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Frontiers in Blockchain
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This article is part of the Research Topic
Establishing Self Sovereign Identity with Blockchain View all 10 Articles
Alan Sherriff
Consultant, United Kingdom
Richard Tighe
Oxfam, United Kingdom
Andreas Freund, PhD
Self-employed, United States
Dr. Prerna Tambay
Business School, University of Bedfordshire, United Kingdom
Decentralization, Blockchain Technology and the Promise of Self-Sovereign Identity
Blockchain in Education: Digital Credentials Come of Age
Self-Sovereign Identity and the Interoperability of Digital Credentials on the Blockchain
Decentralized Resilient Models for Education? Too Early to Celebrate
PERSPECTIVE article
Front. Blockchain, 30 March 2021 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fbloc.2021.616779
Blockchain, Self-Sovereign Identity and Digital Credentials: Promise Versus Praxis in Education
Alex Grech1*, Ira Sood2* and Lluís Ariño3
1Department of Media & Communications, University of Malta, Valletta, Malta
2Faculty of Management and Business, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland
3Chief Information Officer, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain
Blockchain's versatility is primarily due to its immutable and almost indestructible nature. These attributes have caught the attention of researchers and developers interested in applications and environments where the need for the integrity of identity and content are as paramount as the safe delivery and record of transactions. Self-sovereign digital identity in particular is often cited as a human right that nation states need to embrace with as much conviction as education and lifelong learning are considered to be a public good. Although the blockchain has long been identified as an opportunity for driving much-needed change in the core processes of the education sector, use cases to date have been limited in scope and execution, with blockchain advocates and education policy makers seemingly disconnected on fundamental issues such as governance, self-sovereignty, interoperability, choice of blockchain platforms and overall trust in standards and the integrity of the infrastructure. This article is primarily interested in the affordances of the technology as a public good for the education sector. It levers on the lead author's perspective as a mediator between the blockchain and education sectors in Europe on high-profile blockchain in education projects to provide a snapshot of the challenges and workable solutions in the blockchain-enabled, European digital credentials sector.
One of the goals of United Nations Sustainable Development 2030 agenda is "ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all1." With a global pandemic in the mix, capable of effectively delaying and even diluting the existing progress made in this direction, the turn to technology as the salvation of global education systems is palpable. A 2018 UNESCO report addressing the challenges in digital credentialing and recognition fittingly called out the lack of an efficient "one stop shop" universal system with the ability to collect, store, verify and connect educational credentials in a comparable manner across national contexts (Chakroun and Keevy, 2018). Following the European Commission's publication of a JRC2 report in 2017 (Grech and Camilleri, 2017) that proposed the use of blockchain technology as a potent tool to achieve that goal, a wide array of publications and pilot programs have since gathered steam. Once exclusively circumscribed to the fintech sector, blockchain technology is now identified as a force of change in multiple realms of operation including public sector services such as healthcare, voter identity registration, asylum process management3 and higher education. In a recent report, the American Council on Education (Lemoie and Soares, 2020) identified three key themes emerging from the intersection of blockchain technology and education: personal data agency, lifelong learning, and the power of connected ecosystems. While lifelong learning has been a recurring theme in the education sector for several years (Ates and Alsal, 2012; Volles, 2016), the concept of personal data agency as achieved via self-sovereign identities is still gaining momentum in academic and policy circles (Wang and De Filippi, 2020). Despite the technological promise of blockchain, several barriers remain that have limited the practical applications to proof of concepts and pilots so far. COVID-19 may yet be the watershed moment in the education sector that will accelerate the drive toward a system of self-sovereign, ubiquitous, affordable, and verifiable credentials powered by blockchain technology. Efforts in this domain are shifting from theory to practice, largely due to the fruition of multiple initiatives, emerging from both public and private sectors.
This article unpacks these concepts and how the "blockchain in education" ecosystem has unfolded in recent years. It focuses on the lessons learnt from case studies where the blockchain has been deployed to re-imagine digital credentials in high-profile pilots in Europe. Whether deployed as experiments or nation-state initiatives, what these pilots have in common are prescribed objectives to enhance learners' self-sovereignty and agency and improve the options for issuers looking for more cost-effective, secure, democratic and trustworthy solutions than those currently available. The article attempts to bring clarity to ongoing discussions on whether decentralized credentialing ecosystems contribute to more robust, scalable and flexible systems than centralized systems; and whether policy makers and citizens should continue to wait for the technologies to mature or look elsewhere for pragmatic technological solutions to long-standing governance issues specific to the education sector, including the interoperability and recognition of learning credentials across Europe.
