recommends you read cover to cover. It will generate its own token, rely on smart contracts, and through these "support direct personal, individual apprenticeships in thinking." The model described is basically a distributed corporation similar to the model of the DAO (I wrote about it here). From the instructor's perspective, it really is (as Bates suggests) the Airbnb of learning. "This is in some ways a highly innovative proposal for a new type of university, but in other ways, it is a terribly conservative proposal, an extension of the Platonic dialogue to modern times. It could only have come from Oxford University academics, with its mix of blue sky dreaming, the latest technological buzz, and regression to cloistered academe," writes Bates. See also this article from last week in Forbes.

Why would Microsoft buy GitHub? Anil Dash looks at "the cost of acquiring developers for a platform" as one explanation and suggests that "the far greater value comes from radically increasing the number of people who can create software, while improving the quality of software." Both are good reasons but my explanation is a bit different. It's this: Microsoft has finally acquired its social network technology, so it can challenge Facebook and Twitter, but crucially, it's also a distributed consensus mechanism for creating works collaboratively. Git is a directed acyclic graph (DAG) that has been used and tested over time. It creates an ordering of contents, and also creates a way for contents to converge with each other. This is really important, and in my view if properly applied gives Microsoft the core technology it needs to compete in social networks - and more.

Kin Lane writes, " 90% of what you are being told about AI, Blockchain, and automation right now isn't truthful. It is only meant allocate space in your imagination, so that at the right time you can be sold something, and distracted while your data, privacy, and security can be exploited, or straight up swindled out from under you." This is sort of true, but it's also sort of misleading. The other 10 percent - the truthful part - is pretty important, and it isn't just about exploiting you. And it's actually a lot more than 10 percent, once you get past the hype and the popular press. The bad actors get all the press (which is what they want) but the good actors haven't gone away. See also: Using your lack of trust to take advantage of you.

I've noticed an uptick in the buzz on webmentions recently. According to the W3C page, a Webmention is "a simple way to notify any URL when you mention it on your site. From the receiver's perspective, it's a way to request notifications when other sites mention it." But from the Indieweb perspective, it "is a web standard for mentions and conversations across the web, a powerful building block that is used for a growing federated network of comments, likes, reposts, and other rich interactions across the decentralized social web." The discussion on A List Apart provides a good technical overview. Here's more from Chris Aldrich.

I don't think much of FlipBoard because, as Chris Aldrich  says, it's just another silo. I nonetheless think it's a good idea to make indieweb more accessible to people, which this initiative does. I was also interested in the discussion of how to contribute to the IndieWeb Magazine on Flipboard, which you can do with its Social Networks Auto Poster (SNAP) system. It's not trivial, as it involves setting up a FlipBoard app in your WorkPress or Twitter or LinkedIn (or whatever) account. What would be really useful would be a SNAP application that allowed you to send from your social media account to any content service you want, not just FlipBoard. I haven't seen one yet.

I found that this was more a use case for key-based authentication than it was for blockchain, and I also think the article felt a little bit like an endorsement for a start-up called Trusted Key. There's a lot of key-based authentication systems out there; the market leader is probably Yubi, which just completed a successful trial with Google. Token puts it into a (large) ring (which needs to be smaller). They're based on a new web authentication protocol called FIDO2 being developed by W3C with major players in the web space. Here are the basics of FIDO2. Anyhow, the ORU example documented here has the university and the student sign certificates, such that these signatures are recorded in a blockchain.

This short article summarizes four posts from other writers describing how social media (and Facebook in particular) has failed to replicate the idea of the feed as "sustenance" that "nourished critical minds." Here they are:

• Dan Cohen on going Back to The Blog and Going Indie on Social Media
• Mark Sample with Facebook Killed the Feed
• Kathleen Fitzpatrick with Connections along with Feeds and Gardens
• Chris Aldrich responding to Kathleen
• And Mike Caulfield's 2015 post The Garden and The Stream.

These writers, and a number of others, are all part of a new wave of indieweb proponents, and I make sure to follow them and keep up on their work.

This article is mostly about blockchain as a subject for teaching and research in universities, as opposed to its use by universities. For example, there's a new journal, Ledger, and new blockchain reserach centres being launched at Columbia and Stanford. And of course there's a company that offers really expensive blockchain training courses. The gist is that there are opportunities here to expand into this new discipline.

There's a lot to like in this description (I haven't tried out the actual product) of a reader that in many ways resembles what I'm trying to do with gRSShopper. This is a hard project: "there are a whole bunch of different parts to building a reader, many of which have no overlap in skillset: managing the subscription list, polling and fetching feeds, parsing feeds, data storage, rendering posts in a UI, providing inline action buttons to be able to reply and favorite posts, etc." There are some nice bits, especially the interoperability with Twitter and Github.

This is a very nice implementation of blockchain technology - Ethereum, to be specific - to provide public access to data about National Research Council (NRC) Industrial Research Assistance Program (IRAP) grants to companies in different research areas. Coverage in Coindesk. You can see the implementation here. Now as the NRC press release notes, "These are early days, but NRC IRAP's experiments with blockchain are expected to provide constructive insight into the potential for this technology and how it may be used for more open and transparent operations for public programs." You might ask: how is this different from just providing access to a database? On the surface, it isn't different, but because it's on the blockchain, the government can't come along later and revise it or remove it. It's a matter of public record, and there it stays.

This is very similar to other blokchain applications to create DRM-like capabilities in e-books and other publications. For example, Scenarix is a company that has worked with NRC to build blockchain publishing solutions; it anticipates rolling out its Bookchain application for general use in October of this year. Spitball, meanwhile, is building on its (non-blockchain) 1.0 application that does things like reward small amounts of money for homework answers. The proposed 2.0 application (white paper) would tokenize the interactions, creating what it calls "the world's first decentralized student economy". It will have to be faster than Woolf University to do that.

This is a slide presentation outlining some aspects of OS.University (Open Source University) ad in particular their development of a distributed blockchain application (dApp) to manage such things as certificate verification and resource distribution. "The OS.University DApp bridges the gap between businesses and education through blockchain [used for validating and verifying learners' credentials] and smart contracts [managing content purchases and other marketplace transactions, as well as HR processes]." They're still at the proof-of-concept stage and the presentation is pretty high-level but it's a sign of more to come. Via e-learning-teleformacion.

A blockchain is created by hashing the contents of one body of text and implanting it into the next body of text. In this example, has was stored for all to see in the pages of the New York Tomes. This means that in order to change the contents of the text (which would change the hash) someone would have to crecreate the entire press run of the New York Times. I like this because it shows how a blockchain can be set up in a way that has nothing o do with money or coins.

This is an idea that doesn't interest me. But I raise it here because it will probably be applied to educational content at some point (there's probably a stealth startup already in the works). "SocialFlow—which manages social-media campaigns for media companies—wants to replace the ad business and its shady click and page-view model with a cryptocurrency-based "universal attention token," which it announced this week." The same idea "is already built into a new web browser called Brave, which was launched in 2016 by Brendan Eich."

I haven't been able to work with this product but it has opened up some new doors to look into. "Bridgy Fed lets you interact with federated social networks like Mastodon and Hubzilla from your IndieWeb site. It translates replies, likes, and reposts from webmentions to federated social networking protocols like ActivityPub and OStatus, and vice versa." I hadn't considered integration with ActivityPub and OStatus, but it makes sense. More when I learn more.

More and more, as Ethereum co-founder Gab Would says, we are seeing that "the internet today is broken by design." It is centralized, it is driven by "the greedy, the megalomaniacs, or the plain malicious," and it provides no defense against fake news, cyber-attacks and surveillance. Hence the need for what is being called web 3.0 (backed by a suite of applications called web3). "Web 3.0 is an inclusive set of protocols to provide building blocks for application makers," writes Would, " empowering users to act for themselves within low-barrier markets, we can ensure censorship and monopolization have fewer places to hide." Now maybe the new web won't quite be the "executable Magna Carta " Would says it will be. That seems a bit much. But it's certainly not going to continue in the model of Facebook and Twitter either.

This is one of these thinhgs that has been in development for a number of years and will suddenly arrive everywhere. The IPFS - InterPlanetary File System - is a distributed network of hash-addressed resources that you store and share with your IPFS application. As Doug Belshaw says, it hasn't been easy up to this point to use IPFS. But this is changing as Cloudflare, a well-known content distributiuon network, has launched an IPFS gateway, "an easy way to access content from the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) that doesn't require installing and running any special software on your computer."

I have been investigating Crypto-Kitties as part of my wider work looking at distributed ledger technologies. So I found interesting to read Eric Hellman's discussion of our digital feline friends in the context of digital rights management. "What if were possible to 'CryptoKittify' ebooks?" he asks. "Would that mitigate the sins of DRM, or even render it unnecessary? Would it just add the evils of blockchain to the evils of DRM? Two startups, Publica and Scenarex are trying to find out." Good questions. What is it that we even want to record - the sale of the book? Or the relation between the reader and the content. "Once Publica understands that memorializing readers supporting authors is where their success can come from, I think they'll realize that DRM, by restricting readers and building moats around literature, is counterproductive."

If there's anything more predictable than the starry-eyed technology hype article, it's the deeply sceptical tech criticism article that follows, on cure, a week later. Case in point: this article on why blockchain isn't some sort of magical miracle. Cue the outrage: " I fear putting more of our economy -- and even our educational systems -- 'on the blockchain' hardwires an extremist neoliberal worldview into the very code of our society." I don't think so, at least, I don't think it will be so any more than it is currently in the financial and stock markets we already have. Moreover, it's difficult to do business on the blockchain without being accountable for what you've done, which is actual an advance over what we have today. As usual, the greater familiarity we have with the tech, the more we see it is both good and bad at the same time, and both part of the solution and part of the problem.

This post wanders a bit and never really gets around to making its main point, but the core message is that it's better to own your own online presence (and, therefore, your own stuff) than it is to be forced to rely on content silos like Twitter and Instagram. I'm less about centralizing all your stuff in one single place (except, of course, in your offline backup storage, which you absolutely must have) and more about having your own node in a web of interconnected services. For example, I store 30,000 of so photos on Flickr, rather than my own website, but I can easily access them and use them on my website as needed, so, no problem. The other neat thing about this post is its use of a full range of #indieweb services. We'll see if my gRSShopper webmention shows up (might, might not).

Think of it as like a reader for microcontent. " Aperture is a Microsub server. Microsub is a spec that provides a standardized way for reader apps to interact with feeds. By splitting feed parsing and displaying posts into separate parts, a reader app can focus on presenting posts to the user instead of also having to parse feeds. A Microsub server manages the list of people you're following and collects their posts, and a Micropub app shows the posts to the user by fetching them from the server." The website mentions procing, but it's open source and you can install your own.

My first thought on reading the question was, "probably not," but of course in a certain sense everything both does and does not 'keep up' with technology. Anyhow, what we have here is a good article with a lot of links covering some of the more important recent trends in technology: machine-readable learning, common building blocks, machine teaching, self-driving organizations, and change. But even as I look at this list, in contrast to some of the forward-looking applications, we can see that even this set of trends is being left behind. Now, of course, everything both is and is not 'left behind', so none of these things goes away; it all becomes part of a much more complex soup.

This is an important paper for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the authors are deeply involved in blockchain technologies (Vitalik Buterin is the founder of Ethereum) and economics. The principle being advocated is a mechanism whereby members of a society 'vote' for public projects (including, presumably, education) by contributing to that project; the funding ultimately received is a function of that vote designed to maximize efficiency. The problem, of course, in making decisions this way is that people with more money get more votes, and they tend over time to vote for measures that make them richer still, even if they are paying the square of the value of the votes. This paper simply elides over that problem ("we assume that an equitable distribution of basic resources has been achieved in some other manner, such as an equal initial distribution of resources").

There's a nice summary of the paper available from an anonymous author on Medium. It draws the connection between this proposal and that of the DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization), also an outcome of Ethereum. The difference is "how they intend to achieve near optimal provision of public goods out of this organisation, which is something the DAO didn't cover." The difference is in what the mechanism would fund (and it's not clear everyone would define 'public goods' in this way), and the mechanism for voting - "Quadratic Voting (QV) is a concept Weyl has previously put forth...  QV sees a voter purchase the square of the number of votes they wish to buy per issue."

I am not opposed to the idea of people voting for the public policy measures they wish to see supported financially; I have long been a supporter of some form of direct democracy. But pegging these votes to dollars they actually have is something I resolutely oppose. I think a better method would be to allow people to vote with percentages of their tax contributions, so each person receives 100 votes to allocate as they wish, and where people taxed progressively increasing percentages of their income.

