We have completed the second year, or Phase 2, of our Lern2ern initiative. Phase 1 was completed last year with my Grade 6 class in response to a chaotic return from COVID restrictions to face-to-face learning. It worked well and this school year some Grade 7s volunteered to take on the project again, so here is a brief summary. 

I started an after-school club that met on Mondays and we decided to run the second phase with two Grade 8 classes, two Grade 7s and my 7/8 split as our target group. Out of 135 students, 18 from two classes fully completed the online ledger, and earned lunches from Shereen’s Bakery delivered by Shereen and daughter Zana on June 13. As usual, lunch was delicious!

We have learned a few things this time around:

1. We need to market and get more students aware of the initiative.
2. We have begun the decentralisation of the project (via separate classroom ledgers). 
3. If we run it again next year we will purchase approx CAD $750* worth of crypto to NFT tokens earned – Shereen’s is down to accepting these tokens, but we will need to figure out how to do this on a blockchain.

Context

The Lern2ern initiative is a response to the violence in our schools. Lern2ern is not a social credit program. Students have to not only perform the competencies that will give them points, but they have to look after their analog ledger, and then they have to import their scores in the digital classroom ledger.  

Building Community Around Utility

Two classes participated asynchronously over two months and in different sections of our large school building. Although five classes were invited, we could have advertised and marketed the program better to have had more participants. As it stands, the 18 students from two separate classes in school were more than enough to establish proof of concept – in other words, we know this program can scale with the right support. 

The utility of our Lern2ern comes from knowing that the competencies necessary for learning to happen in the classroom are practised intentionally. This was established in Phase 1. We know the competencies that are practised and we know their values are explicitly laid out in the scoring card. By giving the kids the opportunity to meta-cognize a little bit on their competency achievement by inputting their own scores, they can learn the habits that are necessary for learning to occur in the classroom, and get rewarded.

The scoring card is what adds utility to the tokens and to the potential NFTs (Phase 3). The community invests in knowing that the conditions for learning are present. The scoring card lends itself to smart contracts because the point denominations are small. It’s translatable to other classes. It’s proof of concept.

Progress to Phase 3

Phase 1 proved that a group of young people can come back from a pandemic and provide a solution to a chaotic situation. In Phase 1 we came up with the scoring card, the “analog blockchain” was put up on the whiteboard,  and we went together as a group to Shereen’s Bakery in June 2022 for lunch with the kids who were finally seen after almost two years of lockdowns.

Phase 2, which we just completed, has proven that we can move the analog ledger to digital spreadsheets and share them with other classes in the school. We have shown that at least 18 students from two separate classes at different parts in the same building could participate, thanks again to student leadership, and that we could accomplish the Lern2ern under a similar timeline as Phase 1. 

Phase 3 is our most ambitious phase yet and could possibly happen next school year. We could use our remaining funds to purchase cryptocurrency in order to NFT the tokens, distribute them electronically to the students who complete 10,000 points in the online ledger, and determine a way for the students to receive the NFT through their own digital wallets, with the supervision of their parents and school community. We could also determine how Shereen’s will receive those tokens digitally as payment, and make it easy for other local businesses to participate. 

We could start a DAO on Discord (very similar to the way Ed3DAO is run!).  We need student volunteers to run it with adult supervision in order to scale to local schools, including local high schools. We could use an AI to monitor ledger inputs and supervise the Discord channel. 

Web2 is a Sinking Ship

I quit Twitter, Facebook and Instagram a few months ago, and I will never go back. They are a societal blight and we need to migrate our youth off these platforms on to Web3, where their time, attention and work will be recompensed, and where with our guidance they can develop their reputations and portfolios to participate more fully as creative and critical global citizens.

Students can and should own the intellectual property that they create in school, and ownership of property is important because it refocuses attention from the teacher to the class, and from the school district towards the community as a support network with consideration in their child’s intellectual work.