Decentralization is defined as the ability of an ecosystem to shift power and control from a centralized host to a distributed network (Anderson, 2019). The World Wide Web or Web 1.0 was originally developed as a decentralized platform. Control was soon appropriated by Web 2.0 behemoths who turned it into a two-sided client-server model, with a business hosting an application and users (Soghoian, 2010; Toledano, 2013). Recent experiences of data appropriation and surveillance capitalism have left idealists yearning for a Web 3.0 underpinned by decentralized ecosystems on open platforms.
Blockchain technology4 went mainstream in 2008 after its elusive founder/s Satoshi Nakamoto conceptualized it in a white paper and later used it to implement the cryptocurrency Bitcoin (Nakamoto, 2008). As one of the first large scale applications of decentralization, the implications of the technology go far beyond its use as the backbone of a cryptocurrency (Wu and Tran, 2018). As a distributed ledger technology with a decentralized protocol that allows the network to validate a transaction (as opposed to some central authority), the blockchain holds the same socially empowering promise of the early internet. Our often-misplaced trust in centralized platforms, databases and protocols could perhaps be addressed by a technology that is trustless by design—yet allows varying degrees of trust to be built in at the transaction and communication level of the infrastructure itself.
Technologies without a central, controlling authority also tend to be associated with a compelling social value proposition (e.g., M-Pesa). The social value proposition of the blockchain is a composite of a number of intertwined principles (Grech and Camilleri, 2017; Grech, 2018). Of these, Self-sovereignty, Identity and Trust have particular resonance in these uncertain times: self-sovereignty is frequently associated with the right of individuals to own and control their own identity online and be the final arbiter of who can access and use their data and personal information.
In a knowledge-based global economy, an ability to state, verify and prove digital identity in a seamless fashion in a hyperconnected webspace is a vital human right, "the key to survival" according to Wang and De Filippi (2020). According to a World Bank report5 as of 2016, over 1.5 billion people around the globe have no means to prove their identity. According to UNHCR6, by 2018 70.8 million people had been forcibly displaced due to persecution, conflict, violence, or human rights violations. Voluntary and regular migrations for the purpose of employment and education also require a portable and dynamic identity that can be unequivocally associated with fairly earned credentials (Toth et al., 2003). The lack or loss of identity credentials inevitably subjects minority groups to a unique form of socio-economic exclusion.
The above implies an urgent need for citizens to secure complete ownership over their identities. In 2016, the United Nations launched the multi-stakeholder ID2020 Alliance7 with the objective of ensuring universal and ethical digital identity for all within the UN's 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, satisfying the four P's: private, portable, persistent and personal. In 2019, ID2020 proposed a "Certification Mark" to those companies that channel their efforts into technologies capable of providing solutions that meet the 4P's criteria.
In practice, there is rarely any provision to create an identity without relying on a third-party provider. Should that provider cease to exist, so do all the identities of all users in that domain: this defeats all the foundational properties of a self-sovereign identity, such as existence, autonomy, ownership and access, and the principle that the user, and only the user, must have full control over their identity data in a user-controlled data management facility (Ferdous et al., 2019).
In a much-cited post in 20168, cryptography pioneer Christopher Allen described self-sovereign identity as "the next step beyond user-centric identity [where] the user must be central to the administration of identity" (Allen, 2016). Compare this to a traditional identity management scenario, where a user's identity is defined from the perspective of the provider for a specific purpose and is therefore only valid within the domain of that specific provider within that purview (Wagner et al., 2018). Smolenski (2016, 2020) considers self-sovereignty as an attempt to answer long-standing philosophical questions about social personhood. People have all sorts of identities conferred on them in various forms (passports, proof of employment, diplomas) and by various third parties operating as sources of authority (e.g., credentialing bodies). None of these forms can revoke the fact that individuals are the ultimate source of data about themselves: a citizen's identity pre-exists before the conferral of an identity by any third party. The Sovrin Foundation9, a not-for-profit global consortium working toward building and governing a network of globally acceptable self-sovereign identity, has stated that in any such network the three core tenets of individual control, security and full portability must be met.
The blockchain is frequently cited by ID2020 and the Sovrin Foundation as a prime candidate for decentralized, tamper-free digital identity solutions since several characteristics of the technology comply with the key properties of self-sovereign identity. Blockchain provides a decentralized domain which is not controlled by any single entity, and where data stored in any blockchain is readily available, as "availability property" to any authorized entity or "access property" (Ferdous et al., 2019). An owner of a particular data (an identity data such as Personally Identifiable Information or PII) has full control over it and dictates how such data can be shared with other users within the blockchain domain, thereby satisfying the disclosure property. The discussion around self-sovereign identities and DIDs10 has also become one of the key areas in generating momentum toward personal data agency (Lemoie and Soares, 2020). A Digital Identity report11 concludes that "there is enough evidence available to predict increased adoption of DLT/Blockchain digital identity, including schemes developed around Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) principles" (Goode, 2019). The report predicts that by 2025, 20 percent of total digital ID will be built using DLT/Blockchain technology, increasing from 5 percent in 2020.