Donald Clark was a fan of blockchain a couple of years ago but he reports that he has "fallen out of love with this technology" because "I've still to see a single implementation in learning that is worth the candle." I think this is true, and I think most of the educational implementations to date have been trivial. But I'm more concerned about this: "In truth education and training does not want to be decentralised and democratised or disintermediated, as almost everyone in the field works in an institutions that will protect themselves to the death." This is also true, and what we might see in education is the educational version of Stellar or Ripple: the big banks creating their own version of the tech and setting up their own centralized network. But I also think there more to the picture than badges and credentials. More to come. Soon.

This is a nice blending of Kirkpatrick levels of course assessment and open badges. It begins as a criticism of Kirkpatrick's use of badges ("I find it outstanding that after a mere 3-hour training, participants receive a badge specifying that they are able, among other things, to 'plan and deliver training programs with business value in mind.'"). Instead, Serge proposes " to define what I coined as K3 Badges—'K' for Kirkpatrick and '3' for level 3." These are badges that would be certified not by the training institution or the learner, but by managers in the workplace (at K3, signifying that the learning is being applied on the job). This is a lovely idea, and extends the concept of badges in a potentially useful direction. Now all it needs is Bluetooth. I mean, Blockchain. Image: Clan Kirkpatrick badge.

One of the topics we cover in E-Learning 3.0 us the transition from document-based culture to data-based culture. This article explores that transition. It identifies "seven of the most prominent takeaways from conversations we've had with these and other executives who are at the data-culture fore." It presents data as a trool for making decisions, the democratizing effect of data, data as an element in risk management, data as an enterprise's "crown jewel" asset, and the link between data and management and talent.

This is a good crisp summary that doesn't shy away from technical detail but steps through the major elements of blockchain technology with clarity and precision. The sections on blockchain components (section 3) and consensus models (section 4) are particularly strong. It even comes with a fun blockchain use case flowchart. 68 page PDF.

This approach should remind you of some recent online courses. "Using a project created by Robin DeRosa, a professor of interdisciplinary studies at Plymouth State University, as a model, Paige is having her students create a "resource book" for the course." Sharing is also a major component. "One benefit of the project, Paige hopes, is that students take it seriously. It makes them realize, she said, 'I'm not just writing a paper for Robin to read.'" It's a good approach; it should have been tried long before now.

Good article on decentralization. The key characteristic I propose is that a system is decentralised to the extent it distributes power. Specifically, the distribution of control, knowledge and capability between many users." The article is more focused on types of decentralization than on how to do it and what it means, but it's useful as an overall introduction.  Related: How solid is Tim's plan to redecentralize the web?

This is an overview of openness in education and in educational resources in particular and takes a human-rights perspective on the subject. It's a fairly long article, but relatively introductory. Its almost entirely US-based history dates the beginning of open content from 1998, which is a (large) number of years too late (again, my 1995 openly-licensed Fallacies guide was following examples already widelky found the field even by then). Moving foward, the article describes " a home for all OER-related research in the first academic, peer-reviewed journal, the International Journal of Open Educational Resources. Not only was it a first for OER, but Layne also offered authors the opportunity to 'Blockchain' their research–which was also another first in the world of scholarly publications." This claim is also questionable; projects like Pluto have been putting them into the blockchhain for a while now; search for them with scinapse.io. Similar projects include ARTiFACTS, DEIP and Scienceroots. Also worth a look is this 2017 European Commission report on blockchain in education, which also discusses academic publishing.

I think this project mistakes the reason why people share resources. Here it is: "Spitball 2.0, a new version of the platform, allows students to earn a cryptocurrency by sharing content or answering questions to buy study resources and possessions, as well as place advertisements for tutoring and student accommodation." If you have to be paid to share, you aren't really sharing. (Note that to bypass Forbe's spamwall I use Ublock Origin on Firefox).

This podcast transcript provides a level-headed overview of blockchain technologies focusing especially on the trade-offs the use of blockchain entails (for example: less efficient databases in exchange for immutability). There's also a nice table depicting the major use cases for blockchain. And there's a nice look at the different motivations for employing blockchain: "it's about disintermediation, but at the same time, those who are investing in the space think of it as a defensive play to strengthen their position in the center of an ecosystem."

This all-nonfiction issue of McSweeney's "is a collection of essays and interviews focusing on issues related to technology, privacy, and surveillance." It's is available as a free download (344 page PDF). It's worth a look - Cory Doctorow on privacy nihilism, Ethan Zuckerman on the ethics of distrust, Douglas Rushkoff on the media virus, Edward Snowden in a Q&A on blockchain, Edward R. Loomis on surveillance tools. The articles are short, accessible, and there's a lot of them.

 It was only a matter of time. "Virginia Beach-based ECPI University has joined a group of early adopters that distribute student degrees through the same kind of decentralized computer networks that power Bitcoin... The concept behind the technology is virtually unchanged, except ECPI is using the blockchain to issue digital degrees instead of digital currencies." The plan does have a definite upside: "It's on there for life. They never have to call the registrar's office and order another diploma."

Though dated last June this market map appeared in my inbox from Holon only today. It reports five sectors of the education blockchain market: credentials and certifications (the largest by far), peer-to-peer ecosystems, payments, knowledge and marketplace. The website describes each briefly and links to some representative startups. The site reports, "Blockchain's significant potential in education – from powering efficiency to collapsing costs or disrupting the current system – is becoming clearer to technologists, educationalists and governments alike."

This post contains the most unusual explanation of blockchain I've seen. "That whole MARC code and the ISBN numbers on every book is managed by the U.S. Library of Congress and that ensures that no two books end up in the same spot on a bookshelf. So in essence, what I'm doing is I'm checking out the book and checking it back in without taking it for good.... So blockchain is exactly the same thing. It allows me to check in and out my transcript or other smart contracts, but I can't change it. And no two contracts or no two transcripts can end back in the same spot that they left. And therefore, it's a secure mechanism to make sure that people aren't using other people's information or data." If that explanation works for you, great, but I think it suffers the problem of explaining something complex with reference to something evn more complex.

I've commented off and on recently that blogging remains a vital force on the web. It's true that a lot of blogs have disappeared from Blogger and WordPress, but it's equally true that Medium is becoming the site-of-record for a lot of leading edge developments in technology (for example, if you're studying blockchain online, you'll be reading a lot of Medium articles). I have a Medium blog (but I don't like it; Medium doesn't understand that blog posts and comments are different, and nobody sees it anyways) and I have a Medium membership, so I guess I'm in the ecosystem. Still, I heed Dave Winer's warnings here. "They haven't made any comittment to keeping their archive accessible, nor do they give people the ability to move their content off Medium without breaking links.. they could fail to find a business model, and shut down, leaving a huge hole in the web, over many years." Via Aaron Davis.

We find with a lot of blockchain writing that it blends some good technical complexity with some fairly simplistic advocacy. This is a case in point. Node is a Javascript library than can be used to build websites (the system I'm studying, Electron, is based on Node). It's open source software, and like most such, depends on people contributing modules. In one case, a hacker obtained permission to upload a Node module and embedded some code that would steal the contents of a bitcoin wallet. So how is blockchain supposed to fix this? By paying the developers.

The thing is, I have seen no evidence that adding payments would make dishonest developers honest. Would it be nice if open source developers got paid? Sure. But you're just going to get OSS code consortia, where an anonymous company takes the credit and reward (that is what happened on Udemy, where the course I paid for was created by Eduonix, which just pumps them out with no quality-check or follow-up). And how do you sort out between the developers who deserve payment and those who don't? And you still have no way to stop someone who is going to write malicious code.

People don't ask me for my Ed Tech predictions any more, probably because I don't join the usual crowd of predictions focusing on content delivery media (VR, XR, etc) or business focus (socft sckills, socio-emotional learning , etc). Or predictions describing stuff that happened last year. My predictions were basically encapsulated by E-Learning 3.0 and for the most part nobody in education technology is talkiong about any of that stuff. But if you like the usual type of predictions, this article is for you.

I might have done this chart differently, but I like the way they've documented their process and made it harder to make a case against their hype cycle diagram. But where I disagree: they have blockchain right at the start, pre-hype, while I would have put it at peak hype a year ago. Learning analytics is still on the upslope, while I would have it on the downslope. VR is on the upslope and, again, I would have put it on the downslope. MOOCs are in the trough where they should be. AI might be peaking around now, or it might be on the downslope. This time next year people will realize they were getting giddy about applied statistics. Totally missing from the diagram: cloud, data, identity, open pedagogy, and agency.

The Occam problem is this: unless and until blockchain becomes the simplest and most effective technology to do a job (any job) it will not be widely adopted. Yet despite huge investments, blockchain has yet to meet this challenge. We shouldn't be surprised. "It is an infant technology that is relatively unstable, expensive, and complex. It is also unregulated and selectively distrusted." As I commented to a colleague today, the applications of blockchain will not be the obvious ones (like, for example, registering credentials) but rather the rhizomatic ones (where, for example, some underlying technology (like, say, merkle trees) spreads from industry to industry in a generally underground manner.

This report is pretty high-level, but it's well-presented and offers a good overview of the state of blockchain in education. The hook is the set of 50 companies identified in an education blockchain market map (pictured). Sectors represented include skills and credential verification, IP, payments, and marketplace. Some examples presented in the article (I've paraphrased from source): Learning Machine, securing credentials on the blockchain; EchoLink, providing information regarding a job candidate's education, skill and work experience; Larecoin, a cryptocurrency which tokenizes tuition payments, scholarships and student debt; and Orvium, a framework for managing scientific publications.

I think this is a truism that people would do well to keep in mind: "The mechanisms and legal machinations of freedom of speech aside, any community that allows intolerance to flourish will in itself become intolerant." How this works in a completely decentralized system like Interplanetary File System (IPFS) is a good (and important) question.

This is the first of what may be three or four articles on the subject. The key point in the this first post is this: "Trust is the mortal enemy of public blockchains." Or, to put the same point another way, the core message of blockchain technology is this: "distrust each other, the way I distrusted you." I would have though we had learned the limits of trust in this era of hack attacks, online scams and fake news, but maybe not. But more, even the tone of this article fails to inspire trust - the metaphors and imagery seem more appropriate to a junior year fraternity chat room that to a reasoned discussion of blockchain and academics.

First there was blockchain, characterized by digital coins like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Then there were smart contracts and distributed applications (dApps) that could represent and manipulate more than just money. What this article portends is a third wave of distributed computing. DFINITY "is building an open, decentralized blockchain that runs smart contract software systems with vastly improved performance, capacity, and algorithmic governance." How much stock do I put into this concept? Some. This article probably won't convince you; it's a bit of a puff piece. But the thinking behind DFINITY is pretty solid.

The lede is buried near the end of this post: "In early 2018, Concentric Sky and partners BrightHive and the DXtera Institute proposed such a blockchain ecosystem, called EdRec. EdRec is a learner-centric, open standards approach to learning record storage 'on the blockchain,' with self-sovereignty of learner data as its key design principle." What I've l.earned over the last year is that while it's relatively easy to store information in a blockchain, maintaining it as a network is generates wider social and technical issues. See other winners of the US Department of Education's Reimagining the Higher Education Ecosystem Challenge from last eyar.

This paper (39 page PDF) doesn't talk about the applications of Bitcoin or Ethereum, nor even about the specifics of particular currencies. Instead it looks at blockchain (aka 'distributed ledger') technologies in general, identifies major types of features, and creates a taxonomy using them. Features include, for example, identity management, consensus, or fee and reward systems. As such it's a good overview of the underlying technologies, though it will require some familiarity with blockchain to read. The taxonomy looks good to me and accords generally with what I've seen extant. The circular diagram used as an overview in the paper isn't very readable; it would have been nice had they produced a table.

The lede is well and truly buried in this article, but here it is: "We are developing a new open source and modern publishing platform called PubPub and a global, distributed method of understanding public knowledge called Underlay." The PubPub code is open source and available on GitHub and is basically a Node.js-based content management system that looks and feels a lot like WordPress or Medium. Underlay is more interesting - its website says it is "a global, distributed graph of public knowledge... This is an attempt to replicate the richness of private knowledge graphs in a public, decentralized manner... We will work with other protocol layers to define the initial federation model, and decentralize the underlay with IPFS." So anyhow, I used PubPub to create what is now an empty journal (I'll accept submissions, but my approval process is arbitrary and capricious) and sent an email to Underlay, and I'll keep you up to date on everything.

This is a puff piece promoting Greenlight Credentials but it does offer one of the more compelling use cases for blockchain in education: "The benefit of a distributed ledger technology like Blockchain is that it allows employers and colleges to have instant verification of a multiple-source transcript." The key here is multiple-source. "Student profiles can host a range of evidences of learning including badges and a portfolio of artifacts." Of course, when you have multiple credentials in a single space, no one credential is special any more. Cue the crisis in academia.

