Blockchain Storytelling
My students get exposure to the concepts I have learned about as a result of my cryptocurrency studies. I find “financial sovereignty” very relatable to “self agency”, which is (the most?) an important element in motivating students. John Dewey progressive education essays and Standford’s “Design Thinking” process have been my favorite references, but the realm of knowledge covered in crypto educational media is a worthy contender.
We have used crypto currency for purchasing display space in a virtual museum, as quadratic voting tokens, and more. Many of these activities do not rely upon crypto, but rather use it as an additional tool in order to bring more learning into the lessons. Blockchain Storytelling did not use any crypto, but rather I formulated my class discussion points very differently, and with new terms, because of my exposure to crypto currency media (YouTubes and podcasts). Because of the philosophy behind these concepts, I feel a need to expose my students to some of the terms and perspectives that I find.
The summary of Blockchain Storytelling: using an online forum, we collaboratively wrote stories with the author changing every sentence. A “fork” was established when two people responded to the same sentence. There were many one sentence forks that never got sustained. Each student had a pseudonym, but was KYC’d with me. Check out the fork below which for awhile resulted in boys and girls having separate chains. Later they would invade each other’s story chains, as I sat back and laughed all the way to the teacher karma bank (where I was stacking points for making writing fun). A short selection for your enjoyment:
- purple_dragon: Once upon a time I grew wings.
- minecraft: they were on my but
- formula1: when I fart I blow it into your face!!
- _*evelyn*_: I could fly through the mountains and visit my friends in other cities whenever I wanted.
- purple_dragon: Nobody else had wings, so it was up to me to make sure all of my friends were okay, because the internet had gone out everywhere, for months.
- minecraft: they were on my but
For the forum, we used Reddit! Turns out you can create your own personal Reddit from Github. I was lucky enough to have a volunteer grant my students access to his server for the lessons. I opted out of setting my own up or having a reddit account for every student. It probably would have taken more time that I was willing to put into the project. So we used a centrally managed server whose owner I knew but none of the students knew. Similar to exchanges I feel! Importantly, we discussed the concept as a class – who controlled what, who knew what, and what options they had for creating their own servers. I did not actually mention what Reddit was, only Github.
The stories were, as expected, fantastic and numerous. There was a lot of junk, and my KYC powers helped make moderation easy. An interesting bit about moderation: in the official school chat system, students cannot edit or delete anything they type. In this system they could, and I told them that they must not edit or delete. In fact, they did edit and delete, proving that trust doesn’t go far especially when making a tiny edit genuinely improved the “story chain”.
Resources
- Reddit.com or Github.com/reddit or any chat system with nested replies that you can analogize to blockchain forks
Inspiration
- in single letters Reddit.com/r/AskOuija
- in single words You’ve Got Sole
- in sentences Beach ball Stories (I can’t share my kids’, sorry, we voted and decided)
- Design Thinking: https://web.stanford.edu/~mshanks/MichaelShanks/files/509554.pdf
