I will begin by telling you I am not a writer. However, I have a lot on my mind that I feel is worth sharing; so here it is. I believe our education system is on the verge of a huge change and blockchain will play a huge role. I have been thinking a lot about the current state of our education system's benefits and faults. I have heard many smart people talk disparagingly about our current education system. Things like, it was created for the 20th century factory worker, it isn't preparing students to be entrepreneurs or creatives, it sucks the creativity out of it's students and perpetuates ideas of conformity and compliance, and my favorite actively damages our students. I don't doubt these comments. I refuse to defend my chosen profession, in fact. My mind instead goes to the question, "what do we do about it?"
I believe the solution is staring us in the face. If we look at how we educate ourselves, an educational institution is rarely where our mind goes. Let me use myself as an example. When my oldest child was born, I bought a digital camera. Soon after, I found that taking photos fulfilled a part of my I didn't realize was hungry. I began my quest to learn more and develop my skills. Since that time, I have taken and edited hundreds of thousands of photos. I began my experimentation with a camera messing around with it. It was digital, so mistakes were free. I would make the adjustments I could make and learned what the settings did. I bought books, went to seminars, and subscribed to a photographer and he sent me DVD's in the mail. Learning was slow going. Then youtube happened and drastically sped up the process. So, here I am. I have professional level knowledge of photography, but I have no credentials. I have nothing that shows the amount of time and effort I have put in to developing my skills and creativity.
I think you can see where I'm going with this. Imagine we could keep track of all of this using blockchain technology. In a way, this would be the beginning of decentralizing learning. Whether or not that should happen, we can talk about later. I just want to let that settle for a bit. Imagine for a while the possibilities. Students could have more choices, teachers could reach more students, and far more people could be teachers. We already see this happening on youtube. There are plenty of people putting classes on youtube that hold no degree with an institution, but many have put in the 10,000 quality hours to become masters. They are followed because people believe they know what they are doing. So, who wants to help me build this? Does it already exist? If you think it does, leave the information in the comments section.