One of my colleagues, Andriy Drozdyuk, has been saying all along that there is only one real blockchain, Bitcoin, because the innovation is as much social as it is technical. It is the investment and number of distinct users that makes it secure, not the technology. The recent Ethereum Classic hack may be proving him right. In this hack, bad actors took over more than half of the nodes and then began to write 'double spend' transactions, effectively defrauding the system. Ths is th sort of attack blockchain technology - though not necessarily Bitcoin - is vulnerable to. A lesson worth noting.

Serge Ravet offers an extended and well-argued case against the use of blockcerts in education. The term 'blockcert' refers to a specific approach using blockchain to validate digital credentials. The question being posed asks what advantage they have over badges and (especially) the Verifiable Claims W3C specification. The problem, argues Ravet, is different from the solution offered by blockchain: "A credential is not fungible, i.e. its ownership can't be transferred to someone else or transformed into something different, like exchanging a credential for a bowl of lentil stew." So there is no 'double-speding' problem, the one thing blockchain was invented to solve.

This report (11 page PDF) carries on Horizon's long-standing tradition of predicting things that have already happened. Need proof? For the short term, Horizon is predicting mobile learning and analytics. Medium term sees mixed reality and artificial intelligence. And get ready, because in 4-5 years we'll see blockchain and virtual assistants (that will be a surprise to anyone who bought a Google Home with Bitcoin). It's not that these predictions are unhelpful, they're also too vague to be useful. Consider 'blockchain'. They write "the  legacy of blockchain might be what the technology inspired rather than the broad adoption of blockchain technology itself." Well - yeah. But what will be the technology inspired by blockchain? I've taken my own stab at that question - but it's hard to see Horizon getting beyond a one-word answer. Via Campus Technology.

I've been keeping an eye on the HyperSpace project with some interest. In a nutshell, HyperSpace is a distributed publishing platform that uses it's own digital currency to promote and reward participation. The longer term roadmap, though, envisions a fully decentralized publishing economy. Today it took a major step in that direction. Here's the HyperSpace Blog on HyperSpace. You can join Hyperspace, create a post, and in addition to publishing on Hyperspace, the post will be published on the Inter-Planetary File System. In the interests of full recursion, I've published this post to IPFS on Hyperspace; here it is.

This meshes with the idea that Facebook wants to follow the path set out by WeChat in China, which is widely used for financial transactions (people just pull out their phone and pay  I saw it a lot when I was in Beijing). Combining payments with a digital currency (Facebook acquired Chainspace in February) would address the pervasive problem (and cost) of currency conversion in the west. But it would have to be a 'proof of authority' currency because alternative models are too slow. Such an approach would also require what Facebook provides - a unique and knowable identity. We'll know we've passed the threshold from technology company to nation state when we are required to provide our Facebook ID for driver's licenses, credit card applications, passports, school records, etc. It's not that farfetched, and probably aligns with Facebook's end-game.

I've read a lot of these papers in my own research on blockchain but this list is well-presented and is more neatly formatted. On the other hand, my list contains a lot of excepts that indicate what the resource actually says. But this list is probably more canonical. I'll be running through it to make sure I haven't missed anything. For more, see their blog.

Storing education records on a blockchain makes them more accessible (and more permanent). It also opens up the concept of 'education records' to multiple education providers and issuers of credentials. So while the initial application - putting records on a blockchain - might not seem very interesting, the potential side-effects just might be.

This is a slide presentation describing (and promoting) the micropub specification. Micropub "is an open API standard (W3C Recommendation) for creating, editing, and deleting posts on websites and is supported by numerous third-party clients and CMSs." The idea is that you pick one application and then post anywhere. It's a great idea that needs to become a bit more intuitive in order to work. But I definitely endorse the principle. Good slides (lobve the front page) with lots of links to applications.

This paper (15 page PDF) proposes "a framework for secure, trustworthy social networking that also creates value for user-generated content by using a blockchain-enhanced framework for social networking." Obviously a similar approach could be used in educational networking. The framework proposes mechanisms for authenticating authorship, sharing options, recognition or reward, and algorithms for nuisance management (sentiment, trolling, spam). Where blockchain comes into play is in enabling these functions in decentralized systems while protecting user privacy. We're probably still a number of years before we see anything like this widely used, but it suggests the direction we're heading.

I'm interested in this project - called Brave - for two reasons. The first is that it's built with the Electron framework, which merges (Node.js) Javascript functionality with a Chromium web browser engine. I've discussed it before. And second, because it explores the possiblity of an ad-free and tracking-free business model for the web, where you pay content producers using a digital token system enabled through your browser. Bother of these could potentially impact educational technology over the next decade or so. One note of caution - Google is keeping some elements of Chromium to itself, blocking open source solutions like Brave from (say) streaming media.

I think this article does a good job of laying out the problem even if it only hints at possible solutions. Here's a clip: " Buying something you can't afford, and borrowing from organizations that don't have your (or your customers') best interest at heart, is the business plan of most internet startups. It's why our digital services and social networks in 2019 are a garbage fire." Quite so. But if the VC model isn't working, what will? Self-payment?  The IndieWeb, or "products of IndieWeb thinking" like Micro.blog? Or "are these approaches mere whistling against a hurricane?"

Another way new technology will impact ed tech in unexpected ways: "if there is a major blind spot in the AR space in 2019, it's the impact that blockchain technology will eventually have on the software distributed in AR clouds." Here's a good example: "In our current, web-based digital life, copying a photograph, for example, is trivial. And determining whether or not a digital photo is an original photo or just a copy of that digital photo can be difficult. Blockchain addresses this issue by allowing developers to create unique digital assets that users and other developers cannot copy." This has an impact for both commercial content (which cannot simply be copied) and also open content (which can restruct commercial uses). There's more, but this is the gist.

This is related to my talk yesterday. It offers a three-step approach to decentralization: liberate content publishing (" we have built a prototype of a decentralized publishing platform https://dpage.io/ "), empower decentralized identity ("The Blockstack platform has invented their own domain name system that is based on blockchain"), and liberate content sharng (" In Decentus, you can see all posts that were posted by the user (domain). Here is an example.").

This is a two-part article (part 1, part 2). The 'indieweb' is a collection of individually-owned and independent web sites (as opposed to pages on centrally managed services such as Facebook). The fediverse is a collection of social networking sites like Mastodon that support multiple user accounts,  operate independently but are connected to each other (constituting a 'federation'). They are similar in origin and intent, but use different underlying protocols (ActivityPub for the fediverse, with Micropub and Webmentions for the indieweb). The first part of this article lists a number of ways to bridge the two systems: POSSEing, pterotype, wordpress actvitypub, and Bridgy Fed. The second part looks specifically at using WordPress Indieweb plugins and Bridgy Fed; "it works pretty smoothly," but of course if you're not using WordPress then you will need a different approach.

From this report (52 page PDF) from Deloitte: "As blockchain is expected to continue along a traditional path of maturation and self-discovery, signs of dissonance and caution may reflect the technology's health as it likely evolves into a more grounded business solution. Indeed, blockchain is gaining traction and acceptance in more industries, from fintech to technology to media to telecommunications to government to life sciences and health care."

From the post: "This is the first part of a series on Blockchain for Learning posts. In this post I am giving my (current) overview of Blockchain options from industry, a second post will focus more on the academic side (including impact on universities), and I will add a philosophical post on it as well)." It introduces the concept of blockchain in learning then provides a loose list of initiatives. (The headline was more a list of hashtags than a headline, a trend I do not encourage).

I saw a few articles this week on something from Facebook called 'Project Libra'. The gist from Bloomberg: "According to Facebook insiders, the blockchain group is developing a stablecoin, a type of digital currency pegged to the U.S. dollar or a basket of currencies, making it less prone to swings in price." I don't see anything good coming out of this. "It looks like the long-term vision is creating a sort of marketplace model within Facebook," said Harshita Rawat, a payments analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. This way we can get the same social responsibility and public good Facebook has provided to social networking in our financial markets - all closed withing Facebook's ecosystem. More: CoinDesk, Michael Spencer, The Block, Gizmodo, CoinTelegraph, etc.

This paper is written in poor-quality English, so adjust your expectations. Additionally, it is focused at the conceptual level, and contains a proposal only. Having said that, it succinctly describes the communications problem in the use of e-portfolios in cooperative education, and describes how a blockchain-based solution would address the issue. The paper is short of the many details that would need to be attended to in creating such a solution, but it's a glimpse into a possible future.

As YABOs go, this isn't bad. It offers a quick outline of some of the key concepts, overviews some applications, offers some 'review' comments, poses some questions, and suggests some alternatives to blockchain. My main complaint is that after reading it, you still won't know what a blockchain actually is. (YABO = Yet Another Blockchain Overview).

The key to understanding the impact of blockchain, I think, is to stop thinking about Bitcoin and digital currency, and to start thinking about networked ecosystems. "We've observed that organizations that launch their journeys by first designing and testing minimally viable ecosystems (MVE), rather than minimum viable products (MVP), have a greater chance to be successful. When first organizing a blockchain, designing an MVE that equitably incentivizes all participating network members is a key challenge." See also IBM's Building Your Blockchain Advantage (24 page PDF).

In my E-Learning 3.0 course I advanced the idea of "community as consensus". This article (22 page PDF) allows us to look at some of the historical roots of that idea, as found in social contract theory (in, eg., Hobbes, Locke and Rawls), of 'public reason', that is, when people disagree "a cooperative and just social life requires that they abandon their private judgment about their claims and submit to the public reason of impartial justice." This in turn allows me to consider how exactly how (or whether) modern consensus algorithms are a departure from (and maybe an advance on?) traditional social contract theory.

Libra, recall, is the new global digital currency being proposed by Facebook and others. Here you will find a link to the Libra White Paper and to rather more than you might have expected. There are also technical papers, such as The Libra Blockchain, and also Move, a new programming language, and also state replication using LibraBFT. If you want, you can clone the Libra repository, run your own 'core', and try your first transaction. For the non-technical, there's also Libra the organization, and the conditions for being a founding partner (tl;dr: you have to be wealthy and influential). All this tells me that Libra isn't going to just go away, and moreover (and this is key) it isn't going to limit itself to financial transactions.

This is what I would take to be a first effort to explain the IndieWeb in a way that is accessible to people who are not programmers (something it has sorely lacked to date). " IndieWeb is about using the World Wide Web itself as a social network, through a set of open standards for communication and identification of content and people. These things can be used instead of modern social networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc…) or in a way that incorporates these networks as a complementary channel. The movement has three main pillars, expressed as sequential levels: identity, publishing and federation." Via Ton Tijlstra.

The easiest and most obvious use case for blockchain in education is blockchain-based credentials. This article discuses one such project being undertaken by Arisonza State University. "Arizona State has completed the "first big chunk of work" -- providing the tool to view student data such as transfer date, grades, projected graduation, etc." The danger, though, is that each university system will develop its own credentials blockchain and that we'll have dozens of different ways of doing it. "Creating a universal system for reverse transfer, and more broadly student data, would be monumental, said Moreau. But it would mean that colleges would have to give up some autonomy on how they collect and share data."

This article (17 page PDF) works really well on several levels. First, it will reward a careful reading with a really good overview of blockchain technology, one that is technologically detailed, but reasonably accessible. Second, it identifies some of the issues around an educationally-relevant application area, the creation and maintenance of bibliographic records. And third, it presents a solution to some longstanding issues in digital metadata: centralization and a lack of traceability.

This article made me want to write an article along the lines of "6 tips for writing listicles" or "six dimensions of taxonomies for educators". Anyhow, here are the learning technology trends: humanisation, integration, personalisation, data capitalisation, decentralisation, and cultivation. So we can see that the idea here is to try to present technology in non-technological terms. Aren't these 'technology' trends? I mean, it's the same list we've seen dozens of times - UX, APIs, VR, analytics, blockchain, xAPI. But this time described with less reference to these technologies, and more with an eye to "why" these technologies are useful. Fair enough. But it's still a tech-led list, without (to my eye) a sense of why we need (say) data capitalisation.

There's quite a lot of technical talk about why users find it difficult to use decentralized applications, but that's the point. The Gas Station Network (GSN) is intended to address this complexity. It shields users from the requirement to create and pay for digital wallets. The application pays the cost of the transaction, and (if the owners desires) can charge users subscriptions through more common means, such as credit card payments. It's a pretty good idea and points, I think, to the longer-term role of blockchain, as a service layer hidden (mostly) from user interactions. It's created by the MetaCartel. Here's a sample distributed app (dapp).

The answer to the question in the title, according to this paper, is 'yes'. "The implementation of a decentralised publication system as described here, even with the limitations of its current design, can serve as the cornerstone for a revolution in the way scientific communication is currently done. New decentralised processes and communities can build on these foundations and expand into areas that are traditionally closely associated with science: higher education platforms, science dissemination initiatives, and others." I happen to agree, but there are many forces working against it.

