 Hello, hello, hello, has the Bobby said to the man with the three heads? Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello? Has he said to the man with the five heads? So I hope everyone had a nice lunch and it's time now for my presentation. And I'm gonna mess around here first, okay, that works. I'll be talking now about blockchain and artificial intelligence for micro credentials. And my name is Rory McGrale, I'm UNESCO ICD Chair in Open Educational Resources and I'm from Athabasca University. I'll start off though by this statement about our relations with indigenous people, particularly in Canada, where many of the views that we hold today that come from the Enlightenment in Europe actually came from the indigenous people of North America, particularly from Canada, the Canadian people who came from North America. North America, particularly from Canada, the Canadian context. They brought us concepts, the Europeans concepts that did not exist in Europe at that time in the 16th, 17th, 18th century. Concepts such as liberty, personal liberty, equality. Again, Europe at that time was a feudal system. There was no liberty, there was no equality. Freedom of speech was unheard of. Merit, the idea that your social status was dependent on your own actions. Logic, rationalism, skepticism, and the social construction, and also the acceptance of eccentricity. And all of these things were non-existent in Europe in the 16th, 17th, 18th century. But with indigenous philosophers like Candieronk, they learned about the indigenous way of working. And of course, in the Canadian and American context, they also brought us the concept of federalism. But that's my tribute to the indigenous people of North America. All the slides I'm using today are under a CC by license, except where otherwise noted. However, some of the images are under fair dealing or fair use. So, blockchain, let's start off about blockchain. And again, I'm talking today, it's more or less a primer on blockchain micro-credentials and artificial intelligence. So what it is is a distributed ledger that provides a way for information to be recorded and shared in a community. It can be public or private. So it's up to the creators whether they want it to be public or private. And at the bottom line, what it is is a ledger, the same as used to be done on paper and now it's done digitally. However, it's a distributed ledger in that it doesn't exist in one place. It's distributed all over. And this presents its own advantages and its own problems. Bitcoin is probably the one that most of you have heard of as a user of blockchain. And it's based on a distributed ledger or rather a specific kind of distributed ledger and blockchain. And that's done for financial purposes. However, the way it works it can also be used for credentialing in universities and colleges. And we can use blockchain as a distributed ledger. It's not controlled by anyone. It's shared in a P2P network, person-to-person network. It facilitates two or more people to collaborate among themselves with no centralized authority. The records are validated in blocks. Each new block contains a hash of a previous block creating a chain. This altering of earlier blocks alters the hash and breaks the chain. So you can't change previous blocks if you do the whole blockchain is ended. What happens on the blockchain stays on the blockchain. So the blockchain is immutable. It can't be deleted or changed. Transactions can be easily traced. It's organized chronologically. It's time-stamped. And we need, excuse me, yeah, we don't need a third party. It's a secure private network. It's got decentralized exchanges, identity verification, secure certification, enhanced performance and scalability. So these are all of the characteristics of the blockchain. Decentralized, distributed, immutable, secure and time-stamped. Now, what are micro-credentials? There's some different names for them. Alternative digital credentials, badges, mini-degrees, nano-degrees, micro-certificates. All of these are being used. They are different forms of micro-credentials. The one thing to remember is that micro-credentials are for credit. If they're not credentials, then they can't be micro-credentials. They have to be credentialed in order to be seen as a micro-credential. However, employers use them to get qualified workers. They can tell by a micro-credential that an employee has mastered certain skills. Students, it helps them to get, to increase their knowledge, their skills. And of course, the society benefits, there's economic benefits when people increase their skills. Blockchain plus badges equals rocket fuel for verified trusted credentials. Certification transcripts to present systems are cumbersome and inefficient. There's an inability to provide a certificate is serious for students. And digital systems can help to solve this problem. The micro-credential is the death knell for the embossed transcript. So everything is going digital and blockchain with micro-credentials can assure the veracity of the credential. And the credentials can be stackable. And the whole idea of micro-credentials is you work in small chunks and you gradually build up, you stack those credentials up until finally you can get a diploma or a degree or a higher credential. So the certification by blockchain, it works by institutions and granting a micro-credential and then student, it goes out in the blockchain and then students can access the micro-credential from the blockchain and they can also allow an employer or another institution to access it. The certification exists in a wallet, it's for academic credentials, it's for pre-creating and sharing keys and destroying them. It requires a higher level of trust in institutions. It's a certificate is only useful when tied to a person and privacy of the data is essential. The ownership and control belongs to the individual and this is the big difference between certificates today and what we're talking about with blockchain-supported micro-credential. It belongs to the individual, not the institution. They're preserved, the record is preserved, it's valid and it's reliable. You can count on it, not changing. Blockchain problems, however, it's a big system and with big