The  scoring card allowed two separate classes in two different parts of a very large building to complete the online ledgers in a way that was decentralised because the students did it on their own time with only the instructions given by their fellow classmates as a guide. Of course there were some disagreements but this is normal  and did not largely interfere in the process.

A decentralised autonomous organisation, or DAO, as a model for an anti- oppressive  classroom, moves the locus of power away from the teacher to the students and to the community. While strictly not a decentralised autonomous organisation, with Phase 2 of our Lern2ern we have managed to establish a proof of concept that demonstrates that particular elements of the classroom can be decentralised, thus giving more power to the students and community.

Likely the most important way to decentralise and to establish an anti-oppressive classroom is to view students as creators and not workers. When youth begin to practise processes that help them to become creative and critical producers of content that they own in Web3, and when they begin to learn how to advocate for themselves and how to practise the competencies for their own sake as artists and as creative human beings, classrooms become not only anti-oppressive, but innovative and artistic incubators that are calm and joyful.

In this respect arts education isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity. Youth must learn to become creative and critical consumers and producers, and Web3 not only incentivizes work but gives youth a real stake in the work that they create in and out of school. We must migrate students away from Web2 – it’s a sinking ship –  and help them build a world that’s more prosperous and sustainable.

Conclusion

Economically I think the pandemic has hit many harder than we really want to acknowledge. Many of our youth are hopeless and acting out this hopelessness violently. I don’t know if Web3 has all the answers for these youngsters,  but what it does offer is the potential for young people and their families to take back some control as creative and critical global citizens. Thus, Web3 is potentially r[e]volutionary, enlightening, and worth fighting for. 

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*I would like to again thank my school community for their bravery, including the administration and office staff at John McCrae Public School, the owners of Shereen’s Bakery, and Ian Jacskon at Nadurra Wood Corporation for their generous funding. I want to thank the Ed3DAO community. Most importantly I want to thank my students and their families for their support. 

Rich Baxter, Grade 7 Teacher, John McCrae Public School, June 2023.

tags

#web3 #web3educators #skoolverse #artseducation #ed3 #metaverse #edtech #equity #ed3dao #dao #crypto #innovation #publicschool #publiceducation #communitybuilding #tokens #blockchain #ed3 #lern2ern #NFT #nonfungibleteacher

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*Addendum – Source: ChatGPT

Some potential drawbacks of Web3 for middle and high school students to consider:

1. Complexity  
2. Lack of Regulations 
3. Security Risks 
4. Financial Implications 
5. Ethical Concerns  
6. Access and Infrastructure  
7. Distractions and Time Management 

Web3 technology offers several advantages for middle and high school students:

1. Decentralised Learning
2. Digital Ownership and Authenticity
3. Collaboration and Peer-to-Peer Learning 
4. Incentivized Learning:
5. Transparent and Trustworthy Systems 
6. Innovative Learning Experiences
7. Emerging Career Opportunities
8. Financial Literacy

Innovation in Education wins Bronze in the USA & Canada Regional Category at the Reimagine Education Awards and Conference for our program The Bootstrapping Checklist.

Wharton-QS Reimagine Education Awards 2021

Announced: 2021’s educational ‘Oscar’ winners

London 10th December: 2021’s most exciting, effective new approaches to teaching and learning have been announced by QS Quacquarelli Symonds and The Wharton School, after a gruelling competition comprising eight months, 1350 applicants, and five rounds of close expert scrutiny: the Reimagine Education Awards.

Reimagine Education 2021 shed light on the excellence of innovative solutions enhancing learning outcomes and employability for a future billion learners. In addition to the three overall awards, it rewarded innovation in sixteen main award categories (including AI, VR/AR, e-learning, educational apps and more), six disciplines (arts & humanities, business education, engineering & IT, life sciences, natural sciences and social sciences) and regional awards. Winners hail from 27 countries.