I think we've learned to take IBM's pronouncements with a grain of salt. Still, the gist of this short post is similar to other pronouncements that have been made regarding blockchain and education, "proposing a world in which learners and educators work collaboratively instead of through a traditionally isolated approach." The key appears to lie in credentials and identities. "Students are becoming lifelong learners and turning to stackable credentials, the concept of building towards a degree through the accumulation of varying certifications and short-term courses. This, however, has given a rise to challenges in the tracking of disparate methods of acquiring skills. Blockchain provides a logical solution," say the authors. But I disagree. Because GIGO.

After a quick introduction defining blockchain, this article then shifts to its main focus, an interview with three experts on the following potential applications:

• "blockcerts" for certifications and credentials,
• bitcoin for paying for tuition,
• blockchain for transcripts, and
• using blockchain technology to retain authorship and attribution in open education resources.

The focus isn't exactly where I would place it, though it does represent what seem to be the  the core values of academia today: granting degrees, charging fees, and getting credit. There seems to be at least some recognition of this as Spencer Ellis comments, "Until proven to support the longstanding challenges we face in higher ed. (inequities, costs, program completion, etc.) any strategy could be considered hype. If strategies begin to address and change these outcomes, then they truly prove their worth."

This is a smart, detailed and forward-looking presentation delivered at the Scandanavian Developers' Conference this past week. It looks at the concept of 'universal computing' from the perspective of three major innovations: global storage systems (including, for example, IPFS), digital security and self-sovereign identity, portable computing where you provide the data and identity as needed, and the application provider never actually has access to these. A lot of this is related to some of the stuff I've been talking about with respect to content-addressable resource networks and the like. It's hard to imagine the world of Facebook and Twitter being overturned, but Brooklyn Zelenka is talking about a 2-5 year time frame, so be ready. You can also view her slides here in Noti.st

Something that's bothered me for a long time has been how to have a local database that syncs with an online or cloud database. Orbit addresses this. From the website: " OrbitDB is a serverless, distributed, peer-to-peer database. OrbitDB uses IPFS as its data storage and IPFS Pubsub to automatically sync databases with peers. It's an eventually consistent database that uses CRDTs for conflict-free database merges making OrbitDB an excellent choice for decentralized apps (dApps), blockchain applications and offline-first web applications." I haven't tried it yet, but it's on my list.

This does pretty much exactly what we described in Cagliari, but is an actual real product you can use yourself instead of just some proof-of-concept code. Related services include Unstoppable Domains, Pinata, and Viewblock There's a lot of activity taking place on places like Reddit around IPFS and similar initiatives. I'm not sure people have the first idea of how to regulate something like this - an address is a hash string, and how do you regulate a hash string?

I personally think that innovative uses of blockchain in education ought to consist of more than just taking existing database content and putting it onto a blockchain, but the bar does not seem to have risen that far yet. Thus we are treated to these database contents being placed onto a blockchain and called innovation.

This booklet is intended to tell readers "where and how can you discern the critical skills your workers need to succeed in an age of digital transformation." The link provided currently results in a 404, so I can't verify that one way or another. But what caught my eye were some very odd "findings" listed in the blog post. For example, in finance, "several skills are essential to finance, cropping up in multiple functions—SQL, Python language, big data, and business analytics." These are the essential skills in finance? Or for professional services: "data-related skills including data-based decision making, blockchain, and machine learning are must-haves in professional services." It's hard to believe these lists are the result of any actual analysis, much less any consultation with the real world.

Chris Aldrich writes, "I've noticed a lot of quiet, but very interesting and heartening feed reader and discovery work going on in the IndieWeb and related communities lately, so I thought I'd highlight it briefly." In this post he lists a number of nascent resources, including Inoreader, which will make following social feeds a lot easier, the FraidyCat reader, and continuing work on Microsub readers, among other things. Image: Indieweb.

There has been a lot of coverage of the idea that blockchain will disrupt education. Martin Weller (for some reason) picks a paywalled article as his foil to make the case that blockchain will not be disruptive. "How will blockchain do it better? How will it overcome the problems that over a decade of eportfolio work has not quite managed to address?" Fair enough, but other (more open) work has addressed those questions. In the current post, D'Arcy Norman picks up on Weller's critique, finding the right path forward. "Will it disrupt higher ed? I don't think so. Will it transform how some services are run? Absolutely."

Dean Shareski question the nature of the discipline to which he has devoted most of a career. I confess to having said in recent years that I don't think ed tech is a discipline any more, so I can identify with where Shareski is coming from. It has splintered, with the 'pure' ed tech focusing on, as Shareski notes, things like augmented and virtual reality, 3D printing, coding, esports and blockchain. But there's also professional learning, global learning and digital citizenships, and I would add things like digital identity and open pedagogy. My focus has always been a bit different - my interest has always been 'online learning and new media'. But in the end, it doesnt matter how the communities form and reform. There's still alot to keep me interested.

I'm still exploring Blockstack, which appears to have developed a fairly large ecosystem of applications and services (which it won't let you see until you create an identity). But the idea is that it provides access to applications that allow you to create data and store it wherever you want, all connected and protected by a blockchain. As the website says, "Blockstack ID provides user-controlled login and storage that enable you to take back control of your identity and data." There's a blogging app, Sigle, that takes you step by step through the process. It includes a way to define your own storage. Yes, it's open source.

This article surveys a total of nine blockchain based educational projects (Edgecoin, Tutellus, Sony Global Education (SGE), TeachMePlease, SuccessLife, EchoLink (now called EKO), Blockcerts, Gradbase and OriginStamp) found in the literature and compares them with respect to the blockchain features being used and the services being offered, ultimately mapping the services to the features. It's a nice crisp review that gives the reader a pretty good sense of the overall environment.

I'm setting up a new machine in the office, which includes installing browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Edge, etc). Normally when I install Chrome, I get the browser and that's it. But this time, for whatever reason, I also got the 'Web Server for Chrome'. You can also get it on the Chrome web store. First of all, it just works. Click on the icon, select a starting directory, enter http://127.0.0.1:8887 into your browser, and view your files. It can also act as a network web server, or it can try to acquire an internet address, so you can access it remotely. What the indieweb needs is a quick way to set up a personal web server. I'm not sure if this is it, but it looks a lot like this.

Doug Belshaw reflects on an OER20 presentation with Lauren Heywood, Jim Groom, and Noah Mitchell. " As Jim mentioned in answer to my question at the end of the session, it's like the 'dirty secret' of the internet is that we're all sharecroppers in a rentier economy. Why? Because we can never truly 'own' our address on the internet; we can only ever (as Maha Bali and Audrey Watters have both discussed) pay money to a central registry." As Belshaw notes, a lot of the work on decentralized systems such as IPFS are intended to counteract this. But we're not there yet, and there's a risk that we may never get there.

This item reminds me of the relationships between different modal logic systems. It describes the relationships between different models of consistency in distributed systems. Consistency is itself an underappreciated property in computer systems - we take it for granted, but couldn't live without it. Consistency lies at the heart of distributed editing systems such as GitHub, and constitutes the core innovation of the recent (and much-derided) blockchain systems. There is a logic of consistency, as demonstrated by this diagram, just as there is a logic of statements about possibility and necessity.

I know that a lot of people still think of blockchain as a technology in search of a problem (though if you look at my rough notes you'll see it differently) and many other people aren't thinking of it at all, but it's one of those technologies that's going to be everywhere behind the scenes within the next decade. So understanding this deployment toolkit, even if you just skim it, give you a good sense of the sorts of things to look for in data management and records in the medium-range future (note that my rough notes on this page are mostly cut-and-paste from other sources and should not be treated as an original work) .

I think the headline is a bit overstated, but there is something interesting in this plan. "Dfinity is building what it calls the internet computer, a decentralized technology spread across a network of independent data centers that allows software to run anywhere on the internet rather than in server farms that are increasingly controlled by large firms, such as Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud." It's a bit like taking the cloud, and putting it into the cloud. And it's the sort of model we've seen before - "It joins a list of organizations developing a range of alternatives, including Solid, SAFE Network, InterPlanetary File System, Blockstack, and others. All draw on the techno-libertarian ideals embodied by blockchains, anonymized networks like Tor and peer-to-peer services like BitTorrent." But these aren't easy to build, they aren't easy to manage, and they aren't easy to prevent from doing more harm than good.

Just announced as version 1.0, the Oxford Common File Layout (OCFL) specification describes "an application-independent approach to the storage of digital objects in a structured, transparent, and predictable manner... addressing five primary requirements: completeness, parsability, versioning, robustness, and storage diversity." What caught my attention in the specification was the use of content addressing in the file manifest (recommending SHA512 encryption). OCFL lacks the coolness factor of the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) but they have the same mechanics at the core.

This report (21 page PDF) is a basic presentation of usage patterns in comparison with a similar report from 2017. It should really be titled 'Social Media Platforms' because it is focused exclusively on single-url hosted services (the sole exception being 'blockchain platforms', coming in at three percent, and including sites like Gab). I would like to have seen a broader interpretation of 'social media', including minimally things like blogs, podcasts and email, and maximally including such things as federated social networks and communities ranging from Slack, Mattermost and Teams through to ActivityPub services like Mastodon. Without such a wider reading this sort of survey will miss important trends in social media.

There are numerous educational examples of GPT-3 on the OpenAI API page. This is a beta of a service that will allow applications to send requests via API to the service and use their AI to perform tasks such as "semantic search, summarization, sentiment analysis, content generation, translation, and more." I've signed up for a beta account and if accepted will use the service to support MOOCs on gRSShopper and trying to auto-generate AI-authored open educational resources (OER). If that happens I'll be looking for collaborators, so stay tuned. Thanks to Adrian Hodge, working on his team's digital teaching toolkit at NYU Shanghai.

Nice. Does exactly what the title says. "This paper proposes a Ethereum blockchain based decentralized and distributed framework to alleviate the problems existing in present OER. In addition Interplanetary File System (IPFS) has been included in this proposed system for storing the hypermedia as distributed way." It's the sort of paper you can drownes yourself in.

This product describes itself as 'the Zapier of blockchain'. The idea is that users can connect blockchain data to events and services, so that if something happens in a blockchain, something else can be triggered, like (say) a telegram message, or Slack notification. The key here is that they don't have to write any code; they simply select options in the application and they're done. It will be more interesting when the service works the other way, so that actions from external services can be easily recorded on a blockchain. This, though, would be more involved, because the blockchain isn't free to use. This service won't be either. But it's still worth taking note.

This article is really terse, which is too bad, because it obscures the richness of the thinking here. Here's the gist: Wittgenstein's Tractatus was embraced by logical positivists because it described a system of knowledge constructed logically from sense data, the semantics of which was assured by a 'picture theory' of cognition. Though Quine is widely credited with dismantling that edifice, it was Wittgenstein's own thinking (in the posthumous Philosophical Investigations and elsewhere) that laid out the core objections, many of which are restated in this post. Context, trust, persuasion - all these are quite rightly brought to bear against a theory based on 'facts'. So much for the worse for advocates of blockchain, web of data, and distributed consensus, right? "Even universal agreement on the facts often achieves nothing for public discourse."

I attended Bryan Alexander's session on VR and AR today. For example, there's what ASU is doing with their Dreamscape Learn platform. It felt a lot like the rise of Second Life again, except with more expensive hardware. Roxanne Ripkin asked about social VR, for example, AltSpace, which seems like a step forward. Of course, I am more interested in decentralized federated social VR. A quick search landed me on this resource listing a number of blockchain-based distributed VR networks, including for example Cryptovoxels, Somnium Space, and The Sandbox.

This is a contribution to an ongoing (and worthwhile) effort toward digital public infrastructure. "The primary purpose of the IndieWeb space is to directly increase the ownership and control users have over their web identities and data," writes Chris Aldrich. "Since each site or sub-platform on the network may offer completely different or competing slate of functionalities, the range of affordances are seemingly limitless."

Traditional blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum are based on 'proof-of-work', which is a requirement that providers solve long cryptographic problems before being allowed to add new data to the chain. This takes a lot of time and creates a huge processing cost for each transaction, so Ethereum has long been working toward an alternative 'proof-of-stake' requirement. This week marks the beginning of that transition. Announced by Russo-Canadian developer Vitalik Buterin in 2013, Ethereum is intended to be used for a wide range of transactions (including educational records and contracts), not just digital currency.

This article brings readers up-to-date with developments in blockchain-based academic certificates and provides a detailed framework for degree management using Ethereum (which may become more important as Ethereum migrates to proof-of-stake). The paper credits the University of Nicosia as "the first university in the world to issue academic certificates whose authenticity can be verified through the Bitcoin blockchain" and references João Santos's Hypercerts, a non-siloed blockchain-based certification service combining the Ethereum smart contracts and the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) (unpublished, but I found the GitHub reference) as well as pseudocode for core algorithms in the proposed framework.

