A book analyses the potential of blockchain in education
Blockchain, a data coding system which involves a disruptive change like the Internet, is growing interest among researchers from the field of education. In order to understand how it works and its potential in teaching, the book Blockchain en educación shows the technological elements that set this technology and it offers a review on the existent initiatives and the problems it can solve, as well as the uses it has in the field of education.
Blockchain, a data coding system which involves a disruptive change like the Internet, is growing interest among researchers from the field of education. In order to understand how it works and its potential in teaching, the book Blockchain en educación shows the technological elements that set this technology and it offers a review on the existent initiatives and the problems it can solve, as well as the uses it has in the field of education.
A blockchain is an electronic accounting book (similar to a relational database) that can be openly shared by many users and records all transactions, and these cannot be modified, since each of the parts of this chain is temporarily market and linked to the previous block. Each of the transactions is known as a block: hence, the name of the system, which allows having an accounting book in which many users can participate in a controlled way, since each of these blocks is linked to its specific user. One of its great benefits is safety, since this blockchain can only be updated after the participantsʼ and system consensus, and once the data are recorded, these cannot be removed. This makes the system a trustworthy one and reliable for each transaction.
The book counts on the participation of the most relevant actors of this moment regarding the application of BC in teaching, so that we can have more ideas of what this change will turn into in the educational field. Without leaving the critical view aside, the book analyses, for instance, the challenges and opportunities this blockchain offers to digital certificates; BC as a pedagogical tool; customized learning program management, or the concept blockcerts: fundamental blocks in chains for learning and employment in a global economy.
Antonio Bartolomé and José Manuel Moral Ferrer, editors of the book and researchers at the Faculty of Education of the University of Barcelona, guarantee that “despite not being the central topic of education nor the basic target of educational research, blockchain will be a change in our way of teaching and learning”. “Maybe -they specify- it will not be as important as the implementation of public schooling in the 19th Century, but it will solve problems, it will offer development ways for ideas that are stuck and will allow us understand the future in another way”.
The book, published in the collection Transmedia XXI, can be downloaded for free in http://transmedia21.net.