The Reimagine Education Awards are open to edtech companies, universities, schools, and educational non-profits worldwide. Contested by applicants from eighty-four nations, they seek to offer global higher education a platform through which outstanding pedagogical innovation can be identified and rewarded. 

Nunzio Quacquarelli, CEO, QS and co-founder of Reimagine Education, said: “At the end of the second disruptive year for global higher education, it has been a pleasure and a privilege to offer a platform to the projects, pedagogies, and solutions that represent the future of educational provision. With over 300 independent judges participating in the evaluation process, plus a distinguished 20 persons Grand Jury, our winners have received the unequivocal backing of expert educationalists across the world. They should take exceptional pride in their achievement.” 

Thank you to the Reimagine Steering Committee and QS Quacquarelli Symonds, my family and friends, and my dedicated #bootstrappers – #NeverStopInnovating

Rich Baxter, BEd, LLM, BFA

Principal, Innovation in Education

The full list of winners can be found here: https://content.qs.com/re21/Reimagine_Education_Winner_List_20211215.pdf

The nature and purpose of global education is changing dramatically and purposeful online communities that offer proper attribution for work completed are revolutionizing the way people exchange ideas, communicate, and learn. 

Advances in blockchain technology offer an alternative economy based in attribution – the more a student participates in an online learning community and the more their attribution can be secured and assured via encryption and blockchain technology, the more their reputation will increase in the community, the more leverage they will have within that community and also outside of our broader capitalist economy, and thus the more incentive they will have to participate. 

The decentralisation of education and learning is happening by mobilizing learning where students participate, to help solve some of the world’s deepest problems and facilitate commerce and income generation, with mentoring from teachers, professionals, academia and community members.

In its second phase after successful implementation in classroom settings, both in person and fully online, TBC 2.0 is scaling as an open student project commons, where students and mentors will have access to the commons to share projects, support their online portfolios and digital credentials, and gain actionable feedback in a peer-to-peer learning environment with collaboration and feedback as central deliverables. 

In the 2020-21 school year, grade 7 online student participants received digital badges from HighTechU and mentoring from the African Coding Network. The collaboration within our virtual classroom mirrors at the micro-level the way the African Coding Network collaborates at the macro-level (using Github, Google Suite, Discord, and storytelling), thus the techniques, technology and competencies are globally scalable and increasingly accessible.

Physical borders have been transcended. Bricks-and-mortar schools might still need to exist, but they are now parts of emerging local and global learning ecosystems. Online peer-to-peer learning communities are where participants are able to develop their reputations, their skill sets and their competencies, receive actionable feedback for continuous improvement, which inevitably will lead to employability and a global culture of information abundance which will rival and hopefully compliment our aging global capitalist economies.

The key to active student participation is attribution, and attribution is ensured and incentivized in our online learningverse using the concepts of blockchain – in GitHub, student participants’ work is forever attributed to those who do the work, and this increases their reputation and thus learning. In our commons, students borrow from past students’ works, but their brand cards ensure attribution.

TBC 2.0 is a movement and a pedagogy that is anti-oppressive in design, with equity at its centre, that encourages empathy, story telling, data collection and sharing and collaboration between youth with or without the support of a teacher. From a pedagogical standpoint, it’s a paradigm shift of power to the student. So, with or without teachers, TBC 2.0 is a global online learning network – not a competition. It is a place for youth to collaborate and get feedback from their global peer community – to connect and improve their portfolios and gain credentials and learn. 

TBC 2.0 is a proven social-entrepreneurship education program for students grade 6-12 serving the needs of some of our most vulnerable students. The promotion of online peer-to-peer learning gives students access to the collaboration and feedback that they need to grow portfolios, share, learn, and educate themselves. TBC 2.0 is located on GitHub and is meant to scale for students, by students – they write the code and administer the site with mentoring, to gain actionable feedback in a peer-to-peer learning environment with collaboration and feedback as central deliverables. 