In February 2020, the U.S. Department of Education's Blockchain Initiative posted a playful post with the title: "Education has a problem? Put a blockchain on it!"12 The potentially symbiotic relationship between blockchain and education owes much to the self-sovereign affordances of the technology. Blockchain has been associated with the unbundling of higher education (Sood et al., 2020); and from a praxis perspective, with the basic building block of education, the credential. Definitions of credentials tend to be associated with power—with evidence of authority, status, rights, entitlement to privileges, or the like, usually in written form13. According to Gallagher (2019), the reputation of an educational institution is dependent on the market value of this credential. Pittinsky (2015) considers the credential as the only form of non-negotiable currency in the higher education ecosystem; in practice, this statement applies to all forms of lifelong learning.
Within the education ecosystem, the credential is a representation of the different types of learning acquired by an individual; a composite of accredited formal, informal and non-formal learning outcomes—the set of knowledge, skills and/or competences acquired or demonstrated by an individual after completing a formal, informal and/or non-formal learning process that tends to include an issuing institution (Chakroun and Keevy, 2018; Grech, 2018). The term "credential" is also used to refer to the qualification (transcripts, diplomas, certificates, assessments, badges etc.) that a learner receives from an educational institute after fulfilling a set of pre-defined criteria (Seymour et al., 2015). Although the majority of credentials remain paper-based, electronic or digital credentials are now part of the education vernacular. This turn to digital is also associated with alternatives and the need for latent change in the modus operandi of education institutions; as if digitization is making it possible to transcend the limits of traditional credentials, and address many of the concerns raised by students and employers about education institutions (Chakroun and Keevy, 2018). Digital credentials are therefore not mere functional elements—a form of skill/qualification—but tangible proof of identity or self-sovereign identity (Stokkink et al., 2020), with the "value-added" significance of an educational credential unlocked when it can be effectively linked to the sovereign identity of an individual.
Education and identity, both termed as "undeniable human rights" by the UN need to be turned into the cornerstones of resilient, inclusive and equitable systems that ensure these rights for all. The evolution of identity models over the years has been a metamorphic process. Here lies the dilemma. According to Ferdous et al. (2019), the most commonly used identity model at present is the SILO or Isolated User Identity model wherein each service provider gives the user unique credentials to access their services, which means that each time users want to access a particular service, they need to verify their credentials. This can be seen in effect with most of the internet service providers such as Google, Facebook, Twitter etc. The Federated model is employed by private organizations such as HEIs (Higher Education Institutions) or Tax authorities and the User Centric model where a dominant service provider (such as Google) can provide access to a host of other service providers pending verification of credentials. None of these models provide the kind of functionalities that would satisfy the conditions of portability, interoperability and user data ownership rights that allow a data owner to own, control and manage their identity without any intermediary. Moreover, with the massification of higher education and increased student mobility, the demographical composition of students has changed rapidly, challenging the notion of 'the traditional student' (Mintz, 2015).
DID is the key element that enables entities (natural persons, legal entities, or things) to interact with services provided by other entities. One entity may have more than one DID, and it will be the owner who will choose with which specific DID he/she wants to interact with other entities (avoiding profiling). A DID by itself says nothing about its owner since it is just an identifier; it is not an identity.
Once an entity has a DID, different data in the form of verifiable credentials provided by third parties can be linked to it. Some of those verifiable credentials—Verifiable IDs (VID) - may describe the DID owner's identity attributes (national identifier, name, surname, etc.); while others—Verifiable Attestations (VA) - may be just data issued to DID owner (accredited education, university membership, etc.). Plastic credit cards, library cards, driving licenses, national ID, passports, or any other membership cards are daily physical examples of Verifiable Credentials (VCs). Holders are able to share existing selected claims from their wallets to third parties (in the form of Verifiable Presentations or VPs). The decentralized native features of the blockchain, without a single point of control, can nevertheless provide an authoritative source of data that different parties may trust. The blockchain can therefore be used to both register and resolve DIDs and public keys that, in turn, allow digital wallets and their owners to communicate and exchange verifiable credentials in a secure way. Registering DIDs will enable natural persons or legal entities to utilize VCs and VPs.
The blockchain infrastructure is ideal for a digital credential ecosystem that supports the issuance, security, storage and verification of learning credentials over time, and across different professional, cultural and geographical contexts (Smolenski, 2016; Grech and Camilleri, 2017; Chakroun and Keevy, 2018). In a truly self-sovereign ecosystem, recipients should be able to control every aspect of their credentials: where they are stored, with whom they are shared, and how they are identified as individuals in the credential. Since personal data and identity is to be shared online, they should own, manage and have the option to choose to share all or parts of their digital credential records in return for access to services they want—without the need of constant recourse to a third-party intermediary to validate or correlate such data or identity to other data14. The ability to provide "a single secure record of educational attainment, accessible and distributed across many institutions" is particularly compelling (Sharples and Domingue, 2016), although Grech and Camilleri (2017) assert that the benefits of blockchain in education are best addressed through open implementations of the technology, which utilize open-source software and open standards for data and implement self-sovereign data solutions.
