The blockchain university: disrupting 'disruption'?

Abstract

This paper explores the promise of disruption of higher education offered by latest platform technologies - a combination of mobile applications for connecting teachers and students and blockchain technology for secure transactions of information and money. We start with a brief examination of several generations of technological disruptions arriving from the Silicon Valley with a special focus to educational technology. Showing that these disruptions are primarily focused to furthering capitalist mode of production, we question whether the latest disruption could provide different results. We briefly examine a historical (utopian) attempt at disrupting education described in Ivan Illich's book Deschooling Society (1971). While this analysis firmly belongs into the past, it presents us with important insights about connections between education, technology, capitalism and the environment which are just as relevant today. We proceed with an analysis of the world's first blockchain university - the Woolf University. Advertised as 'Uber for students, Airbnb for teachers', the Woolf University offers the seductive promise of radical transformation of higher education based on cooperative principles. We examine blockchain technology in detail and identify its main novelty - the transfer of trust from people to technologies. We briefly question this transfer, leaving a more detailed analysis for further research. Instead we focus to ideological underpinnings of the blockchain university, as they reflect to teaching, learning, and university administration. We show that further analyses of the blockchain university will be best supported by adopting a networked learning perspective and especially its wide body of knowledge about various (learning) connections. The Woolf University has not even admitted its first cohort of students, and the question remains as to whether Woolf will now adopt the blockchain in such a manner as to radically disrupt 'disruption', or it will simply blend into the existing powerful political, educational and economic structures. Our analysis, which is therefore based on early ideas about the development of the Woolf University, indicates that it has the potentials to offer cooperative learning to students, cooperative employment to academic workers, all the while retaining highest quality of teaching and learning modelled after ancient scholastic principles. On that basis, we conclude that the Woolf University, together with other adaptations of blockchain technology for educational purposes, does offer a lot of potential for fundamental disruption of higher education and should be closely watched in the times to come.