The imminent disruption of educational bureaucracies toward decentralized peer-to-peer online learning networks where attribution of student work will be ensured by blockchain, thus compelling competent participation of community members thereby attracting mentoring, investment, HigherEd and employers, in order to address present local/global systemic inequities and propel a global information [r]evolution, has already begun. TBC 2.0 is a step toward this [r]evolution as it puts the power to the students in a decentralized global learning network, unified by a five step workflow.

Special thank you to Andrew MacLean and Warwick Vlantis for your support! (I learned the term “Culture of Abundance” from Warwick).

Rich Baxter

https://bootstrappingchecklist.org/

Rich Baxter is founder, educator and advocate for social innovation, the arts, and entrepreneurial education. The Bootstrapping Checklist was Shortlisted in the Teaching Delivery Category and Showcased in December 2016 and again Shortlisted in the K12 in December 2020 at the Reimagine Education Awards.  We won Bronze for the 2021 USA & Canada Regional Awards.

I want to thank Robyn D. Shulman for the opportunity to contribute to the ongoing discussion about technology in education in a recent article in Forbes online:

Voices From The Field: Educators Share What Edtech Entrepreneurs Should Know

From Robyn:

“In this article, which will be a short series, teachers, superintendents and support staff from public schools around the country share their insights based on the following questions:

• Why some teachers are afraid of technology
• Best advice for entrepreneurs who want to go into education technology
• What catches a teacher’s eye for a prospective product”

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I’ve included my response here because as I go back into the classroom in a couple of weeks, I want to remain optimistic about the future of public education in Ontario, in Canada, and in the US.

I feel that ‘education’ is becoming more and more exclusive, and I don’t know that it has to be that way.  The facts remain that public schools are getting less funding, and that teaching as a profession is becoming less and less attractive to newcomers.

If public education is to thrive, two fundamental shifts need to happen;

1. Teachers need to be supported.
2. Schools need to become innovation hubs (you can read more about this idea in this website).

Here is my contribution to the article  –  I will try to expand on these ideas in the coming months, your comments are always appreciated.  Thank you, R

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On Technology Resistance: Rich Baxter, 7th-grade educator says, “To use technology effectively, schools need to be places of innovation, and they are not designed to be so. So how can we expect teachers and students to use technology in productive ways? Our prime minister says Ontario classrooms are an environment that is generally hostile to teachers, so why would a teacher want to exacerbate that situation by innovating with technology?”

Best Advice For Entrepreneurs: Entrepreneurs who want to have an impact on student learning in a financially and socially meaningful way should spend resources marketing solutions directly to learners or their parents. We are facing a 69 million global teacher shortage by 2030.

The education space is not where the future is headed, and if we continue to use the term edtech, I think that’s where we are getting stuck.

Switch the term to learntech and market directly to the consumer – especially youth who are not and will not be served by our crisis-ridden education systems (with a few global exceptions) – and now an entirely new market of learners opens up. Global education and global learning to me are not the same things.

Global education is systemic, but global learning is personal, meaningful, and fulfilling, and the hope for our future survival and prosperity. But the [r]evolution must come from within us, with the humbling realization and the responsible acceptance that half the world’s population is carrying with them in their pockets in the form of mobile devices, the solution to all our global crises, and the other half is not.

I have been teaching for 25 years and have been innovating in my classroom for most of that time. My classroom went paperless around 2012 and technology hasn’t changed all that much since then. I espouse a hybrid approach that includes tasks that have both an analog side to their digital side – and this comes back to arts education, which is by nature technical.

Technology helps when students are encouraged to produce the media they also tend to consume. For example, they learn about dance by creating dance. They learn how to draw by drawing. They learn how to write by writing. They learn about video production by producing videos. Technology has to support and help implement those acts of creation, and I think a lot of the technology that was created years ago still isn’t being used properly now.

