Humanity’s progression is built upon the level of people’s education. It is not too bold to state that education is the invisible fabric that moves humanity forward. However, the base that moves the world ahead has been stagnant for decades. To be frank, it’s unforgivable how innovation in education has been a laggard. Sure, there have been micro-changes but there has not been a paradigm disruption. If all the other macro fields in the world such as technology, medicine, finance, and other domains are evolving, why is education getting left behind? It is reasonable to believe that education has been stifled due to macro variables such as politics, social mobility, academia, capitalism, complexity, and bureaucratic systems.
This writing will be distilling the concept of education and how we can create protocols on the blockchain that will disrupt education. This will be possible through Edchain. A proof of education being on the blockchain. However, before we talk about the Edchain, we need to begin with the first principles and primitives of education. In this writing, we will linearly progress from the most minor units of information to the current structure. Education is a marvelous phenomenon and we must treat it as such. After all, it is the magic that evolves the mind.
The Primitive Unit of Education and Its Ontological Structure
Information is the origin stimuli of any form of understanding; the primitive unit of education.
Humans build their judgment based on the information they process throughout their life. In a semantical sense, information is ”a unit of processed stimuli.” Whatever stimuli have been processed through our senses leads to the neurochemical activity that yields thinking. Humans make sense of information to build ontological mechanisms, such as language, domains of knowledge, technology, and everything in between.
Throughout the years, the availability of information has compounded. If we look back a couple of centuries ago during the monarch eras, the elite were the only ones to be exposed to learning intended information. For this reason, the elite were the only ones that were literate, due to them having teachers to advance their education. Innovations like the codex, the printing press, radio, television, computer, and the Internet evolved the vehicle information traveled on. Information started spreading at an unprecedented rate and we now have an abundance of it. This is due to the fact that Humans are great at producing information.
The magical aspect of this is that information is the primitive unit we use to create our understanding of everything. To see how this works, let’s step back in time. Let’s imagine how it was before humans invented language. In our primitive state, Homo-sapiens used noise to convey and communicate information one to another. This information exchange process evolved from oral sounds to developing an alphabet for written language. Progressing from here we created books, computer code, data, algorithms, and so on.
Information Systems
When humans associate conceptual intention with information we create understandings. Furthermore, when we understand information we build the intention of meaning. For example, you reading this right now, you are simply seeing symbols that you understand are characters of the English language. You process the stimuli on the screen and make sense of it. We further advance our levels of understanding by packing our understanding into information systems. In essence, we are building relations with all units of information and associating meaning to them. Everything humans know is assembled into information systems. From quantum mechanics to biblical scriptures, all fall under information systems. **
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Information systems are created by giving stimuli linear understanding. Going back to our example of the English language, when you learned how to read, you are introduced to the characters of the alphabet, syllables, words, and sentences. Each of these components are information systems. Syllables create an information system of phonetics, the alphabet is a semantic information system of symbols, and words create the semantic information system for the logic of the alphabet. In some sense, creating an information system is the generational progress of information. Perhaps this process is what has made human beings be such an omniscient species on Earth. In contrast, there is no other living organism that scales and navigates information systems to the levels that humans do.
Moreover, in life, we experience multiple information systems simultaneously. Think of information systems as conceptual platforms that you process. In other words, a form of a matrix. Whenever you deal with an activity you process the context of information and do real-time processing of your information systems. The outcome of the activity is based on your level of understanding of each information system. Education comes into the picture now because it is what allows us to understand these information systems and gives us the judgment to work with them.
Edchain
Education is the purposeful intention of processing information to develop and progress understanding.
Education is a phenomenon that has bewildered humans since ancient times. From philosophers discussing ideas, to math being discovered, and humans creating magnificent advancements in all avenues of our history. Humans have been evolving information systems and we are at the forefront of the cutting edge. Education is entering a new paradigm as it can be engineered.
What it means to be “educated” can be defined by three axioms: Knowledge, skill, and sentiment. These are the ubiquitous components that cover the entire spectrum of what it means to be educated. We define knowledge as conceptually understanding a domain. Think of how someone can understand the physics of how to ride a bike. The next axiom is skill and this entails the execution of knowledge that leads to an outcome. In this case, think of someone riding the bike: They balance themselves, pedal their feet in a circuit, and move the handlebars to navigate the bike.