Here's Ben Werdmuller on the recent trend toward decentralized networks: "One might propose a decentralized alternative to Facebook that has all of Facebook's features, for example, and assume that people will flock to it because it's not owned by a corporation. You care about privacy and ownership, after all - if others don't, surely it's just a matter of educating them?" But "People, in general, want convenience from their technology, not morality. So instead of building a more ethical version of the past, we need to build a more suitable version of the future." I think this is really key. It needs to be easy to use and it needs to do what people want to do. Image: 101 Blockchains.

I don't think the term 'virtual private neighbourhoods' is helpful, because the abbreviation - VPN - is the same as that for the much wider technical concept of the 'virtual private network', which is a type of software security system. But the concept being discussed, whereby "people are increasingly hanging out in small, private communities," is a useful one. "Global timelines and newsfeeds won't come back," argues Matt Webb. What we will get instead is "private Discords, private Slack channels, and a flurry of spatial interfaces in development," to which I would add distributed communities like Mastodon and decentralized web such as indieweb. It feels, in a way, almost like going back to the days of MUDs and discussion boards. Maybe that's nostalgia talking, or maybe it's a genuine rejection of the influence of - and the values of - large commercial media. (p.s. the original title of this article was 'Dunbar Spaces', and I think that's a pretty good name for the concept generally). (Image: Vancouver Public Library, Dunbar branch, which is what I got when I looked up 'Dunbar spaces').

No, I don't think we were wrong to look at applications of blockchain in education. Premature, perhaps, but the opportunities for a decentralized set of permanent records of authorship, achievenement, and other data are too important to ignore. "Through the use of blockchain," writes Rory McGreal, "it could be possible to ensure the availability of more affordable, equitable and quality educational content internationally."

This post proposes some use cases for learning resource metadata, and in passing points to some pretty significant resources, including a database of 1,300 recognized vocational qualifications, the 16,000 units of competency they are assembled from and who provides them. Use cases mentioned include the Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF) as well as micro-credentials, referenced in the Blockchain Challenges for Australia report.

Like Element, Signal is a peer-to-peer encrypted messaging app. It also includes features of blockchain in order to enable things like financial transactions. There's a strong case for this sort of app. "People who want more control over their data and how it's used — and who want to exist outside the gaze of tech companies." But as in the case of Element, there's risk. People can use it to send objectionable content. More, people could use its currency exchange feature for illegal purposes. And that's what's causing the dispute among Signal staff, between those who want to address problems as they come up, and those who thing the platfrom should take a strong stance against bad actors from the outset.

This is an excellent post analyzing the weaknesses of the Indieweb as it is currently constituted. You may have already seen my response. Daniel Goldsmith makes the point that the Indieweb is target-blind, exclusionary, and "has at its core a significant barrier to entry." I can't disagree. It instantiates a certain point of view of the world (the same one that informs existing social networks), it is complicated and difficult to follow, and it doesn't take into account the broader ideal of what an Indieweb should be.

This is a variation on donor-based funding for open source software (and therefore, open content). The idea is that donors contribute to a pool of money, and then donations are allocated by the number of people supporting given projects, as opposed to the size of the donations to those projects. This works against the phenomenon of rich donors picking winners, a valuable idea since such donations tend to favour (as I said in a post yesterday) projects "that entrench the idea of winners and losers, view the commodification and often the commercialization of community and media as inevitable, that view all of this as being inherently individual-based, libertarian, and 'free' in a very special and privileged sense of free." Via pia mancini.

This is a commentary on the Praxis and the Indieweb post we covered here last week. Aaron Davis comments "the cost of connecting people has collapsed. However, what is overlooked is that there is still a cost." I don't think anyone has overlooked that, seeing that we're all paying costs for computers and phones, bandwidth, software, and services. We pay with money, with labour (to get access through our employers), and personal information. And yes, our home on the internet, our domain of our own, looks more like rent than ownership. But this is true generally, including for actual homes (try not paying your rent or your taxes or your utility bills and see what happens). It costs money to live in society, and you can't live outside society, and this leaves us all in a perpetual state of need. The hope of the Indieweb is to reduce that need, but the issue isn't cost. Not really. No, the issues are (as I think the original Praxis post said) design and inclusivity.

Something is 'fungible' if it can be easily replaced with another item of the same type. For example, we don't really care which dollar bill we receive; they're all basically the same. A non-fungible thing is something that is verifiably unique. Like the Mona Lisa say. So a non-fungible token (NFT) is a digital thing that is verifiably unique. People have been paying a lot for NFTs of famous things recently. Is it a scam? A bubble? Or is it, as suggested in this article, the latest face of digital rights management (DRM). It's a persuasive argument, because what people are actually buying are "NFTs that point to digital objects", and not the objects themselves. "In neither the NFT nor DRM cases do buyers get the same bundle of rights that are guaranteed for a physical object in copyright law," writes Bill Rosenblatt. He may have a case.

This is a follow-up to an earlier post on non-fungible tokens (NFT) and makes the point that blockchain technology - which is what NFT are based on - poses a significant environmental problem. " Ethereum uses about as much electricity as the entire country of Libya," we read.  But there are two subsidiary points worth making. First: it's an environmental problem only because so much electricity is generated using hydrocarbons. The argument here is not to oppose blockchain, but rather, to demand electricity be created from alternative sources. Second is Ethereum's impending switch to proof-of-stake, which would reduce its energy consumption to almost nothing. This article is sceptical about the prospect, but in fact, the conversion has already started.

Mini-Heap describes this post under the heading 'the metaphysics of blockchain'. It's a good title. The main idea here is that blockchain for Bitcoin works because the record is the fact. But for something like, say, a birth date, the fact exists independently of the record, and the same sort of transcription errors that can make birth certificates unreliable can also infect the blockchain record. But what about, say, badges, credentials and other educational records? Is an educational record a recording of a real world event, or is the production of the record the event in itself? After all, when the program is complete, nothing actually exists over and above the record.

One way of supporting cooperation is to increase the cost of communication, making dishonesty more risky. This paper discusses an alternative whereby we can decrease the cost of communication by making dishonesty less profitable. That, at least, is my take on what I'm reading here. There's a lot of jargon in this paper (14 page PDF) from the world of games and decision theory. Essentially, communication becomes less risky. In more structured systems, "signals must be costly in order to ensure that they are reliable, or honest, for otherwise such signals could be easily forged by opportunistic agents." By contrast, 'cheap talk', combined with a 'discounting function', allows agents to get past an early period of betrayal and mistrust to emerge into a cooperative association. This is important because it allows us an alternative to 'expensive talk' systems like blockchain that are specifically designed to prevent dishonesty, and it suggests that open cooperative systems are less risky than supposed.

The three Rs in this article are: respond, recover and reimagine. They are of course post-pandemic Rs (because that's all we talk about now). And they're for (Australian) universities, not individuals (though, hey, maybe that would be a good plan for people too - especially the 'reimagine' part). The article asks, "Can you offer researchers and academics easy access to emerging technologies such as Internet of Things, AI, blockchain, augmented reality and in the very near future quantum computing?" I don't think these are the real needs right now. Sure, they're useful and we should be looking at them, but institutions need better access to online resources, better ways to share data, and more open learning environments, and a broader understanding of what can be done in education with digital technology.

Ironically writing on Substack, which is busily monetizing longer-form web content, Jeet Heer asks, "Can we bring back blogging?" From where I sit, I would observe that it actually wouldn't take very much work - all people would need to do is start blogging again (like I have been since 1995). It's not hard, but you do need to avoid services that throw up paywalls or worse in front of readers. In this response, Chris Aldrich cites with approval a comment about the need for "a sort of flywheel of engagement" and writes, "if we want a real resurgence of thought and discourse online, we're going to need some new tools to do it." Perhaps, he suggests, "some of the building blocks the IndieWeb movement has built." Maybe. But in the end, I think, we ourselves have to choose openness. Image: Aggressive Growth Marketing, Can blogging be automated?

Yesterday I considered the question of how to represent a graph in Javascript Object Notation (JSON). I want to use a graph to represent a course network, which would in turn be used to help someone enroll in the course. There isn't any single authoritative way to do this (though there's a specification on GitHub) but I did find this resource that offers a number of approaches (click on 'expand source' to see the actual JSON code). I also found another site offering similar approaches. There's also the approach using JSON Linked Data (JSON-LD). It's JSON that includes a @context element (for example, the context for person) that points to a data type definition and @id element that creates a canonical id; links to other elements are then embedded in the data using their canonical ID. I've gone ahead with a sort of abbreviated JGF using content-addressing IDs (CID) (see IPFS).

OK, I'll admit that my efforts to install and use NEAR ended up in utter failure, as documented in today's installment of Stephen Follows Instructions. The concept still appeals to me, though I'm hard-pressed to explain exactly why. NEAR is a community-building app based on Node and connected to the blockchain, and is based on a model that allows more many different communities, rather than one overarching network (as we see in Google and Facebook). Here's how NEAR describes itself: "NEAR is an open source platform that enables creators, communities, and markets to drive a more open, interconnected and consumer-empowered world." They're not good at explaining themselves, but I think there's something interesting there with potential longer term applications in education. Via Laura Hilliger.

If you need for some reason a good authoritative report on non-fungible tokens (NFT) you can cite, this paper (20 page PDF) is for you. It identifies the core technical components of NFTs, then presents their protocols, standards and targeted properties. It then looks at security issues, surveys potential applications, and discusses issues related to NFTs. The bibliography includes an extensive list of NFT projects, also presented as a useful table in Appendix B.

If I had to put these ten points into a single point, it is this: the future of social won't be more of the same. And I think this is a good point. And if I had to characterize these ten points with a single observation, it would be this: these ten points are the dead ends we've reached with existing social. We've learned centralization doesn't work. It needs to support diversity. It won't be based on a single identity. It won't be standards-based or blockchain-based. And it will be simple to set up and run. Image: Pew.

I think there's merit to this post, though I thing it relies on questionable hypotheses to get to where we already are. The first hypothesis is the characterization of aggregators as systems that monopolize demand by consolidating it; Gordon Brander offers Facebook, Uber and Amazon as examples. The second is that aggregators have broken a natural law describing how technology evolves: "yesterday's product becomes tomorrow's component." But you can't make Facebook, Amazon or Uber a component, he argues. There's no way to defeat their network advantage. So where does this leave us? "What if we instead had a small tool that was personal, multiplayer, distributed, evolvable? Maybe this is just a niche category, or maybe it could be the basis for a new open-ended ecosystem?" Well that, I argue, is where we are - at least conceptually. It's what Indieweb and Solid and mastodon and (humbly) gRSShopper are all seeking to attain.

This is the second edition of the book by Martha Cleveland-Innes and Randy Garrison, two of the leading voices in distance education (and the reviewer David Porter is no slouch himself). In this review (4 page PDF) we only get a hint of the slate of individual chapter authors, but again, those named (Richard Schwier, who wrote a froward, and Phil Ice, and Melissa Layne, who wrote on blockchain and AI) suggest a similar pedigree. And yet as I read the review there's a deep sense in me that they don't get it. No, it's not the lack of currency (though Porter notes "the scarcity of research citations beyond 2015, with the majority of the research cited coming from pre-2010"). It's that distance education isn't about $160 textbooks any more, and that's what this is. Sure, you can get an overpriced ebook, but the field as a whole has moved on, led for example by Tony Bates's open textbook Teaching in a Digital Age. No matter how qualified someone is, I can't take them seriously as a commentator in this field if they're publishing books behind paywalls.

I haven't tried publishing on Mirror yet though I probably will. It incorporates many of the concepts I've previously described here under the heading  of 'e-learning 3.0' - it's a decentralized blockchain-based publishing platform that allows you to embed third-party resources, monetize though various business models, and distribute using the interplanetary file system (IPFS). "The Mirror client has been architected to provide a snappy and beautiful interface, underpinned by a statically rendered site powered by Next.js and a performant API. Posting and editing on Mirror feels instant, while data asynchronously commits to permanent decentralized storage in the background." Well, we'll see. Here's an example of a Mirror blog post, here's another, and here's another. Image: CoinTelegraph.

This short post demonstrates the most elegant system for publishing to the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) that I've seen so far. I looked a bit more into it and found js.ipfs.io, which makes IPFS publishing possible with three lines of code (I haven't tried this yet so there may still be a catch). But to me the big news in all of this is that Cloudflare is supporting IPFS URLs, which suddenly makes it fast and useful for everyone. "These things happen slowly," writes Belshaw, "often taking a decade to mass adoption as bugs and annoyances are ironed out. We're getting there."