Catching An Educator’s Eye: I am interested in edtech products that help learners realize their creative visions mainly through arts or entrepreneurship practice, which by nature are technical endeavors, but the technology doesn’t always equate to digital, and there should always be hybrid solutions available to learners. So as entrepreneurs do we invest money and time creating new technology or do we invest by creating awareness of how to use the technology that already exists? I advocate for creating awareness and giving hope so that people know that they can learn – and I don’t think you need education systems to achieve this goal.

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Rich Baxter is a founder, educator, and advocate for social innovation, the arts, and entrepreneurial education. His program The Bootstrapping Checklist was Shortlisted in the Teaching Delivery Category and Showcased on December 5, 2016 and December 4, 2017 in Philadelphia at the Reimagine Education Awards and again in 2020 and exists in the Creative Commons as an open innovation project. Rich is a judge in the K-12 category for Reimagine.

Continue reading Educators Share What Edtech Entrepreneurs Should Know →

If you are a teacher and you are creating a really cool program in your classroom you should scale it globally. But if you think you should also make money from scaling your awesome program, it’s probably not the best way to go about it.

To innovate in a school setting, going the open source or open innovation route, however you define it, is probably your best choice.  Likely, a combination of proprietary and non-proprietary intellectual property scenarios might be more favourable.  Below is a list of things that in my experience are important to consider – please feel free to comment.*

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As a public school teacher going the proprietary route in terms of IP would lead to many conflicts of interest –  a non-proprietary route (or at least a mix) is much easier.

You have to ‘give it away’. Some teachers or students might have problems about giving their work away. Of course, you always need a ‘bread and butter’ gig that pays the bills. But on top of that, participation in a coding or entrepreneurial community (or similar), to gain experience, knowledge, and reputation is increasingly possible. Consider ‘giving your work away’ in exchange for these valuable assets.

Going the open innovation/open source route is a good model for students in schools as a basis for project based learning. Assuming they have access to internet, cloud computing, and [mobile] devices, students can innovate using increasingly available webtools. The ‘soft skills’ learned by working in teams to solve problems are transferable and sought after by both the private and public employment sectors.   

Service learning, project based learning, entrepreneurship education, and STEAM are all well served when students understand their level of IP commitment, especially because cloud computing now allows for student projects to last over many years. A lot of work can go into a three or four year project, and a proprietary IP stance won’t likely stimulate innovation or cooperation.

If it’s innovated at school, student (and teacher) work in the form of cloud stored portfolios should be saved and shared in a school improvement repository/library/bank –   a sort of ‘creative commons’ for the local community – viewable by parents, staff, students, district supervisors and trustees. This data can also be used to attract mentoring or outside partnerships and/or investment, in effect transforming the school into an innovation hub with classroom as incubator and school as accelerator.

However you define open source (I’m studying Github Open Source Guides), the tools available for working this way are becoming more and more available. Google, AWS, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin are all free or relatively cheap tools for scaling your awesome program. Twitter is extremely powerful, and although ‘following’ and ‘liking’ is not supposed to imply reciprocity, if used well it can inspire collaboration.

Choosing the more non-proprietary route, teachers can be more assertive (i.e. pushy) at acquiring resources for their students.  Resources can come in the form of funding, mentoring, and equipment, to promotion on social media, and so on.

School district legal departments can more easily facilitate this type of open innovation by providing teachers and students with some basic IP guidelines. Also, teachers and students need to do their homework and learn more about IP law.

We can use and grow our present internet age economy of knowledge abundance. It is not constructive to stray too far to any one side of the non-proprietary or proprietary debate – we all need to mix it up according to our circumstances. Education can share the hope and skills that our internet age brings, and open source and open innovation projects can make local and global solutions happen.

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*This article is not a substitute for professional legal advice. This article does not create an attorney-client relationship, nor is it a solicitation to offer legal advice. Thanks!