In 2021, praxis in the blockchain and education sector is about pilots in credentials and infrastructure15. Blockcerts16 was the first open standard specifically developed to create, issue, view and verify blockchain-based certificates. From its inception, Blockcerts was meant to facilitate a set of common standards for blockchain certification from which interoperability would emerge. Since 2017, high-profile blockchain certification pilots developed on the Blockcerts standard include a nation-state project by the Government of Malta, the Caribbean Examinations Council, the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) and by MIT Media Lab17. Open University's Knowledge Media Institute (KMI) is a partner in a number of large-scale projects with practical use of blockchain based credentials in the education and identity domain. Qualichain is a flagship KMI project supported by the European Commission to understand the intersection of blockchain technology with semantics and data analytics performing a dual function of storing and issuing credentials as well as providing a set of more advanced services, including career counseling, intelligent profiling, and competency management (Kontzinos et al., 2020). The university-led Digital Credentials Consortium (DCC) aims "to create a trusted, distributed, and shared infrastructure that becomes the standard for issuing, storing, displaying, and verifying digital academic credentials; [and its] focus is the design of the standard and development of a transparent governance model that keeps the learner's rights at the center" (Digital Credentials Consortium, 2020).
There are a handful of state-funded digital credential initiatives (such as Diplome18) as well as private collaborative initiatives (such as Sony Global Education19, ODEM20, IBM's Learning Credential Network21) that range between being in nascent stages to piloting stages. The majority of blockchain based pilots are taking place seem to be centered around small nation states such as Estonia (eEstonia), Malta (Nationwide Blockcerts) and Switzerland (Blockstack) (Campbell et al., 2018). In 2016, Verbert et al. suggested that blockchain can be used to 'open up the system of scholarly reputation currently associated with academics, and a number of institutions have reported experimenting with blockchain including United Kingdom NARIC (National Academic Recognition Information Centers), PESC (Postsecondary Electronic Standards Council), AACRAO (American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers), CHESICC (China Higher Education Student Information and Career Center), Mozilla and Deakin University.
The European Commission (EC) is investing in the development of techno-legal frameworks suitable for self-sovereign identity between member states. The Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) program is funding a set of generic and reusable digital service infrastructures (DSIs) also known as building blocks22. A CEF building block is a collection of reusable specifications, software and services structured in a service offering that serve general concerns of digital (public) services across EU borders and sectors. Europass 2.0, the related European Digital Credentials Infrastructure (EDCI)23 and eiDAS24 fall in the scope of creating a space in the higher ed ecosphere where learners may secure, own and share their digital identity credentials in a trusted, distributed, and shared infrastructure.
Probably the most ambitious blockchain infrastructure initiative in Europe is the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure25 (EBSI) project. Launched in 2019 by the EC together with governments from member states and the European Court of Auditors (having come together as part of the European Blockchain Partnership), EBSI is being built for cross-border government services. The longer-term roadmap is to make EBSI interoperable with other government and commercial blockchain platforms. At face value, EBSI represents an attempt by policy makers to engage with the technology and learn how to regulate it through the simple expedient of using it themselves26.
EBSI is a public permissioned blockchain, which means that only reputable entities will be able to write to the chain, but everyone will be able to read/verify. Thus, for public permissioned blockchains a governance model will be required (see Self-Sovereign Identity and the Interoperability of Digital Credentials on the Blockchain section). EBSI includes a "Diploma Use Case" as one of the four foundation use cases, with cryptographic proofs of digital diplomas stored in a blockchain network. The Use Case is based on the European Self-Sovereign Identity Framework (ESSIF), a pure SSI framework extended and adapted to European values and regulatory frameworks - in practical terms, the eIDas trust framework and the GDPR directive. Under this new SSI paradigm, digital credentials will be issued directly to citizens for storage in wallets that citizens own and control. In the process, recipients secure full control of their identities and data. No personal data will be stored on chain, other than the attestation of the issuance or any other relevant digital credential status changes. Any third party with whom the citizen has shared any credential, will be able to verify both, provenance (for the holder and issuer) and status (valid, revoked, suspended, expired) for the issued digital credential.
The combination of ESSIF principles and mechanisms with ESSIF ensures both consent and privacy by design. It will always be the owner (holder) of the digital credential who will: start interactions with third party services; accept data (in form of verifiable attestations); or share data (in the form of verifiable presentations).
Levering on the design architecture of EBSI, Figure 1 illustrates the main components and flows when self-sovereign identity principles are applied in a blockchain scenario.