I took note the other day that CloudFlare is acting as an Interplanetary File System (IPFS) gateway. There are rules and such and it's not as straightforward as one would like, but it really points to the company's advantage in providing cloud services - an already-existing network of cloud servers hosting content around the world. This makes their "declaring that they will be the fourth major public cloud" something to take seriously. "Cloudflare... is expanding into other value added pieces by leaning into a fundamentally different (high fixed cost, near zero marginal cost) business model the larger incumbents structurally cannot follow." Things like IPFS.

I'm sure that headline will not bring joy to a lot of people, though it would be really nice to move on from userid and password combinations. Here's the gist: "one's crypto wallet would function as a sort of profile, similar to Facebook or LinkedIn. But unlike web2 profiles, decentralized identities are backed by hard evidence: a permanent, timestamped record of a person's accomplishments, contributions, interests, and activities to date." Fine, but we don't want to have to show the equivalent of our driver's license or health care card top log on to a website. So decentralized ID is also going to have to support anonymized ID. It's not clear though that governments and advertisers are ready to allow that. Image: IBM.

The topics James Ball writes about here, are relevant even if his predictions aren't. NFTs, for example, won't flame out in the way he suggests; they will meekly become obscure (in my view). Twitter won't get its act together, but social media (not just Twitter) will look for new revenue models to escape its toxic dependence on advertising. The gig companies (Uber, AirBnB, etc) will struggle to make money, because they have always struggled to make money, but with pandemic restrictions easing (vaccines make a huge difference) I expect a bit of a bounce-back.

Also, it's easy to predict things that have already happens (a common failing in these lists). It's a given that Jack Dorsey will focus on crypto because he has already started to do so (eg., changing the name of payment processing company Square to Block). The trick will be to make blockchain payments as easy as, um, tweeting. Similarly, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) have already had their moment, which makes the prediction that they will moot. And yes, people are trying to make VR a thing again, or should I say, meta.

Finally, why wouldn't podcasts and mailing lists continue to surge? The bottom has fallen out of the news media industry, and both podcasts and newsletters favour the low-overhead personal journalism model that allows people to make a living. What's most predictable is that traditional media or companies like Spotify will try to own it all but until they can nail down market exclusivity, they can only try.

Daniel Christian links to a Business Insider story (which may or may not throw up a paywall; it's getting impossible to predict these days) outlining the idea of web3, which blends distributed technologies and a cryptographic infrastructure (it's basically what I covered in my E-Learning 3.0 course in 2019). The idea is gaining increasing traction as the reputation of the existing centralized ad-supported social media internet continues to plummet. I'm still waiting for something to put it all together in a quality consumer-facing application; when that happens the future we've been slowly building to will suddenly arrive.

I was talking about a lot of these technologies back in my 2019 e-learning 3.0 course and we learned enough back then to know that it's not a magic 'everything will now be paid for' button. Yes, things like blockchain, NFT and DAO provide better mechanisms for paid content, but they also provide better mechanisms to preserve the openness of open content. The good news is that the new technologies will keep the line between the two from blurring, which should keep most of us out of the courtroom. And that's a victory for everyone. Image: CoinTelegraph

I would like to think these are merely the product of an apocalyptic science fiction movie, but sadly, they are not. As we can see when one of these faucets breaks down, it records every transaction with a user and records the information on the blockchain. I would hope they're not coming to a school or business near you, but I can already imagine them being used to enforce handwashing protocols. Educational technology indeed! Their primary use, of course, is to host advertising. Because, you know, you aren't exposed to enough advertising, what with all the cable unplugging taking place these days.

I've already linked to the first two parts of this series, so I may as well cover part 3. In this post Donald Clark questions the web3-metaverse land grab. "The libertarian roots of Silicon Valley have outgrown their teenage years. They're now greedy adults - they want it all." We've seen this scenario play out before, with the dot.com land rush, the Second Life land rush, and most recently, the NFT land rush. Before that it was casinos and forex and similarly greasy online enterprises. The new web3 world, notes Clark, is much more sophisticated than any of these. It will be of a lot of use. But let's not pretend that libertarianism will do anything other than make the rich people richer. To make web3 work, it will need to be owned - and managed - by the community. Not by Facebook.

This is an absolutely outstanding bleeding-edge looooong overview of the coming year in blockchain and associated technologies. If you're at all interested in web3, DAOs, decentralized storage, or crypto technology, you want to take a Saturday and read this cover to cover. On the way you'll encounter concepts like the flippening, the use of RabbitHole for learning, the evolution of owned media, and so much more. Really. If you're serious about hard tech, don't miss this one. 165 page PDF.

The discourse on Web3 is beginning to reach a dull roar in the last few months, and I don't see any signs that it's going to go away. Dion Hinchcliffe writes, "Web3 has very much arrived as a major trend with a towering stack of tech behind it and quite impressive economic results to match. It's a trend that is now is increasingly informing technology evolution as a whole." This article defines Web3, outlines the motivation for it, its roots in crypto, the idea of decentralized trust (with a discussion of the tendency to centralize decentralized tech), lists the major technologies involved, and describes what organizations should do to prepare for it.

The ideas outlined in E-Learning 3.0 are becoming more real, as we see in this post (and if you note the URL you'll note that the post is distributed on IPFS, the distributed content addresisble resource network). As the authors here write, "Web3 has enabled creators to own their work online, ed3 enables students to own their education. Nascent ed3 models are improving access, affordability, and accreditation, but more work needs to be done." There's a lot to this article - it's a nice Saturday read. (p.s. if all this intrigues you, you'll want to look at Mirror, the Ethereum-powered platform these posts have been written on - more here). Too bad Mirror doesn't support RSS.

If you haven't been following web3 and distributed learning technologies for the last few years, this hype may be appearing out of nowhere, evidence of a frenzied "must-be-building ethos is rampant in the tech industry." Had we moved more slowly and carefully, argues Elizabeth Renieris, "we could be further along in addressing some of Web 2.0's failings by now." Maybe. But it's not like people haven't been trying to fix Web 2.0, rather, it's likely that a web controlled by Amazon, Facebook and Google inherently can't be fixed. Yes, there is a danger that "web3 will have us sell ourselves as it doubles down on extractivism, turning every interaction into a commercial transaction." But it's not web3 that creates that danger; it is an economic system based on commodification, extraction of value, and concentration of wealth. We need to stop blaming technology - past and future - for social dysfunction.

It's interesting to see the pundits all weighing in on web3 these days. I'm not sure what has prompted it - nothing really significant has happened in the last few months; it's just blockchain and tokens and NFT and IPFS as usual. A lot of the commentary has been quite critical - see, for example, Doug Belshaw commenting of a reecent paper that "There are so many issues with it that I don't really know where to start." Here Bryan Alexander describes an interview with the paper's author; "our community started in with questions and pushback and we went all over the place, together: credentials, centralization vs decentralization, privacy and cryptography, the purpose of education." Just for fun, and to remind readers that this isn't something that started this week, I bring you my History of web3 on OLDaily page for your enjoyment.

Another introduction to web3. The core idea of web3 is that you can publish articles on a decentralized network, recording ownership and links on the blockchain. This has naturally led to a frenzy of speculation about how web3 is the future of web monetization. But you can have a decentralized independent web without exchanging digital coinage. And the big thing about web3 has nothing to do with money; it has to do with identity. "On web3, your access credentials are not based on a username or password, but is based on cryptographic proof of you are who you are, and that proof is the same for any and all websites or platforms users access."

"A blockchain can be thought of as quite a boring technology," writes Doug Belshaw, "a back office solution where an append-only database (i.e. one can be written to, but then is read-only) is stored on multiple machines instead of centrally." True. And it's the mechanics of the decentralization that make it interesting (and the financialization part is the least interesting). Proponents of web3 and ed3, he writes, talk of it "as being disruptive, egalitarian, and a step-change in how society operates."

Belshaw disagrees. "The hard yards when distributing power involve emotions and, well, being human," he says, referencing this article by Austin Robey on the difference between distributed autonomous organizations (DAO) and co-ops. Reading it, it seems to be that the real division is that in co-ops it's one-person one-vote while in a DAO it's (mostly) one-token one-vote. Do people vote, or do dollars vote? That's the age-old tension between democracy and capitalism.

Robey also argues that co-ops are distinct in that they often operate on the basis of shared principles. Perhaps. But you can't base a society on shared principles. Society is a set of laws, protocols, structures, languages and mores. It's a way to allow people with different beliefs to interact, not a way to shape them all into someone's picture of an ideal world. I stepped my way carefully through all this in my E-Learning 3.0 course. But I guess people are more interested in this week's over-the-top proclamations for and against.

My link to the history of web3 and related topics on OLDaily in a previous edition was broken. Here's the correct link.

If you've been following OLdaily you've known what a DAO is for several years, but for the many who find this new, the Guardian has a tongue-in-cheek overview of the concept. Essentially, a DOA is a company (but not a 'company') with assets in the blockchain that is managed by a decentralized group of shareholders (but not 'shareholders'). "In that idealised vision of the organisation, there barely needs to be any human-level structure at all – hence the "autonomous" part of the name. The DAO itself exists as a smart contract."

This article begins with a clever metaphor linking the blockchain with the heavy chains worn by the ghosts that haunt Ebenezer Scrooge. "And that raises questions. Among them: Are crypto-entrepreneurs imagining better systems for education—or just systems that pay off better financially for themselves?" And in the true entrepreneurial spirit, Rebecca Koenig asks, "Could both answers be true?" And, well, they could. "Folks in the crypto space are questioning whether industries can be reimagined to operate in ways that are less extractive, and more community-owned," says Jon Allen, managing partner at investment fund Mirana Ventures. But I can sense a lot of scepticism in the air.

Casey Newton begins by noting "it felt like everyone I knew was sending me the same link. "The Problem With NFTs," a long video essay by the Canadian media critic Dan Olson." I've also seen the link, but I haven't watched the two-hour video (maybe on the week-end). This post, though, is sort of a reply to it. The three things? First, he says, make crypto transactions safe, reliable, and approachable to normal people. That's a pretty tall order but it will happen, eventually. Second, he says, make a moderately efficient blockchain 'computer.' Right now everything involving web3 technology generally is too slow. It will get better, but better hardware won't do it alone. Third, he says, develop technologies for mitigating harassment and abuse. Well that would be the golden grail. It would give us a reason to leave all those other places full of harassment and abuse far behind. I think this is possible (it's actually one of the appears of web3) but needs proper design. And it wouldn't hurt if harassment and abuse wasn't so socially acceptable in the wider world of media, marketing and politics.

According to this announcement, the Learning Economy Foundation (LEF) "has been awarded 2 grants by the like-minded innovators of DEVxDAO to do a definitive applied study and taxonomy on decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). The research will result in a detailed final report and playbook, a social research Hub, and an open source Internet of Education DAO framework that can be forked for use governing Internet of Education related decentralized projects and organizations." A lot of what I see on the website reads like people who know about blockchain but who are looking at education for the first time. Nothing new there, I guess. Still, I'm keeping an eye on the initiative. P.S. readers will also want to have a look at this slide deck as well.

It's interesting indeed to see the reactions of the two communities. gamers have turned against Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) with a passion, seeing them as just another way for games to separate them from their money. On the other hand, music fans seem more than willing to pay for the crypto tokens. There are good reasons. First, "live entertainment has always done a healthy business in collectibles; gaming hasn't." Additionally, "music NFTs can more easily be positioned as helping artists." by contrast, nobody loves game publishers, and the people who actually build the games would not receive any of the NFT money. Third, "the music NFT projects I'm describing this week are entirely optional." In games, however, they would be much less so. As newton writes, "there is wisdom in fandoms, and they're already telling us what they want from the blockchain — and what they don't."

We're now well into the phase where people who don't know much about NFTs are writing about NFTs. But Chris Kennedy is honest about that, and as he says, "writing is a great way to work through ideas." It's wrong only when the uninformed pretend to be authorities, but that's not what's happening here. We read these blogs as a discussion, not a Library of Authoritative Sources. This difference is important. Anyhow, Kennedy, thinking aloud, offers a list of possible uses: for transcripts, as graduation mementos, as something students can produce, and as parts of a modern portfolio. These are good applications for crypto generally, and we'll probably see some version of all four of these (I know, someone is going to ask "what problem are we solving with these," but they're the same people who were happy with paper-based records).

This is another part of the whole concept of web3 that has been around for a while but is getting newfound attention. "With dApps, there are still computers that do the same job a traditional server does, but those computers don't all belong to the same person or company. Instead, the workload is spread across the computers of users and anyone else who makes their computer systems available." The attribution of work and payment is handled by smart contracts and blockchain. The advantage is that dApps are difficult to corrupt or hack, and they are tolerant of machine failure.