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Rich Baxter is a founder, educator, not a lawyer, and advocate for social innovation, the arts, and entrepreneurial education. The Bootstrapping Checklist was Shortlisted in the Teaching Delivery Category and Showcased on December 5, 2016 and December 4, 2017 in Philadelphia at the Reimagine Education Awards and exists in the Creative Commons as an open innovation project.

When teachers or groups of students download the slide deck and then try the 5-step process, I wish them to post videos about their experiences on our YouTube or Twitter – this is how we are building community.

#opensource #openinnovation #BootstrappingChecklist #bootstrappers #ReimagineEdu #socialinnovation #entrepreneur #education #artseducation #edtech #edchat #edtechchat #local2global #iterate2innovate #neverstopinnovating

Entrepreneurial skills such as resilience, focus, commitment, developing relationships, self-reflection, and a positive attitude are not intuitive skills. They take practice and dedication and it becomes a momentous event for a young student to begin to understand that just because they may not already have many of these skills, it doesn’t mean that they will never be able to develop them. This revelation for many kids lifts a weight for those that begin to grasp that skills are developed through dedication and practice, and that because these can be learned and taught, they become very much accessible to all students.

We are generally predisposed as humans to shy away from conflict – our first reaction is almost always the wrong one – and so teaching kids to embrace change and challenge as opportunities is critical at an early age if they are to grow into adults who will be able to excel in our uncertain future workforce. So entrepreneurial and change management skills are important skills to teach in our classrooms.

One of the things I notice through the Bootstrapping Checklist is how students learn to relate to each other in a more respectful and professional way – they start to look at school as an opportunity to practice skills to help them relate to each other in a professional manner in order to try to realize their project visions.

Students learn to separate their behaviour from their personal identities, meaning that if they behave badly out of frustration or anxiety during a tough team meeting, it doesn’t mean that ‘that’s who they are’. It means they behaved badly in a stressful situation and entrepreneurial education of this type teaches kids to recognize and respond to challenge, rather than simply and continually reacting to stress.

Thus students begin to objectively see how their language and the way they and their peers speak to each other can positively or negatively impact the group’s success. They also learn that problem solving is hard, that getting frustrated is normal, and that there are specific skills and strategies that can be applied to mitigate the difficulties of complex problem solving.

I claim that the Bootstrapping Checklist can produce ‘cohorts of students who are more than HigherEd ready’ – and what this really means is that students learn to understand what agility looks like in a constantly changing and unpredictable global and local employment market. A fundamental quality of the Bootstrapping Checklist is what I call guided iterative inquiry – it is very much process oriented design thinking, heavily influenced with the Japanese concept of Kaizen, or continuous improvement.

Teachers are fortunate in Ontario because we have a lot of freedom to plan curriculum delivery in our classrooms, and Ontario is a global education leader in inquiry and project- based learning, but we need to go further and normalize ‘cultures of innovation’ in our schools – and so teachers must take up the mantels of ‘teacherpreneurs’ and model this mindset for the students daily.

I go as far to suggesting that schools, especially middle and high schools, should be turned into ‘innovation hubs’, where the classroom is project incubator and the school/district is accelerator – cloud computing and iterative design thinking can practically support student projects over years – with the potential of student projects actually deploying in communities.

This is a paradigm shift of the purpose of our education system – to produce students who are not only skilled at change management, but who critically have not lost their desire to be imaginative, empathetic and creative people who are excited at the opportunities that constant change and uncertainty produce. We need to teach our kids never to lose their brilliance, and schools need to support this creative drive from the beginning to middle school, to high school, and beyond.

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Rich Baxter is an educator and advocate for social innovation, the arts, and entrepreneurial education in our public schools. He is honoured to be a Judge in the K-12 Category for the 2017 and 2018 QS Stars Reimagine Education Awards.

#opensource #openinnovation #TheBootstrappingChecklist #ReimagineEdu #socialinnovation #entrepreneur #artseducation #edtech #local2global #edchat #edtechchat