«Woolf: building the first blockchain university»
Miles PattendenOxford University, UK; Madrid Institute for Advanced Study
Abstract
This presentation describes our efforts to build Woolf: the first blockchain-powered university with its own native token. Woolf will be a borderless, digital educational society which reimagines how teachers and students connect and which will rely on blockchains and smart contracts to guarantee relationships between students and educators. For students, Woolf will be the Airbnb of degree courses; for teachers, it will be a decentralised, non-profit, democratic community; but for both parties the use of blockchain technology will provide the contractual stability needed to complete a full course of study. It is our ambition for Woolf to revolutionize the university. However, at its core, it makes possible the oldest and most venerable form of human education: direct personal, individual apprenticeships in thinking. Woolf has been developed by an independent group of academics (mostly from the University of Oxford), and experienced academics will form the first college in the collegiate university. We believe such a personal education will be increasingly valuable as artificial intelligence and robotics gain an ever-greater share of the current jobs. The Woolf platform is designed to reduce bureaucracy, lower tuition costs, secure teaching salaries, and increase the time that students interact with their professors. The result will be simple and powerful: students and teachers are brought together, no matter where they are in the world.
Bio
Miles Pattenden is a research fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford and a lecturer in the Faculty of History, where he teaches British, European, and World History. Miles’ research concerns the catholic church and the growth of its global networks in the early Modern Era. He has published two monographs, «Pius IV and the fall of the Carafa» (Oxford University Press, 2013) and «Electing the Pope in early Modern Italy, 1450-1700» (Oxford University Press, 2017), and is currently writing a history of the Universal Church from 1400 to 1870 for Princeton University Press. A former Marie Curie fellow and Commonwealth scholar, he holds MAs from Cambridge and Toronto and a DPhil from Oxford. He has held teaching posts at Oxford University, Oxford Brookes University and University College Cork, and has been a visiting researcher at the Università Ca’ Foscari in Venice, the Università di Bologna, the British School at Rome and the Madrid Institute for Advanced Study.