As usual, substitute the word 'media' with the word 'educators' for an edtech version of the argument. Then, as is always wise, remove the word 'must' and replace it with the word 'can'. Then you get some interesting points. For example, "Web3 technologies... offer new tools for content verification and fact-checking." And with community-driven impact analysis and ranking, content "could be recommended and prioritized based on the impact on the things the user considers valuable." Also (and contrary to what this article suggests), web3 allows people to create their own learning cooperatives, and avoid paying higher prices based on marketing algorithms.

"Web3 is going just great...and is definitely not an enormous grift that's pouring lighter fluid on our already-smoldering planet" declares this website sarcastically. The image is titled "A sad-looking Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT monkey looks at a world engulfed in flames." Known as W3IGG to the web3 community and founded in December, this website highlights the continual (and sometimes hilarious) failures of the world of blockchain, NFT, web3 and crypto. Recent examples include a case where a DAO lost all its money after a 'hostile takeover', the convoluted efforts of the Canadian truck protestors to distribute bitcoin they've collected, the Coinbase outage during the Super Bowl, and many more. Via Platformer.

OK, here's the slightly simplified explanation of what a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) is. Take any digital content, and run it through an encryption function known as a hashing algorithm. This produces a unique identifier for that content. Next, create a unique identifier for a person (typically the address of their digital wallet). Write a statement saying the first belongs to the second. Embed this statement into a blockchain so that it cannot be altered. You have created an NFT. To the extent that this is useful in education, you can now define the future of NFT in Edu (your results may vary, but this article takes you through some of the possibilities).

The University of Calgary Gauntlet - where I was an editor in the 1980s - printed its last weekly newspaper on paper in 2017. But it updates daily online. That pretty clearly is the future of news media generally, though it still comes as a surprise to many. That's why I find it so odd that student newspapers in the U.S. are still pondering their future. Where should they put their efforts? Well, not TikTok or Twitter, though that's part of the picture. It's POSSE - Publish on Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. Anything else puts you at the mercy of the platform. Though newspapers, which are experimenting with Facebook and Google's AMP, haven't really learned that lesson either.

This article covers a report (102 page PDF) from the American Council on Education (ACE) on the Education Blockchain Initiative, funded by the U.S. Department of Education. This initiative includes Blockchain Innovation Challenge and the report covers the development of that project. Four projects involving teachers and educational resources are featured. Overall, the use cases focus on learning and employment records (LER), verifiable credentials (VC), and decentralized identifiers (DID). The value of the report is the detailed description it offers of each of the projects, from use cases to the development of a minimum viable product (MVP) and subsequent development. Related: ACE Education Blockchain Initiative​.

Michael Feldstein writes a long post saying he doesn't know very much about web3 but that it probably won't help education very much. Now having offered a MOOC on web3 as it was back in 2019, I think I can say that I do have a pretty good understanding of it, both at a technical level and at a social level. Now Feldstein's article is valuable in that it raises many of the questions and confusions people have (for example, he should know self-sovereign identity tokens not only allow people to manage their own logins, they also enable zero-knowledge proofs, which means people can validate credentials without giving out personal information). But I will say that this probably isn't the time for a Economy 2.0 statup - not in a world of content-addressible decentralized resources.

I thought that this was a relatively good article in that it explores a number of features of web3 that go unmentioned by others (and critics especially). But I think we need to be clear that we can talk about web3 without talking about crypto-currencies (like bitcoin or ethereum), just as we could talk about web2 without talking about PayPal or advertising. 'Play to earn' models and NFTs are the web3 equivalents of affiliate marketing and commercial e-textbooks. The web2 or web3 model makes them possible, but it doesn't make them necessary. But it is true that while "web2 is about communication and sharing (like Instagram and Facebook), web3 is about creation and ownership where users can retain control."

This article uses about 1800 words to say the following (slightly paraphrased): proof of stake does away with wasteful bitcoin miners and replaces them with 'validators.' Instead of investing in energy-intensive computer farms, you invest in the native coins of the system. To become a validator and to win the block rewards, you lock up - or 'stake' - your tokens in a smart contract. Proof of stake hasn't been proven on the scale that proof-of-work platforms have, and there's still the risk the rich get richer and eventually centralize and control the system.

A number of projects and causes working 'for good' have taken to web3 technology, write Scott Smith and Lina Srivastava. For example, the World Wildlife Federation-UK is selling NFT "Tokens for Nature". But there are "three linked challenges baked into Web3 that any proponent of positive social impact must solve," say the authors (paraphrased):

1. Decentralized tech doesn't equal distributed power; equitable power structures must be proactively designed in Web3 systems.
2. Existing power holders are already building their Web3 business models on exploitation and extraction and do so without addressing these concerns in their core business model.
3. These systems say they address issues of trust, but building trust requires, among other actions, deep listening and honest engagement.

Short article on web3 and the metaverse from an AACE perspective. It starts with the obligatory reference to Neal Stephenson, mentions Non-fungible tokens (NFT), depicts web3 as 'Read-Write-Own', and raised the obligatory sceptical note from Jaron Lanier. AACE should do better.

This story offers a fair warning to those eager to jump in too quickly on the crypto side of web3 and the metaverse. A half year after making BitCoin an official currency, El Salvador is finding that the infrastructure has to work and the value has to be (more or less) stable in order for it to play a key role in the economy. And it does not offer the independence from institutions some people hope. "At some point, as a participant in the economy, you have to cede some control and trust someone else, whether it is the developer of an app, a bank, or a government."

According to Tim O'Reilly, " "Web3" as we think of it today was introduced in 2014 by Gavin Wood, one of the cocreators of Ethereum. Wood's compact definition of Web3, as he put it in a recent Wired interview, is simple: 'Less trust, more truth.'" Well, that's one way to put it. As O'Reilly explains, "Wood's point is that the blockchain replaces trust in the good intentions of others with transparency and irrevocability built into the technology." I'm in agreement with that as a basic statement of intention; after all, if we have to depend on the good intentions of others to progress, then we won't progress. But there's more to web3 than that; there's the whole question of decentralization, and as O'Reilly remarks, "Blockchain developers believe that this time they've found a structural answer to recentralization, but I tend to doubt it... the rapid consolidation of bitcoin mining into a small number of hands by way of lower energy costs for computation indicates one kind of recentralization. There will be others."

This is a bit of a grab-bag of an article as author Amber Burton makes her debut on the EdTech beat for Protocol. Three companies are featured: 101, "playfully termed the 'metaversity,'", which "aims to solve the problem of credentialing skills"; Fusemachines, which offers live training in AI for its corporate clients; and Copilot, an AI code-completion tool for developers which Burton says "signals a future in which more tools are tailored to the specific needs of workers."

It's worth taking the time to look through the list of activities and resources listed on  this website, beginning with the basics, then to consuming and creating content, and on through the rest. The site leans more toward things like DAO, NFTs and crypto than I would like, at the expense of (say) IPFS and distributed data networks. But the site is a valuable reference, especially if it's well-maintained. Just be wary, and don't invest any money you're not prepared to lose. Image: Natalia.

Imgur has a clever parody running today; I saw it here but it's probably gone now; view my capture here. It replaces the traditional 'up' and'down' voting arrows with cryptocurrency icons, the result being a 'value' created for each contribution. In a sense this parody represents the 'new economic system' contemplated here by Irving Wladawsky-Berger. The parody is funny because Imgur's rankings are really arbitrary and capricious, and converting them to currency would distort them beyond recognition (and take all the fun out of them). And that's the fear about web3 (and ed3, the online learning analogue). See also: Dion Hinchcliffe.

I don't really disagree with Irving Wladawsky-Berger's projections here - I've made many of the same points myself. I just think too much of his list consists of different ways to say 'AI'. That aside, we agree that things like distributed architecture, trust architecture (aka blockchain), advanced connectivity, biotech and next-generation materials are all important (as I've said in the past, the future is carbon, carbon and carbon (think things like neuro-computing, graphene, and bio-tech). Note, though, that the carbon stuff is longer-term (think 10-15 years) while the architecture stuff is short-term (think 5-10 years). Image: my carbon-carbon-carbon meme-style illustration.

Launched just a couple of weeks ago, the Canadian Web3 Council aims "to shape Web3, and secure the jobs and tax revenue generated by the most important innovation in decades." It's calling for "a regulatory environment that encourages our innovators to grow their business domestically, enables Canada to shape Web3, and secures the jobs and tax revenue generated by the most important innovation in decades." They note that "Canadians have founded many of the most important blockchains, including Ethereum, the second largest blockchain by market capitalization, Cosmos, a decentralized network of independent, scalable, and interoperable blockchains, and Flow, a blockchain designed to be the foundation of Web3," but warn that Canada may miss out on the benefits produced by these innovations.

This story describes the rise of the fake "birds aren't real" conspiracy theory "that is just realistic enough, as conspiracies go, to convince QAnon supporters that birds aren't real, but has just enough satirical flags that generation Z recognises immediately what is going on." This item checkes a couple of boxes for me: one, as an example of hacking memes in the 2020s, and another, the idea of community being defined as agreement on truth-validation methods, or 'community as consensus'. Even if you don't agree with my take on this, you'll find the story an interesting reflection of our times, I think.

The EDUCAUSE Horizon Report (58 page PDF) is harder to criticize than its NMC predecessors because it takes a much broader approach, offering fifteen trends spread across five categories. But it still has its signature list of "those key technologies and practices they believe will have a significant impact on the future of postsecondary teaching and learning":

• AI for Learning Analytics
• AI for Learning Tools
• Hybrid Learning Spaces
• Mainstreaming Hybrid/Remote Learning Modes
• Microcredentialing
• Professional Development for Hybrid/Remote Teaching

Or, if I had to summarize: AI, hybrid, and skills. Which gives the report a surprise factor of exactly zero, though there is a value I suppose in not taking a risk on any of the more interesting future tech trends ranging from the metaverse to web3 to the decentralized learning economy.

This is a very brief outline of a longer report (62 page PDF) on blockchain and web3 by the Future Today Institute. Yes, the report is cheerfully optimistic, perhaps overly so, but its primary benefit will be to help people write use cases for decentralized digital technology, including especially digital currencies. There were certainly additions over and above my own list (slightly dated), for example, 'conditional money' (which can only be used for certain purposes), 'earned wage access' (instead of waiting for payday), fractional ownership and fan ownership models (instead of ownership by billionaires) and distributed earning models. Most of these will have educational analogues.

Both web3 and alternative credentials are motivated by a desire for decentralization. But "while decentralization can be facilitated by technology up to a point, it is also limited by the nature of humans as social animals," writes Michael Feldstein. Working toward this idea, he outlines four types of alternative credentials: as a skills inventory used by human resources, as an affordable alternative credential, as a way to skip MIT and go straight into a job at Google, or as a technological solution like a digital badge platform. But none of these is really new, he argues; the idea has precedents in ideas as old as guild membership and new as automated resume scanners. And in the future we'll see more of the same: alternatives developed at human speed and being created by already established organizations.

I was initially enthused at the thought of reading a heady criticism of connectivism, but this completely anonymous web leaves me wanting just because it's so short. Still, the critique is on point. It asks "How does the connectivist cMOOC e-Learning 3.0 demonstrate the theory in which it is grounded?" It starts out OK. "It feels more familiar and authentic that the typical video-quiz-discussion structure of the standard MOOC." But the low rate of participation tells. "Looking at the surface analysis above, #el30 seems small, dislocated and disconnected, affectless and cold. Because it lacks living material warmth, a certain touch and affect which renders these interactions 'emotional, affiliative and meaning-rich'." All fair enough, I suppose. Having had more people would have helped a lot, I think. And also a better way to support direct interaction. But yeah, "the actual practice feels trickier to grasp."

This is one of the more comprehensive presentations of web3 in a learning context I've seen recently. The medium is Google slides, but the content is dense enough to be useful. There are overviews of tome of the major terms - blockchain, DAO, NFTs - leading to an overview of the fediverse. Scott Leslie then explores how libraries have started to work with web3 before looking at some of the issues and concerns. "The idea is that they can provide the best of both worlds - local instances, serving local communities with locally appropriate policies, and yet scalable via federation."

This is an interesting idea that might work or (more likely) is completely unworkable. Here's the Product Hunt pitch: "UniversityDAO is a decentralized autonomous university aiming to end student debt and empower Universities to own their university through the tokenization of the University system." Here's a white paper. The idea is that students buy tokens (using real money) and this is used to fund the university; the tokens, meanwhile, represent shares in the ownership of the university (or whatever is left after the students' education is funded). Related: Social Bees University DAO, University DAO Voting, Invisible College.