FIGURE 1. Main components and flows for an enabled SSI and Blockchain scenario.
Smit (2020) believes that the most significant benefit of SSI is interoperability, which she states has two different dimensions—a philosophical and a technological dimension. In practice, within an education context, there are four distinct dimensions that need to be managed if interoperability is to be achieved to prescribed standards:
1. Technical dimension: Verifiable credentials enable information to be packaged, issued or shared in a standardized format. The following de facto and formal standards should be considered to ensure true interoperability: W3C-VC, W3C-VC-EDU, W3C-DID, W3C-JSON-LD Wallet, DIF and the corresponding IEEE and ISO working groups.
2. Legal dimension: The two main aspects for consideration are identity and data. For example, in Europe, the eIDas trust framework should be considered to facilitate identity and cross-border validity. In the case of data, GDPR regulation, educational jurisdiction rules and national legislation have to be navigated.
3. Semantic dimension: Standardization extends beyond technological interaction and the transmission of data. Interoperability has to do with the seamless receipt of the data package, its opening, and a common understanding of how the fields that make up the data can be read. Both the sender and the receiver need to be using the same semantic model. This is a challenge since there are different (perhaps too many) semantic models to describe a student's learning pathway (for instance PESC or EMREX/ELMO). There is a need for a clearly defined, common model for the accreditation of learning achievements to ensure the portability of both the identity and the record of a student throughout her life. This may well represent an opportunity to differentiate between describing the learning route and the accreditation of the learning achievements obtained during the route. There is a need for a common schema that may describe the accreditation of learning outcomes. This must in turn be capable of: describing any kind of learning (formal, informal, non-formal); recognizing accredited and non-accredited credentials (including micro-credentials); and supporting different learning contexts (from higher education and technical and vocational education and training or TVET to modular learning). In Europe, the Europass Learning Model (ELM)27 is the data model able to accredit any type of learning outcome achievement, and a correspondence between ELM and ELMO has been provided. The following de facto and formal standards should be considered to ensure true interoperability: W3C-VC-EDU, and the corresponding IEEE, ISO working groups.
4. Governance dimension: This may be further tabulated as follows:
1) Overall governance dimension: Aspects like the purpose, ownership and responsibilities, decision flows, accountability, communication roles and responsibilities, exit conditions, accommodation for existing solutions, technology standards to be applied, or the type of blockchain deployed etc. (see below).
2) Technical governance dimension: Once there is a decision on the type of blockchain model to be deployed, there will be technical governance aspects to be considered which are conditional on overall governance. For instance: aspects related to the concrete implementation of the blockchain (e.g., Hyperledger Fabric or Hyperledger Besu, etc.); the consensus protocol to be fixed; the minimum nodes required; the level of data segmentation and encryption between nodes; etc.
3) Educational governance dimension: roles adopted by legal entities will enable the educational governance for accredited education (see below).
The governance of digital credentials is also dependent on two critical set of decisions related to the type of blockchain deployed, and accreditation taxonomies:
Decisions on type of blockchain to use:
This is a critical aspect to define for the governance of digital credentials on the blockchain, and very much indicative of the way governance is managed, or perceived to be managed, in specific socio-economic contexts. The type of blockchain selected for digital credentials has much to do with the trust that decision-makers vest in the type of blockchain being used. The choice of blockchain will be made from the following types:
1) A public blockchain (so anyone who is connected to the internet can join and become a part of it),
2) A private blockchain (so a restrictive blockchain that operates in a closed network),
3) A permission-based blockchain (so some accreditation/authorization mechanism to enable roles should exist)
4) A permission-less blockchain (so anyone is able to write/update)
5) A hybrid blockchain (combination of private and public blockchain than can also be permissioned or permission-less)28.
Decisions on accreditation taxonomies:
1) Accredited education: in situations where permission attributes need to be issued (such as in the case where a higher education institution issues a degree title to a student). A clear business governance model must be defined, along with the related type of blockchain that is chosen to suit the best business model/requirements.
2) Non-accredited education: in situations where there is no need for permission attributes to be issued (such as in the case of the HR department of a company issuing certificates for completion of an internal professional training course for employees)
The issuing of accredited educational credentials requires clear governance rules for a set of variables. These are likely to include decisions on:
1) An entity that is qualified to host nodes (that is, who hosts mining and verifying nodes).
2) An entity that can authorize legal entities to become Trusted Issuers. To become a Trusted Issuer a legal entity will require authorization from another accreditive source (usually a national quality accreditation agency) that will "accredit" the requesting legal entity to issue certain types of verifiable credentials; and the "accreditive source entity" will be a Trusted Accreditation Organization (TAO). In this context, "accreditation" simply means "to make authoritative, creditable, or reputable".