Lastly, talking about sentiment would be how people perceive the signal of someone’s knowledge and skill. In the case of our bike rider, people can focus on aspects such as: what type of bike the person is riding, the clothes the person is wearing, what tricks the bike rider does, awards the rider has received, etc. Sentiment is correlated to the external components of education, not necessarily about the individual’s knowledge and skill.
By defining knowledge, skill, and sentiment we can create systems of rules that build data about educational activity. At Lirn.io we are calling this the Proof of Education Protocol.
Before we dive further into the Proof of Education Protocol we need to discuss what are blockchains. In the simplest terms, a public blockchain is a distributed ledger that gets data added in a linear manner and people can inspect it to verify that the data added is legitimate. This level of coordination and transparency is what allowed for digital money to be validated on the internet.**
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When Satoshi Nakamoto introduced the whitepaper on how Bitcoin would work, he solved a problem known as the double spending problem. In principle, the issue was that there was no way to truly track the ownership of currency but through a blockchain, people can now see how money online was circulating and derive truth from it. This is also called being on-chain. The double-spend problem wasn’t the only thing blockchain solved but it bundled several domains such as cryptography, economics, accounting, system theory, technology, and more to provide a new shared source of truth.
In 2014, Vitalik Buterin introduced an idea that allowed blockchain to enter a new level. He proposed the idea to have applications be built on top of a blockchain. This would be possible by using smart contracts, which is when code can add data autonomously onto the blockchain. A good example of how a smart contract works, is to compare it to a vending machine. The process to purchase and receive your item from a vending machine is autonomous. First, you insert money, second select an item lead, and lastly receive the item from the vending machine. With smart contracts, people could create applications that give items to people. Those items are represented by data on the blockchain.
Ethereum opened a new paradigm for data entry. With this innovation, new systems dependent on social consensus could be created. As we are seeing now, blockchains are carrying information for revolutionary systems such as decentralized finance, identity, science, information, and others. These new systems are built upon the benefits of data being on the blockchain and we are just seeing the reformat of these systems. The next system that is going to be advanced by blockchain is going to be education. This will be called the Edchain; when educational activity is on-chain.**
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At Lirn, we have created specialized smart contracts that add a layer of integrity to the data we issue. All data that Lirn issues goes through our system of rules to solidify a meaning for having proof of knowledge and skill. On top of that, the data we issue can not be transferred from account to account. This prevents people from purchasing legitimately issued data. In the industry, these tokens are called soulbound tokens or NTTs. For educational-based soulbound tokens or NTTs, we are coining them Lirts.
Let me break down our protocol further. Since we define knowledge as conceptually understanding a domain, we can create processes to test to do so. A simple version is to do a multiple choice for a themed assessment. This is a binary outcome due to the user getting answers being correct or incorrect. If the person gets enough of the questions correct, it can be a form of verifying the person conceptually understood the questions of the assessment. A more advanced assessment is to have people articulate their answers in a timed manner and have a subject matter expert vet if the answers have enough affinity for understanding. If someone passes the educational assessment they receive the Lirt for proof of knowledge.
For proof of skill, the vetting would be based on empiricism and the execution of knowledge to create something. Proof of skill will be more complicated due to the grading mechanism not being able to an objective process. Grading someone’s creation deals with dynamic variables that can not be accounted for to issue automation. For example, if someone created an algorithm with one-hundred-fifty lines of Python code vs someone who created the same algorithm with two-hundred lines of Java code, which is better graded? They both do the same objective but got there differently. For the time being, there is too much complexity to make this a binary experience so our vetting mechanism is going to have to be interpreted by oracle.
Our aim over time for this protocol is to decentralize the process of vetting education while incentivizing participants to act in the most integral manner.
Education is entering a new paradigm because educational activity can have a shared source of truth for people to proof of knowledge and skill. The data that is sent to the blockchain now carries a specific context that can allow people to rationalize sentiment. People can now see the transparency of the educational activity people are doing. For example, say someone gets Lirts (data for proof of knowledge/skill) for educational activity people can trust the process was done in a legitimate manner. This leaves a lot of room for innovation in the opportunities for education. A clear case of this would be if employers demand people to have specific Lirts to even apply for their open roles.
Education is the invisible fabric that progresses humanity forward and we are at a point in history to disrupt it. People around the world will now be able to partake in a more open educational system that will be more meritocratic and objective. Location will no longer be an issue, for if the learner wants to educate themselves they will have a system that validates them. The reigns of esoteric elitism and privilege that academia has wrangled are coming to an end. Edchain is here.