IBM launch blockchain credentials to close skills gap

A consortium of academic and professional organisations have launched a solution for learning credentials running on the IBM Blockchain Platform.

Blockchain - Where's the Evidence of Value Add

MERL Tech are carrying a guest post by John Burg (Policy, Planning and Learning Fellow at USAID), Christine Murphy (Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Capacity-Building Specialist at Social Solutions International) and Jean Paul Pétraud (Monitoring and Evaluation Fellow at USAID), which summarises their research based around the question of blockchain technology having important benefits for data collection, management, and use.

To cut a short story even shorter, the simple answer to their question is - of the 43 use-cases studied, "we found no documentation or evidence of the results blockchain was purported to have achieved in these claims."

OK, it's only 43 projects, and they may have got unlucky in the ones they researched, but it does sort of suggest that blockchain companies are good on their sales pitches, but not so hot on their delivery.

Read the article from MERL Tech here.

Video: Ethereum 2.0

Vitalik Buterin’s keynote at Devcon 4 in Prague on October 31, 2018.

Talks about moving from Ethereum 1.0 to Ethereum 2.0, including what is Ethereum 2.0, why do we need it and how we got here.

Blockchain Technology Overview

A 68 page pdf from Dylan Yaga, Peter Mell, Nik Roby and Karen Scarfone from the National Institute of Standards and Technology at US Department of Commerce which aims to provide high-level overview of blockchain technology, so readers can understand how the technology works giving us some idea of the methods behind the "magic".

Blockchain in Learning & Career Development

Slide presentation from Hristian Daskalov (Co-Founder of OS.UNIVERSITY) made at Ada. National College for Digital Skills outlining aspects of the development of a distributed blockchain application (dApp) at OS.UNIVERSITY.

The presentation shows that they're looking at using blockchain to manage things such as certificate verification and resource distribution.

Blockchain for Education and Professional Development from Open Source University

Four Generations of DLT

Video from Hedera Hashgraph which gives a quick outline of how DLTs are evolving to give us four differing, but linked, generations.

4 Ways Blockchain Can Transform Education

Article from Paul Ratner on BigThink.com asking if blockchain can transform education like it has the financial sector.

The piece is based on the research paper from European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) that looked at case studies from across European Universities which allowed them to identify how blockchain might impact education.