3) An entity qualified to be a Trusted Issuer (TI): A Trusted Issuer is a legal entity that is accredited to issue certain types of verifiable credentials (such as a Higher Education institution accredited to issue qualifications as defined in the level 7 from the European Qualification Framework).
4) Supporting rules for definition of identity and levels of assurance for entities (natural persons and legal entities).
5) Data schemes to ensure semantic and technical interoperability. The blockchain will provide the source of trust containing at least the following trusted registries to enable business domain governance:
– DIDs registry: contains DIDs and public keys;
– Trusted Accreditation Organization registry: details of the trusted accreditation organization and the "authorisations" it may accredit;
– Trusted Schema Registry: Data schemes;
– Trusted Issuer Registry: Trusted Issuers details and accreditations;
– Revocation & Endorsement Registry: verifiable credentials status (valid, revoked, suspended, expired).
In principle, by addressing all of the four interoperability dimensions and the related issues highlighted in this section, the blockchain solution should be able to support the accreditation of any kind of learning. However, following this process alone will not necessarily fast-track the adoption of digital credentials.
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the education sector has been devastating. By April 2020, 94% of learners in 200 countries were adversely affected (United Nations, 2020), with the UN Secretary General deeming school closures "a generational catastrophe" (Farzan and O'Grady, 2020). In countries with already fragile education systems, there are fears that discontinuation might lead to a permanent removal of education services29. The pandemic has also exacerbated a latent crisis within education institutions, suddenly exposing precarious business models and resistance to change. Years of debate about the merits of online and blended learning models and OER (Open Educational Resources) vanished in the wake of the crisis, with universities shifting overnight to emergency, remote online teaching (Baker, 2020; Grech, 2020; Mitchell, 2020).
The pandemic has triggered an overall digital transformation and rapid, large-scale change in most higher education institutions. Yet almost 10 years since the technology's inception, with the exception of fintech, there is no industry where blockchain has secured a foothold. Blockchain credentials have not gone mainstream; the blockchain university as envisaged in the Woolf University white paper is stillborn (Gerard, 2019)30. The revolution has not quite happened (Baraniuk, 2020). We may tabulate a few reasons31 for this state of play in the education sector, based on first-hand experience32:
Lack of large use case studies: According to Sindi (2019), research on the diffusion of blockchain innovation has not progressed enough due to a lack of use cases within the higher education community. It is not an accident that the "nation-state" initiatives have been piloted by small states with a legacy of trialing emerging technologies, and with ready access to policy makers, ensuring speed in decision-making and political will to cut through "red tape". Gartner observed that most blockchain applications seemed to be stuck in the experimentation mode at the end of 201933. A peer review study published by the Center for Evidence Based Blockchain concluded that "almost half of the blockchain firms show no explicit evidence of the problem to be solved. Approximately one-third fail to cite a comparison and intervention analysis, and less than 2 per cent demonstrate evidence of outcomes backed by filtered (critically appraised, peer reviewed) information" (Naqvi and Hussain, 2020).
Interoperability is rarely just about technology: The real obstacles to the implementation of emerging technologies such as the blockchain "for the public good" lie in the socio-technical integration of rules-based, autonomously operating DLT systems in complex social environments. This is not just about whether end users become data controllers (Van der Bergh, 2018), but often whether a project can deliver the same value across borders and nation state jurisdictions. Technologists tend to develop solutions in ideological silos, with little understanding of the barriers systemic to socio-political environments or the need to secure the buy-in of policy barriers to overcome such barriers. Taking EBSI as a technologically-driven project and idealistically meant to be taken up by EU member states as a public good: for EBSI blockchain credentials to become the EU-standard for education credentials, interoperability authentication and mechanisms need to be determined at the outset with existing EU member state projects and quality assurance and accreditation institutions. That implies seamless technology and member state policy interoperability on issues such as education accreditation and quality assurance and portability of formal and non-formal credentials. The pandemic has led to more nation-state insularity, as opposed to solidarity. Digitally secure educational credentials to facilitate international student mobility are not necessarily on the agenda of nation states.
Self-sovereign identity does not entail individuals certifying their own identity. As long as societies are structured in non-anarchical political systems with well-defined government structures that guarantee and enforce laws while allowing for the establishment of public and private trust frameworks, public administrations will still have the final sovereignty of the identification of citizens. The best self-sovereignty that technology can propose to individuals is not in the issuance, but in the management of their identity (Allende López, 2020).