Chris Aldrich describes the IndieWeb community as consisting of three spheres: the logos (or knowledge) which can be found in the community forums or discussions; the ethos (those representing the IndieWeb ethic) who can be found out there interacting on their own ("because they grew up in the period of the open web, or because they never felt accepted by the thundering herds in the corporate social enclosures"), and the pathos (or sympathizers) "wishing they had better user interfaces, better features, different interaction, more meaningful interaction, healthier and kinder interaction." Image: studiobinder.

Way back in 2002 I built something called the Referrer System that found links to your web page and listed them. All you had to do is put a little Javascript snippit on your page. It became really popular and broke my server and also attracted a lot of spam. WebMentions performs essentially the same function, but isn't centralized, and offers more control over what appears on your page. But it's also harder to implement, though in recent years it has gotten easier. I really think something like Webmention is the alternative to social media, but we have to get to that point where everyone has their own easy-to-use website (which, ultimately, is what social media provided). Image: CSS-Tricks.

My introduction to WebMentions was to write code that completely supported the W3C specification only to find it wasn't working because there's so much more you have to do, like set up h-cards, remove duplicates, and block self-references. Miriam Suzanne writes, " I'm an experienced web developer, and I can figure it out. But the steps aren't simple, and most of my friends are not web developers. So, to me, this all feels like the prototype of an idea – a proof of concept." I think that's right. The concept makes so much sense. But documentation like this isn't helping anyone. Via Geoff Graham.

The five areas are: secure credentials, gamifying learning, record-keeping for grants, accreditation, and student financing. With the exception of gamification, all these have to do with records and bookkeeping, and arguably, blockchain is not even remotely required for gamification. It's a pretty sterile view of blockchain in education. I think we will see much more interesting applications once we get beyond this idea of education as a set of transactions leading to a degree. The technologies that create blockchain were designed to support a form of social cohesion and cooperation across decentralized networks of content and resources, or in other words, an alternative to centralized forms or organization and collaboration. Surely there's room for more imagination here.

Martin Weller weighs in on the recent edtech angst. He makes some obvious points: "The ed tech industry is different (from) the ed tech community of practitioners," he writes. Also, "a new generation of ed tech practitioners (is) here and they may approach it differently." Moreover, "the rapid (and rapidly repeating) nature of ed tech... burns people out." And it didn't help that "many found that post-pandemic their views were not respected," All of this is true. It's a tough industry (as is pretty much anything in tech) and if you don't have an enthusiasm for it you get burned out and disillusioned pretty quickly. I also think you need rather more variety than most ed techies are allowed to have: I combine writing, consulting, blogging, coding, gaming, travel and speaking, and more all into one gig. Doing it this way, and staying excited about the new (the way I am about things like the indieweb and Octopus) go a long way. But I remember well the days back at Assiniboine when I had to fight with my managers to forge my career my own way. If you let them, managers will make you a hired wrench and leave you tired and frustrated with no prospects for the rest of your career.

This article begins by reporting a bit of a pivot by Don Tapscott's Blockchain Research Institute toward web3. It makes sense, given the poor reputation blockchain has enjoyed, though that of web3 is hardly any better. Here, Irving Wladawsky-Berger characterizes web3 as "a very promising set of technologies and applications in their early years." That would be my assessment as well. It's important, though, to abstract away from the token economy and financial aspect of all this, which Wladawsky-Berger doesn't really succeed in doing. But there are hints. An "anonymous single-sign-on will allow one username and authentication method across all web sites and accounts" by itself makes web3 worth investigating. Persistent and unique digital identities for resources (such as papers and images and more) should be added to the mix. There's something there, despite the corrupting influence of the financial sector.

Another small step closer. "In Web2, users sign in with centralized identifiers like email addresses and social media profiles. In Web3, users create and own their Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs). DIDs are cryptographically verifiable identifiers stored on the blockchain, and independent of any organization. DIDs contain no personal data or wallet information." The way this works is, if you log on using your Web3 ID you are presented with a QR code. Scan the QR code with your phone, and your identity provider sends your credential to the service. You can use it to perform authentication tasks (verify age, membership in an organization, possession of a degree or credential, payment of a token) anonymously. Here's live video (warning: long, boring) of me trying to make it all work.

Here's the gist: Decentralized Social (DeSo) "is a way of social networking built on open blockchain technology without a central authority that owns and operates the network, creating new opportunities for how we can use social media and giving more power to you, the user." This article describes the motivations for a web3 free of the limitations of existing social media networks that "are not portable nor composable and operate in closed ecosystems that do not talk to each other." It describes the Lens protocol "that is changing the nature of social media in Web3 by creating an open, decentralized, and composable social graph" and suggests "we can update the whole concept of what a community really is... and explore new ways to visualize, build, display, and interact with a social graph." The catch: you need to 'connect your wallet' in order to use it - a compatible wallet, that is. *sigh*

You may recall he idea of 'houses' in schools from Harry Potter (10 points to Griffindor) though of course it predates the books by generations (my own high school tried it in the 70s with limited success). In this item, "CritterCoin guides schools through sorting students into Houses and identifying the behaviors they want to reward. Schools then design their own digital coins and teachers award them in real time when students demonstrate positive behaviors." Do school houses need NFT pets? Obviously not. Will they catch on? The jury is out. (p.s. put me in Ravenclaw).

Decentralized Identifiers (DID) are a core part of web3 and with the 1.0 specification being approved by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) companies can now move forward with widespread adoption of supporting services. It's worth noting, though, that the W3C specification allows for centralized decentralized identifiers, a point both Google and Mozilla raised in their objections. It would also have been desirable to see "at least one, interoperable method that works out of the box." Microsoft, as well, raised concerns about compatibility with JSON and JSON-LD. Here's the W3C announcement.

This is why people are so cynical about new technologies. Here's why Pearson plans to sell textbooks as non-fungible tokens (NFT): "In the analogue world, a Pearson textbook was resold up to seven times, and we would only participate in the first sale... technology like blockchain and NFTs allows us to participate in every sale of that particular item as it goes through its life." In other words - you can't sell your used textbook without giving a cut to Pearson. Here's a message to publishers: nobody wants a technology that allows you to control everything they own.

I'm going to have to actually follow the instructions to determine whether the advice here is good, but the article does offer an insight into just what constitutes a personal presence on the indieweb. It also shows the major issue for the indieweb: "there is no out-of-the-box solution for making your website ready for the IndieWeb. It involves a lot of customization, fiddling with services and setting up endpoints." Most people won't do that. I don't want to do that.

"What if," asks Tim O'Reilly, "instead of thinking of the metaverse as a set of interconnected virtual places, we think of it as a communications medium?" Then the metaverse is "about a time when immersive digital worlds become the primary way that we communicate and share digital experiences." I think this is very much applying a web 2.0 lens to web3. The distinguishing characteristic of the metaverse and web3 is object permanence in a digital space. And yes, we could think of a set of objects as a place, or as a communications medium, and any number of other things. But what's actually new is that we can now use digital objects in ways previously reserved for physical objects only - as keys, tokens, currency, credentials, identifiers, and the like (use your imagination to extend this list).

I've been getting email suggesting I be more critical of blockchain and web3 technologies, though I would observe, with Irving Wladawsky-Berger, that "in their early years, major new technologies are generally accompanied by a mixture of excitement, speculation and confusion, as people sort out what the technology might be about and how it's likely to evolve. Something important is going on out there, but it takes time and marketplace experience to sort things out." Still - and here is where I think most criticism comes in - I have zero interest in what is called here an 'internet of value'. While it may be true that "contracts, transactions, and the records of them are among the defining structures in our economic, legal, and political systems," I don't think they should be, and there are many more important things in the world. But this isn't a problem with the technology, it's a problem with a world view that see things exclusively in terms of money, laws and power. Image: Tapscott, on Altoros.

An non-fungible token (NFT) is essentially a blockchain record that points to a digital resource. The point being made in this fairly technical post is that "your NFT should point at a thing, not point at a location." What that means, in practice, is that the record shouldn't point to a URL or an internet address, because these can (and often do) change. Instead, it should reference the digital hash of the resource, a content-based address produced using a cryptographic algorithm. Such resources can be uploaded and stored using a distributed network such as the interplanetary file system (IPFS). Via Boris Mann.

According to the authors, "none of the existing blockchain initiatives in educational credentialing seems to meet their original goal of global adoption." Based on an analysis of the industry workflow, the paper (8 page PDF) "identifies six practical problems in the industry, and proposes five desired attributes of ideal credentials infrastructure." The problems are: difficulty in getting credentials recognized, damaged or tampered credentials, the cost of screening for hiring, loss of confidence in traditional credentials, identity theft, and centralized credentials governance. The attributes are: learner control, verifiability, tamper-proofing, portability, and employability-driven. The suggestion is that, properly designed, blockchain can address these issues. They offer a four-layer model for developing such a system and recommend "users involvement strategies to improve social understanding and acceptance of blockchain technology."

You may be reading about something called 'the Merge' over the next couple of weeks (it's tentatively scheduled for September 19). This is the conversion of the Ethereum blockchain network from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake. Ethereum is the second-largest blockchain network in the world, after Bitcoin, and so the Merge will have huge implications for digital currencies and distributed ledgers generally. The Merge will result in a huge energy savings because "it eliminates the need for energy-intensive mining and instead secures the network using staked ETH," the Ethereum currency. This website is an introduction to the Merge but not a complete explanation; this article offers more detail. See also this article in Protocol.

This short article and video introduces the WebNative File System (WNFS), an effort to enable users "to be able to search for, select, and open files within the browser itself" in order to help "build Web3 native apps." The difficulty is that the browser is a 'hostile environment' in the sense that it is difficult to secure. This proposal builds on directed acyclical graphs (DAG) and the interplanetary file system (IPFS) to propose an approach. There's a lot of good thinking here, with the key (I think) being the way temporal structures and key structures can be understood as DAGs (presented elegantly as shape-shifting graphs in the video). There is a much more detailed presentation here along with a white paper and code on GitHub. If you're interested in this you'll be interested in other sessions from the IPFS þing (pronounched 'thing') conference from last July. Via Boris Mann.

Ethereum has completed 'the Merge', a software update that converts the blockchain from a 'proof-of-work' system to a 'proof-of-stake'. The change effectively reduces their energy consumption to about one percent of what it was previously, removing a major objection to the use of blockchain systems. It also reduces security risks by protecting against '51% attacks'. Now Ethereum has other challenges to address: the cost of transactions, the speed of transactions, and creeping centralization.

This (19 page PDF) is a pretty good and very detailed description of a use case for blockchain technology in education, and specifically, a mechanism for supporting the use of digital labs by students working in a learning management system (in this case, Moodle). The parameters for access and use of the lab are established using an Ethereum smart contract, while data is linked from the blockchain and stored using the interplanetary file system (IPFS), which provides robustness against single-point failures or intrusions. The difficulty with this approach (in my view) is that the technology it's using might not be more reliable than the technology it replaces, and there are in addition cost overheads (in the form of Ethereum gas fees) to consider.

According to Protocol, Balaji Srinivasan's The Network State is "a blueprint that, right or wrong, will inform how powerful tech leaders interact with governments for years to come." It suggests that individuals can organize themselves into a single (blockchain-based) network independent of traditonal nation-states. The appeal here is to the employment of blockchain mechanisms to promote and enforce the objectives of the state, and the suggestion is that they will become large enough, and organized enough, to negotiate for their own autonomy. I don't think this is how networks actually work, nor how they should work. To me, it reads like a new sort of authoritarianism, one that does not recognize the inherent interdependence among all states, and suggests instead that a particular population (of mostly wealthy white men) can opt out of governance by the rest of us, and (presumably) exert its power over us. Not interested.

This article is a bit disjointed as it struggles to pull together the strands of virtual reality, blockchain and artificial intelligence that combine to form the metaverse. But it does make the important point that the metaverse will require interconnectivity between systems, something that doesn't exist at the moment, and would require corporations to take very different stance on cooperation and competition than they do today. It concludes with four scenarios, including the greater possibility for fully immersive learning, increasing gamification of learning, and the struggles teachers and parents will face to make sense of this new world.

"The core distinctive feature of Web3 is the decentralization of business models," write the report authors. "To that extent, it marks a third phase of the internet (hence "Web3") and a reversal of the current status quo for users." And they argue that it's important to look to this core value despite the "bumpy (ride), with ongoing challenges ranging from poor user experience to fraud". The article outlines these "building blocks", including blockchains, smart contracts, and digital tokens. I think it would be wiser to focus on the functionality, because the enabling technology will probably change: open-data structures, disintermediated functionality, and decentralized ownership. The other part of the article to focus on is the 'risks and challenges', near the bottom, which as a whole (in my view) explain why the enabling technology will probably change: lack of clarity, poor interfaces, unknown risks, transaction costs, etc. Still: "the value proposition for consumers at the heart of it—one that unifies data, functionality, and value, and in doing so creates opportunities for new and more efficient forms of applications and asset ownership."