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What is a blockchain? What are you and your team working on? What benefits do you forsee?

What are Blockchains?

Blockchain is most commonly known as the technology underpinning the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. But in recent years the open source code of the Bitcoin blockchain has been taken and extended by many groups to expand its capabilities. Blockchain technology, which can be thought of as a public distributed ledger, promises to revolutionise the financial world. A World Economic Forum survey in 2015 found that those polled believe that there will be a tipping point for the government use of blockchain by 2023. Governments, large banks, software vendors and companies involved in stock exchanges (especially the Nasdaq stock exchange) are investing heavily in the area. For example, the UK Government recently announced that it is investing £10M into blockchain research and Santander have identified 20-25 internal use cases for the technology and predict a reduction of banks’ infrastructure costs by up to £12.8 billion a year.

The reach of blockchain technology will go beyond the financial sector however, through the use of ‘smart contracts’ which allow business and legal agreements to be stored and executed online. For example, the startup company Tallysticks aims to use blockchain based smart contracts to automate invoicing. In October, 2015 Visa and DocuSign showcased a proof of concept demonstrating how smart contracts could be used to greatly speed up the processes involved in car rental – rental cars can be driven out of the car park without any need to fill in or sign forms. The ability to run smart contracts led Forbes to recently run an article comparing the future impact of blockchains to that of the Web and Internet.

We believe the blockchain technology and smart contracts can also be used in education in many interesting and potentially revolutionary scenarios. On this website you can see some of the ways we see the future of education developing using the blockchain and what we are doing to progress towards our vision.

Related Projects

EU Blockchain Observatory

The European Union Blockchain Observatory and Forum aims to accelerate blockchain innovation and the development of the blockchain ecosystem within the EU, and so help cement Europe’s position as a global leader in this transformative new technology.

Institute of Coding

The Institute of Coding is a collaboration between the UK Government, more than 60 universities, big players in the tech industry, SMEs, industry groups, experts in non-traditional learning and professional bodies. Led by the University of Bath, the world-leading consortium aims to strengthen the UK's position globally in computing and IT, address the UK digital skills gap and create opportunities for more computer science graduates.

QualiChain

The key objective of the project is to bridge the gap between secondary schools and higher education & research by better integrating formal and informal learning scenarios and adapting both the technology and the methodology that students will most likely be facing in universities.

Blockchain Enhanced Projects

Up2U

SlideWiki

Experiments with the Ethereum Blockchain

Ethereum is a platform for decentralised applications, built on top of a blockchain mechanism, which can be used for public data storage and computation. It acts as an immutable public ledger, which provides strong cryptographic guarantees for data integrity. One definitive feature of the Ethereum platform is the ability to execute Turing-complete Smart Contracts. A Smart Contract is a program on the blockchain. We have been investigating the possibilities that the Ethereum blockchain infrastructure affords.

Below you can see some screencasts of some of our recent experiments with Ethereum:

Education

IoT and RDF

Security and Legal

Publications

• Mikroyannidis, A., Domingue, J., Bachler, M. and Quick, K. (2018) Smart Blockchain Badges for Data Science Education IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), San Jose, California, USA, IEEE Education Society Publications
• Mikroyannidis, A., Domingue, J., Bachler, M. and Quick, K. (2018) A Learner-Centred Approach for Lifelong Learning Powered by the Blockchain EdMedia: World Conference on Educational Media and Technology, Amsterdam, Netherlands, pp. 1403-1408, Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE)
• Sharples, M. and Domingue, J. (2018) Blockchain en Educacion: Cadenas Rompiendo Moldes, in eds. Bartolomé, A. and Moral-Ferrer, J. M., Colección Transmedia XXI. Barcelona: Laboratori de Mitjans Interactius
• Jan, Z., Third, A., Ibanez, L., Bachler, M., Simperl, E. and Domingue, J. (2018) ScienceMiles: Digital Currency for Researchers Workshop: 3rd International Workshop on Linked Data and Distributed Ledgers at The Web Conference, Lyon, France, International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee, kmi Member Submission

Media

Open University in £40m campaign to create more computer scientists

The Open University in Milton Keynes is at the heart of a £40 million drive by the Government to help train more computer scientists. It is leading one of the five main themes – on university learners – being addressed at the new Institute of Coding.

Credit Business Weekly

John Domingue – The Future of Education

Professor John Domingue, Director of the OU’s Knowledge Media Institute, discusses developments in technology which he sees impacting on education in the long and short term as part of our ‘future of education’ campaign.

