By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Education Blockchain 50
2019/01/24
This report is pretty high-level, but it's well-presented and offers a good overview of the state of blockchain in education. The hook is the set of 50 companies identified in an education blockchain market map (pictured). Sectors represented include skills and credential verification, IP, payments, and marketplace. Some examples presented in the article (I've paraphrased from source): Learning Machine, securing credentials on the blockchain; EchoLink, providing information regarding a job candidate’s education, skill and work experience; Larecoin, a cryptocurrency which tokenizes tuition payments, scholarships and student debt; and Orvium, a framework for managing scientific publications. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Kaufmann-Wills group: The Facts About Open Access, Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers October 11, 2005

This is a pretty good report and appears to make a genuine effort to be even-handed and fair. It is based on a study of and comparison between hundreds of open access and commercial journals. It becomes apparent that the open access movement is young, rough around the edges, not as polished or rigorous as the commercial sector, and not as profitable. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Brian L. Hawkins, Julia A. Rudy, and Robert Nicolich: Core Data Service: Fiscal Year 2004 Summary Report, Educause October 4, 2005

Piles of data "about campus information technology (IT) environments at 890 colleges and universities in the U.S. and abroad" and some interesting commentary on the "fallacy of relying only on input measures." The authors write "This effort to 'keep up with the Joneses' is untimately an inflationary pressure that can be dysfunctional." More...