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