systems, you can have unexpected failures. Others might say, well, we're doing just fine at our university with our present certificate system. Not only that, it's a profit center in some institutions who students paying for their credentials. So why change a system that works? And of course, a big problem is that encryption is permanent and your keys can be forgotten. So you need a encrypted key in order to access your blockchain and if you lose it, bye-bye blockchain. So it's a pretty scary thing. But the blockchain problems are the persistence which is one of the attributes of blockchain is also a problem because fake content, once it's out there, it stays out there. Illegal content can stay out there. Unwanted content, it may be just something you don't want to be out there. Leaked personal data could be on there that you don't want. So there's a lot of problems that need to be addressed when going down this route. Other problems, the network maintenance costs, the transaction speeds, so far blockchain are much slower than would be expected on the internet. Storage, the regulatory intervention so governments can come in and make changes. There are no useful apps in education for micro-credentials yet. There are some that are being experimented with and used in some areas. And of course hacking could be a problem. The other big problem is energy use where with proof of work, for example, for Bitcoin, they say to get one Bitcoin now you need electricity as much as the country of Ireland uses in a year. So it's huge, huge energy use. But there are other ways, not just proof of work, but proof of stake, proof of authority, proof of identity, and it can be brought down considerably. So access and affordability, this blockchain micro-credentials, they need to be inexpensive when it's needed by the learner. It can solve centralization issues. You create a network of trusted entities and it's access to content with a public key and verification validation is based on the quality of the blockchain. It's a distributed management platform, user management, resource creation, resource management, copyright management, virtual currency exchange and learning certification management. All of these things could be used implementations of blockchain in a institution. The learner control, here's some questions. Should learners be able to choose what history they share with others? So let's say they don't want somebody to know this part of their history. Are they, will they be able to block it and change it? Different narratives for different purposes. You may wanna emphasize only one part of your blockchain certification for this job and another piece for another job. Can you highlight or hide those different experiences? And prior learning assessment and recognition are important for learner control. So what happens if a student wants or needs a fresh start? The gain, Audrey Waters tells us that the gains afforded by the immutability of the data are undermined by problems which are left unresolvable because of that same immutability. So again, all of these are problems that need to be addressed. It's possibly disrupting and democratizing education for awarding qualifications, licensing and accreditation, the management of student records, IP management payments, and permanent distributed record of institutional output and reputation. Can disintermediate, inefficient, opaque and hierarchical centralized systems can they be replaced? Higher education need not be involved in the verification of credentials. Informal learning can be verified like formal education as well. It could give an input to people who have learned informally. Freedom for learners to enroll in and complete courses at institutions of their own choice, to change institutions as they strive to complete a program, to transfer credits among institutions nationally and internationally and to have prior learning assessed and accredited. So all of these are give freedom for learners and take a lot of the power away from institutions and give it to the learners themselves. The European Union has supported blockchain, but they say only if open standards are adopted. And I think those of us at this conference would definitely agree with that. Now, what does artificial intelligence have to do with this chat GPT-4 and BARDA seem to be the most popular ones? Well, AI can help personalize learning. It can bring equality to learning, inclusivity and openness is really important in using artificial intelligence. The benefits, it automates and simplifies transactions. It increases efficiency and digitalization. It helps track students. It supports consent management and security. It can help to prevent tampering. Other things, it can verify learning outcomes. It can discover skill gaps and it can discern learning difficulties of individual students. And of course, it can be open. I'm showing this graph, sorry, table, micro-credentials, blockchain and artificial intelligence. I've just written an article to be published on this subject and I asked chat GPT to create a table for me. And they did this in seconds and I made a few very slight modifications to it and I put it in my paper. And the key of course, if you're putting it in your paper, you must accredit chat GPT that they did this, right? Because otherwise it would be fraud. So I put this in the paper, accrediting it and I couldn't believe it. I know this field reasonably well. It would have taken me a day or two at least to produce a table like this. This came out in seconds. So it's again, quite a great tool for that. So the limitations of AI. Well, there's a need for large computer resources, that's for sure. Ethics and the broader context is we've got to be looking at that because I found if you see anything that's politically controversial, you will see right away that it has a bias, a very strong bias on it. And of course, human control. How can the humans ensure they control these machines? And this idea came up recently is that blockchain can be used as a kill switch for AI that gets out of control. So there's a number of people working on this now and it might be one of the possible solutions to AI going rampant. And IBM skills build has a good jargon-free explanation of how AI