Resistance from central governance: The inherent resistance to change demonstrated by mainstream institutions is symptomatic of an overall governance and structural issue associated with the hegemonic brick and mortar model of the university (Caruth and Caruth, 2013; Dans, 2020). Fear of decentralization is rife, both at nation state level and particularly in a higher education sector: the blockchain for many higher education institutions implies a threat to "central governance," business models and a loss of power vested in legacy systems and in the HR or Registry departments. When digital credentials have been registered on blockchains, they are not being claimed or used very often: hiring managers and registrars have yet to trust or understand how to evaluate them (Lemoie and Soares, 2020). The same resistance may be found in central governments: it is not to every nation state's liking to trust the trustless public blockchain, open standards et al. The much-lauded Estonian blockchain model is a centralized, militarized version of the technology, not some variant based on open standards and a public blockchain. The analogy of trusted, centralized paper credentials vs. mis-trusted, decentralized, permissionless, digitized counterparts will unfortunately continue to resonate with policy- and decision-makers, until there is a tipping point whereby the interoperability issue described above is 'resolved' by some higher authority—say through prescriptive regulation from bodies such as the European Commission or national governments. In our view, the success or otherwise of EBSI in the European education credentials sector is critically dependent on the buy-in of a core set of policy-makers and national quality assurance stakeholders in EU member states, particularly those prepared to explore the implementation of high-profile EBSI pilots, as opposed to the actual technical interoperability of the EBSI infrastructure.
Lifelong learning is still at odds with the hegemony of universities. The discourse about the blockchain's "potential" to disrupt education systems worldwide has been a feature of academia since 2016. Beyond the "low-hanging fruit" of verifiable, tamper-proof education credentials, most studies concur on the opportunity for decentralized systems to facilitate the interoperability of education worldwide, and the mobility, self-sovereignty and lifelong learning aspirations of citizens. Yet many universities cling to the paper credentials as symbols of centralized power. In Malta, for instance, the University of Malta continues to resist joining the nation-state Blockcerts initiative, despite its launch in 2017, citing administration challenges. On the basis of use case studies, there is more enthusiasm for blockchain credentials from the TVET sector and from professional and non-formal institutions (including those exploring micro-credentials) than orthodox higher education institutions.
Open standards are at odds with business returns. Many blockchain credentials initiatives masquerade as "open" but need to be closed for their promotors to secure a return on their investment. Commercial blockchain credential solutions have been developed on the Blockcerts open standard, and then closed to ensure lock-in with the end user. Trust in open standards have frequently been associated with mistrust in the security of the public bitcoin standard. Governments continue to wait for others to take up the baton of blockchain self-sovereignty.
The analogy that the blockchain is a hammer looking for a nail continues to resonate, even if the education sector seems to be an obvious nail (Herd, 2019; Singer 2020). Gartner's prediction in 2019 that blockchain technology-oriented solutions could create more than $176 billion worth of business value by 2025 and $3.1 trillion by 2030 seems optimistic in 2021. Blockchains may be presented as the verification of identity across adversarial networks, but the promise of a global, interoperable identity ecosystem is dependent not just on trust in decentralized infrastructure, but on the willingness of nation states to collaborate for the common good. Despite the best intentions of centrally-driven digital identity projects such as EBSI and eiDAS34, cross-border interoperability needs buy-in from third parties, including standards bodies and policy makers in member states, and within different entities within the Commission itself.
Covid-19 has led to a huge range of human activities migrating online, and far more smoothly than anticipated;35 for the education sector, the pandemic represents an organic crisis which may drive latent change in the education sector (Heitz et al., 2020). The move to technology-enabled education appears to be as inevitable as more discerning learners questioning the return on their investment in orthodox higher education. The credential will not disappear as long as citizens need to demonstrate identity and skills sets to others. If skills, as opposed to degrees, will really shape the future of work, there may be greater possibilities of the labor market attributing value to digital repositories and mutual recognition of blockchain credentials than traditional bricks and mortar universities trying to cling to outdated business models.
According to Lemoie and Soares (2020), blockchain technology can be applied to advance social equity through personal data agency, lifelong learning, and the power of connected ecosystems. Optimists such as John Domingue at the KMI believe the time has arrived for blockchain to underpin a new resilient decentralized model for lifelong learning where all of the diverse educational experiences available to modern students are tracked, verified and stored as immutable records (Hayward, 2020)36. Students will have a self-sovereign student identity where all of their educational certifications are completely owned, controlled, and managed by them, without the need to invoke the support of an intermediary. In troubled times like today with severely contracted economic activity leading to large scale job losses37, blockchain-backed educational credentials could ultimately create access to job opportunities which would otherwise go unacknowledged. It might be possible to directly impact an individual's ability to find employment; for example, recruitment sites could match vacancies to candidates based on a broader range of experiences as reflected in their student experience collected from a multitude of resources (Kalla et al., 2020; Marbouh et al., 2020).
