As I learn more about the potential DLT/blockchain has to drive innovations in higher education, I have become increasingly excited by the idea of designing my innovative education design project with this technology in mind. For it makes perfect sense to me that a blockchain-based professional development platform would support the kind of personalized learning ecosystem I am hoping to develop; one that relies on project-based learning and provides learners with access to a collaborative network of innovative technologies, methods and pedagogies that they can then use to create their own educational innovations, knowing that their content is being protected and that both student and instructor efforts are being incentivized and rewarded as part of the learning process.
I also like that a DLT/blockchain platform is characterized by versatility, self-governance, and broad-scale connectivity; all of which goes a long way towards addressing some of my earlier concerns about building a professional development platform that has the potential to scale to accommodate the needs, interests, cultural understandings and learning styles of every learner or learning community; while still being structured enough to support a creative pedagogical approach that is somewhat replicable as an online professional development prototype.
As I researched organizations I felt could be a benefit to the development of an Innovative Education Design Project like mine I came across a new IDEO initiative called IDEO CoLab Ventures. IDEO CoLab Ventures is described as an investment in “early-stage distributed web startups” which IDEO works with to co-create and launch new products and protocols (Lee, 2019). Thus, by tying aspiring entrepreneurs into “a collaborative network focused on accelerating the research and development of emerging technologies,” IDEO helps bring users and their needs “to the center of the problem-solving and venture-building process – with the ultimate goal of making distributed web technologies such as crypto-assets and blockchain networks more usable, adopted, and valuable to people and the world” (2019).
The posted video provides some more insight into how IDEO’s CoLab program works:
Lee, I. (2019, February 5). Introducing IDEO CoLab’s Distributed Web Investing Program. Medium. https://medium.com/ideo-colab/introducing-ideo-colabs-distributed-web-investing-program-9b044344fc8f
Having been a technology teacher for 15 years, where much of the work my students did was project-based, I wish we would have had a platform where they could save their projects and continue to build on the knowledge as they moved on in their education journeys. I really loved in the video, that they mentioned "thinking of how to innovate the way that we innovate" - they are seeing the big picture!