large language models work and I recommend looking at. IBM is committed to training 2 million AI learners for free. And I'll finish up with this statement. Every day, computers are making people easier to use. Everything you know is wrong. And if you're not confused, you don't understand. And remember this, technology won't replace teachers, but teachers who use technology will probably replace teachers who don't. So I think that we all have to have a good grasp of artificial intelligence, blockchain and micro-credentials because they're here, they're coming and they're coming very quickly. So thank you very much for your attention. I'll open it up for discussion if we have time. Do we have time? Questions? Yeah, there's a few, the island of Malta which calls itself the blockchain island. They've experimented with it. There's some, I think, the Université de Trois Rivières and some others in Canada have been experimenting it with it. But again, it's all at the very experimental stage at this point. It's not been a really top commercial or institutional use of it to this date. So it's something like AI that's coming. And I see that all of these three things can work together. Yes, at the back. I think that has to be worked out. That's one of the problems is the institution can't control blockchain once it's out there. The individual has control over there with their own keys. And so that could be a good thing and it could be a bad thing because institutions also need to control to verify the credentials. But I think that once it goes out on the blockchain with their imprimatur on it, then it's static. It's gonna stay that way. You cannot change it. You can add to it, you can't change it. So they could have some assurances that it'll be a valid credential no matter how the students use it. As long as they don't lose the key. Any others? Yes? Yeah, yes, for sure. It's increased skepticism and I didn't get into that Bitcoin, the money part of it. And I was going to, I was thinking about it and I was investing. I was gonna invest in this company in Vancouver and then I found out it was a total scam. And I'm glad I didn't have the guts to go in and actually buy some. And you see this guy in the Bahamas now who, I mean, you're talking about what hundreds of billions of dollars just disappeared. So there's definite reason for skepticism with it. And so we have to take that into account. And I've noted that as one of the problem. And the other thing of the poor guy who lost his key and he bought his Bitcoin at a few cents each and now they're worth tens of thousands of dollars. So there's definite reason to be skeptical about it. I would advise extreme caution to any institution going into it and go slowly. And I think what I've learned in my many years of working with technology is institutions are best not to go first. And when I was younger, I was very impatient and saying, look, we should be going down this path or that path or another. And you find out that if you wait, it becomes really easy five years down the road. We went with mobile learning, using mobile devices for learning at Athabasca in the year around 2000. And at that time, nobody was really into it. I got into a research project with Nokia, which doesn't exist anymore, and a group in Ireland. And we looked on mobile learning. And it was very difficult and there were all kinds of problems, then we established a mobile library and again very difficult, very problematic and everything and we tried all different types of mobile devices. But when the iPhone came along, that's when it all changed. It was five years down the road from when we've been doing all this work and I realized, wow, now's the time to really get into it because now you can do all kinds of amazing things with mobile devices. And now let's face it, everybody and their mothers learning on mobile devices. So it's quite a changed world. And I remember at one meeting at our university, we were talking about mobile learning. We were the first, I believe, anywhere to set up our library to make it accessible on mobile devices. And we were talking about it at a faculty meeting and somebody said, well, who's asking for mobile, anyone? I don't know anybody who's asking for it. And my response was, well, who asked for the internet? Nobody asked for it. It came anyway, like, you don't wait for people to ask for things, things happen and you use them and you use the latest technology. I could give you another example is when I was young, we had, we learned with, I'm that old, with quill pens and you dip them in the ink. And I'm left-handed and it's very difficult if you're left-handed to work with a quill pen without smudging the ink. So I picked a, I got a regular pen but the teacher slapped us and said, you can't use that. You have to learn to write on a quill pen. Well, now nobody writes on it. I won't say nobody, there are some experts in quill pens who love it. But on the general route, everybody's using our regular pens now. Nobody uses quill pens. So this is what's gonna happen, I believe, with artificial intelligence and blockchain and everything. And you don't have to know everything about it in order to participate. And so I think that the changes are coming. We have to learn to adjust them. I'll give you one more story about that. We worked in Eastern Canada in New Brunswick in the 1990s. And the World Wide Web had just came out and we were propagating the news about it and getting people involved. And I was at a native reserve in Eastern New Brunswick. And one of them said to me, well, this isn't part of our culture. We never do that. And my response to him was, well, whose culture do you think it's part of? It's not part of my culture. The internet wasn't part of anybody's culture. That just happened. And anyway, they went on and they created a program. It was called From Beaver Chips to Microchips. And they started creating games in the reserve. And actually they sold quite a few, especially in Europe. People were very interested in them. Anyway, I'll close with that. And thank you very much for your attention. And I hope it was helpful in some way. It's just basically a primer on what's happening and how we possibly might deal with it. Thank you very much.