My Imperative To Educate
I take parenting seriously. I am a firm believer it is one of my purposes on this Earth, and it gives me a great sense of meaning for my own existence. Imparting both wisdom and knowledge is highly crucial for developing children, as well as ethics and a moral code of right vs wrong. While morality is sometimes subjective with a tricky question of nuance, hard knowledge is not. Teaching hard knowledge can be rough to go through however crucial. Teaching creative electives, well, that should be more fun in my opinion.
As a father, I see a new technological horizon coming and feel the need to teach my findings to my children, and others, in a very hands on way. I sense a new paradigm shift in quite a few things is coming. From the concept of wealth, to the way the internet functions bridged more with day to day activity, to the very concept of what is purpose and meaningful to do, it is these ideas, merged with a new digital ecosystem which I feel will shift. Esoteric, sure, but I like to let the mind wander.
For this blog however, I wanted to speculate what could be coming down the horizon in terms of educational systems, even conceptual educational technology, integrating with dApps and Web3.0. This post is about integration of blockchains, smart contracts, Web3.0, dApps with homeschool and other forms of "non-traditional" education. (depends on your definition of tradition, but I digress.)
For education overall, in a previous post I noted concepts like "Proofing of knowledge" possibly coming into play. I don't mean proof-of-knowledge in terms of cryptography, but more of a proof you've obtained knowledge, leveraging personal ownership of an NFT representing a tokenized piece of a single, social, collaborative learning process. I wrote a blog about the idea of combining lecture/labs/meetups/hands on learning driven community Hackerspaces into tokenized NFT representation of a form of proof of knowledge, as well as paying students cryptocurrency for their attention to circumvent "the freedom" associated with our attention economy. Check it out here if you want to read my ideas on it.
HIVE, dApps, NFTs and educational systems
While core knowledge is important, this post is more about creative, artistic knowledge. My daughters are very similar to the artist found within myself. Each one of them has their own unique form of indepth creativity, each one can sing in perfect/near absolute pitch, loves to draw, loves creating for the sake of creating. It's my duty as a father and a musician to foster this in any constructive way possible.
As a recent inquisitive transient to the HIVE network, I immediately began digging around HiveProjects sinking my teeth into dApps and finally getting a good understanding for what that term meant. As much as I love to sit and ponder the wonders of dApps, my mind had to return back to homeschool teaching mode for my daughter's math assignment. But this lead me to a combination of thoughts. The idea of bridging homeschooling and general education with dApps.
The idea of educational technology is not new. Most certainly, the idea of educational theory is ancient. After all, it is what drives an intelligent, social species. Moodle, for example, is an open source learning management system. An LMS offers assistance with educators on lesson planning, tracking student progress using a multitude of education theory standards, and other various educational resources.
Earlier in this post, I stated I wanted to speculate where dApps could take education, in a hands-on way. Understandably this could be viewed somewhat of an oxymoron. You could say the speculation is this very blog you are reading right now (thank you for that), but the hands-on approach would be to just.........jump in. Take a deep dive into HIVE's dApps, see what exists, and how it relates to my goals of digital homeschooling.
“For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.”
― Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics
NFT Digital Artwork, a blockchain portfolio
Encouraging creative development and 'economic education' experiences leveraging distributed ledger technologies.
If it is apparent to me that one of my daughter's passions is creating art, then one aspect of her art class should be monetization, along with a more traditional art/aesthetic education. One thing that utterly pains me about traditional public education is the lack of any real monetary skills. I plan on making up for this.
"Back in my day, economic education was called 'chores'. Kids these days."
― Amphlux
One exciting technology growing amongst the communities throughout this new interconnected network are called NFTs, or non-fungible tokens. These allow for packaged digital assets such as artwork to be packaged up as tokenized containers representing digital scarcity and ownership. From comic books, to music, to online TCGs and other collectibles, NFT technology allows for artists to reach out and begin realize the full potential of their art, in terms of both wealth and recognition.
My daughter is an artist. She draws all the time.
I really like this piece (but I am pretty biased). I like the dress and its polkadots. I especially like the 2 glimmer spots in the eyes. My daughter has painted glimmer spots in all of her characters eyes in all of her drawings ever since she way really young. She has drawn lots of characters, from her and her sister's character "The Bubble Princess and The Fire Kid" from our mini impromptu D&D games, to Finn and Jake to different princesses. She loves rainbows, colors, princesses, pinks and purples.
After browsing NFT Showroom and brainstorming a bit, it struck me, and by it I ultimately mean this blog. I began looking around at the various NFT artworks on the site, wishing I could buy a few. I'm not a richboi, yet, so I have to hold off on those impulses, but I did make a mental note to own a few of the NFTs on the site eventually. I really enjoy the stamp aesthetic, and it makes sense. There is an entire history tied to collecting stamps, and stamps acting as value holders, containers of wealth. So I furiously got to work, taking her artwork she worked on and turning it into something that could be sellable.
Now begins her NFT portfolio.
I'm not the absolute greatest at digital art, but I think this turned out pretty ok. Quite a few hours went into this piece, and it was a project of learning digital art for both father and daughter. Now begins the 2nd stage of this education, starting to understand scarcity. I asked how many of these should be minted. She doesn't quite get it, which is understandable. Honestly, I don't entirely understand NFTs either.
But to do is to learn, and to learn is to understand. Ultimately, she came to consensus for minting 7 of them, her age, which makes perfect sense to me. So we will settle with that. She's not quite ready for a more esoteric understanding of one value vs another value, as to her, value is art supplies, legos and art kits. So I'll help with that. You can find the NFT for sale here. It is not in violation of ToS standards as I have personally asked.
Is this entire blog post some sort of marketing plea to sell this art? I would initially say no, but maybe it is in a way. Perhaps we will look back at this post in some future lesson on marketing and view it as a reference. For now, the lesson to impart will be creative work is valuable and can lead to wealth in different, various forms. Because in the future this isn't the only dApp I'm planning on leveraging from HIVE with homeschool. Stay tuned for the blog I write up when I turn her 3D artwork from Virtual Reality into a browsable website using the HIVE dApp 
Amphlux: If we do this project, you might even be able to get some money from this.
Z: Really? Money?
Amphlux: Yes really.
Z: You know what I would get with money? A really cool art kit!
Amphlux: You really are exactly like me.
