For a generation people struggled to birth a weapon that could be used to free people from fiat hegemony. Finally out of 2008 Bitcoin was born. While most of the world still lives under fiat hegemony great strides have been made and the work is well underway.
But there’s another banking system holding the world back: the banking model of education.
We propose a new model and platform for education built on blockchain technology which realigns participants around knowledge production & network value and toward building a true tribe of learners.
Education is in a crisis as credentialism and debt drive out learning and value. Too often students find that rather than being given an education they’ve been handed a sack of debt. Too often the credential is just the rubber stamp of a factory, representing the fact that someone payed to play rather than any actual knowledge.
Rather than empowering the next generation to build our common destiny with the tools they need, these systems actively disempower, and detract from learning, and have left our future drowning in debt and degree inflation.
The Banking Model of Education treats students as empty receptacles waiting for deposits of knowledge from teachers— but this is not how learning works. Teachers learn when they teach, they learn from students, they learn with students. Students learn from each other. In ideal form this is a fully intentionalized, cocreative partnership: new knowledge and new value which did not exist before are created by all participants in the learning process. Our current systems misconstrue this process in a way that misaligns teachers and students. A whole economy has grown up around this perversion. The current crisis in education is a product of this misconstruction.
The metric system which dominates education today grew out of an attempt to standardize and commoditize mass education in response to the Industrial Revolution. The Carnegie credit system attempts and fails to capture a range of different values with one measure. It attempts to treat educational experiences as fungible when they are not. Anyone who tries to "transfer" these credits knows they might as well be trying to move the University itself. "Countless dollars and hours are wasted every year as transfer students are forced to retake courses or never given credit for what they have learned due to the flawed currency of the credit hour." Worse yet this system is rife for potential abuse: students pay into a byzantine, gamified system and earn this phony currency in the hope of gaining a credential that will advance their lives. Winning the credit game takes primacy while the goal of actually learning falls by the wayside. We believe the value created in the educational process can be made accurate, liquid, and active.
Alumni Associations largely exist to solicit donations from alumni. They do not give alumni a stake in control of an institution, a stake in the value they've funded by paying tuition or a stake in the value they've helped create through the learning process.
Independent instructors are unable to leverage the network effects which institutions are able to leverage(and mostly under utilize). An open toolset running on an open network will empower independent instructors and allow them to realize learning opportunities that would otherwise be inviable.
The Letter Grade System dominates education today but to employ such a system in the computer age is farcical. Attempts to boil down a student's understanding to a single data point are value destroying and actively misleading. Right now assessments happen in silos with the data accessible to only a few parties least of all students, and that's before these veritable treasure troves find their way to the trash bin. We believe that by bringing educational activity including assessments onto the blockchain we can make these systems more informative & accurate and therefore more valuable and more powerful for all parties.
Tickets are ERC-721 Tokens, they are issued by instructors, they may be purchased by anyone, transferred, sold, and resold to anyone. Ticket holders attend an educational event to get their tickets punched. Punching Instructors "punch" tickets upon completion of the course. This releases alumni network ERC-20 tokens, destroys the ticket, and creates an attendance level credential.
Laurels are the Tribe(alumni network) currency and are issued equally to instructors and students upon completion of an education experience when tickets are punched representing the value that teachers and learners create together in the partnership paradigm in contrast to the banking model education. A token which is held by the entire community aligns incentives around increasing network value. This contrasts with Carnegie credits which are non-fungible, immobile and illiquid. By tokenizing credit students can continue to benefit from the value that they helped create. This turns the student debt paradigm on its head.
We're building a new movement on top of the movement around the goal of renovating education using blockchain technology. We believe this technology allows us to realign all participants around learning, knowledge production & network value and toward a brighter more learningful common destiny by building a true tribe of learners. You can think of it like a tokenized alumni network. Tribe will be organized as a decentralized autonomous community, giving learners a stake in and the power to direct the value they help create rather than saddling them with debt.
Paying it forward will be the first priority of Tribe. The first thing Laurels will be directed toward is a platform for issuing community driven, crowdfunded scholarships.
Students who pass assessments are issued credentials additional credentials. We plan to support a diversity of assessment types including criterion based assessments, comparison based assessments, and ipsative assessments. In the current assessment paradigm assessments of instructors are given second fiddle. But grading teachers is just as important as grading students. We will support first class assessments of instructors at the outset.
Students who have passed assessments get punched again after student-teaching a course with the endorsement of an instructor and co-endorsement two other instructors forming an instructor to instructor chain of transmission and a decentralized wisdom tradition. They may issue their own tickets and work as instructors.
An interface layer designed to provide a set of easy to use tools for all stakeholders including in-classroom apps and assessment apps in addition to the standard D-app suite.