Credit OU News

Links

0xcert

Your ID, degree, artwork or house. 0xcert-ified on the blockchain. Create, own, and validate unique assets on the blockchain. 0xcert is the first open protocol built to support the future of digital assets, powered by the non-fungible tokens.

Building the First Blockchain University

Woolf will be the first fully accredited, borderless, blockchain-powered university. Woolf University will use blockchain technology to enforce regulatory compliance, eliminate or automate bureaucratic university processes, and manage the custodianship of sensitive financial and personal data.

Oxford academics launch world’s first ‘blockchain university’

A group of University of Oxford academics have launched the world’s first “blockchain university”, an Oxbridge-style institution that they describe as “Uber for students, Airbnb for academics”.

EU Blockchain Observatory & Forum

The Blockchain Observatory and Forum will highlight key developments of the blockchain technology, promote European actors and reinforce European engagement with multiple stakeholders involved in blockchain activities.

Blockchain in Education

This report introduces the fundamental principles of the Blockchain focusing on its potential for the education sector. It explains how this technology may both disrupt institutional norms and empower learners. It proposes eight scenarios for the application of the Blockchain in an education context, based on the current state of technology development and deployment.

Talks

Towards the decentralisation of personal data through blockchains and linked data

A talk at the University of Bonn Computer Science Colloquium. It covers how distributed ledgers (blockchains) combined with decentralised linked data technologies such as Solid can support the management of personal data avoiding the issues highlighted in the media around for example, Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.

This event took place on the Wednesday 21st November 2018

Using Blockchains and Semantics to Decentralise Personal Data

The increasing centralization of the Web, he says, has “ended up producing—with no deliberate action of the people who designed the platform—a large-scale emergent phenomenon which is anti-human.”

As highlighted by the Web’s inventor and by recent stories around the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica the over centralisation of, often personal, data generates significant problems for ordinary users. A related problem is that ‘data poor’ citizens can suffer through the denial of credit and more. Recently in the UK over 60 citizens were erroneously deported because of a lack of citizenship data.

At the OU we have been working on a semantic blockchain platform, LinkChain, which supports the decentralisation of personal data by through a combination of blockchain and Linked Data technologies. In the presentation I will give an overview of our platform and show some initial uses within the higher education space.

This event took place on the Tuesday 18th September 2018

Events

Blockchain Expo Global 2019

25th April 2019, Olympia Grand, London

The World’s largest Blockchain Conference and Exhibition focuses on the future of enterprise technology. The event showcases two days of top-level content from leading brands, embracing and developing cutting edge blockchain technologies. Arriving at Olympia Grand London on April 25-26, the Blockchain event is co-located with the IoT Tech Expo, AI & Big Data Expo and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo so you can explore the convergence of these technologies in one place.

Blockchain International Scientific Conference (ISC 2019)

12th March 2019, London

World's First 'Scholars in Blockchain' Conference. ​ International Recognition of your work by Blockchain Scientific Community.

Blockchain Europe Roundtable

30th October 2018, Hotel Thon Bristol Stephanie, Brussels

The Blockchain Europe Roundtable is a meeting and discussion platform for EU policy makers, EU agencies, member states and competent bodies, academics and industry leaders to reach an EU-wide consensus to support effective management of blockchain applications.

Courses

Our department is a research department, so we do not offer any blockchain courses at present. We have collated a list of some of the online courses currently out there. Please contact us if you know of other courses you feel we should be listing.

John Domingue
KMi Director (Project Champion)

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How can we help you?

The OpenBlockchain team have a wealth of knowledge and experience and a testbed architecture to support investigations in the use of blockchain in almost any scenario imaginable. We provide Research Consultancy Services that are tailored to your individual needs and can support anything from improving your understanding of the potential of blockchain, to in depth technical discussion and testing of scenarios at prototype stage. We are keen to build research relationships with commercial and academic partners and to identify sources of research funding that we can leverage to fund longer term relationships. We have already submitted a number of bids to research grant funds in the UK, working with commercial partners in domains including energy management, professional development, teaching and recruitment.

Pricing

Our Research Consultancy starts from as little as £1000 per day and we will always enter into initial conversations without any fee.

Contact Us

If you have an idea you would like to discuss, just use the contact form and tell us a little about it – we will be happy to start a conversation and work out how we can help you.

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