Technology history indicates that an organic crisis frequently leads to significant innovation and social change. The burst of the Internet bubble and the emergence of social media platforms is a pertinent analogy. Technology and a pandemic are a whole new ball game, and the blockchain can hardly be considered to be a placebo for the ongoing challenges of the global education sector. A return to that most mundane of applications, a "better, self-sovereign education record" (Griffin, 2020) may be a by-product of these troubled times. To regenerate the blockchain project requires much work in the three inter-related areas of regulation, interoperability and human trust frameworks. The technology affordances of the blockchain alone will not suffice.
The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/Supplementary Material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding authors.
All authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual contribution to the work and approved it for publication.
AACRAO, American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.
CHESICC, China Higher Education Student Information and Career Center.
DCC, Digital Credentials Consortium.
DID, Decentralized Identifier.
DIF, Decentralized Identity Foundation.
DLT, Digital Ledger Technology.
EBSI, European Blockchain Services Infrastructure.
EDCI, European Digital Credentials Infrastructure.
EDU, Education
eID, Electronic Identification
eIDAS, Electronic Identification, Authentication and Trust Services.
ELM, Europass Learning Model.
ELMO, European Learning Mobility.
EMREX, Easy Mobility on Recognition of External38
IEEE, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
ISO, International Standards Organization.
ESSIF, European Self-Sovereign Identity Framework.
FSMB, Federation of State Medical Boards.
GDPR, General Data Protection Regulation.
HEI, Higher Education Institution.
ID, Identity.
JRC, Joint Research Center.
JSON, Java Script Object Notation.
NARIC, National Academic Recognition Information Center.
ODEM, On Demand Education Marketplace.
OER, Open Education Resources.
PESC, Postsecondary Electronic Standards Council.
PII, Personally Identifiable Information.
SSI, Self-Sovereign Identity.
TAO, Trusted Accreditation Organization.
TI, Trusted Issuer.
TVET, Technical, Vocational and Education Training.
UN, United Nations.
UNESCO, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
UNHCR, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
VA, Verifiable Attestation.
VC, Verifiable Credential.
VID, Verifiable Identity.
VP, Verifiable Presentation.
W3C, World Wide Web Consortium.
1https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal4
2The Joint Research Center (JRC) is a department (Directorate-General, DG) of the European Commission providing independent scientific and technological support for EU policy-making.
3https://ec.europa.eu/cefdigital/wiki/display/CEFDIGITAL/2020/06/10/Three+new+CEF+Blockchain+Use+Cases
4In its simplest form, a blockchain is a type of distributed ledger technology (DLT) where transactions are recorded with an immutable cryptographic signature called a "hash," and then "grouped in blocks." Every new block includes a hash of the previous one, chaining them together—hence a "blockchain." Data in the block cannot be altered or removed, so every transaction exists in perpetuity while the blockchain exists. The distributed electronic ledger functionality also provides a mechanism for a community to record and exchange information. In this community, each member maintains his or her own copy of the information and all members must validate any updates collectively. The information could represent transactions, contracts, assets, identities, or practically anything else that can be described in digital form. Entries are permanent, transparent, and searchable, which makes it possible for community members to view transaction histories in their entirety. Each update is a new "block" added to the end of a "chain." A protocol manages how new edits or entries are initiated, validated, recorded, and distributed. With blockchain, cryptology replaces third-party intermediaries as the keeper of trust, with all blockchain participants running complex algorithms to certify the integrity of the whole. A distributed ledger is a decentralized database, distributed across several computers or nodes, managed by multiple participants, without the participation of a central authority. Each node has equal status in terms of authority, without a central authority or server managing the database, so each node can independently maintain and update the ledger and any of the nodes will verify its existence. A blockchain is a usually distributed, usually cryptographically assured chain of blocks (the technical term is Merkle tree), whereas a distributed ledger is a database that exists on (i.e., is distributed over) multiple locations (but not necessarily secured on an actual blockchain). Technically, the git version management system is a blockchain, and a RAID 1 hard drive array is a distributed ledger (Basu and Gabbay, 2021).
5World Bank's 2016 ID for Development (ID4D) report.
6UNHCR's 2018 report on global trends in forced displacement is a record high in human history.
7https://id2020.org/digital-identity
8In his 2016 paper, Allen identified ten principles of self-sovereignty: existence; control; access; transparency; persistency; portability; interoperability; consent, minimization and protection. Also see: https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo/self-sovereign-identity
9See https://sovrin.org/
10A DID or a Decentralized Identifier is a globally unique identifier developed specifically for decentralized systems as defined by the W3C DID specification. DIDs enable interoperable decentralized Self-Sovereign Identity management. More info: https://w3c-ccg.github.io/did-primer/
11The Digital Identity Report—The Global Opportunities for Verified Citizen & Consumer Digital ID: Market & Technology Analysis and Forecasts 2020-2025. Published in November 2019
12See https://medium.com/designing-the-future-of-education-and-workforce/education-have-a-problem-put-a-blockchain-on-it-bc2574826752
13https://www.dictionary.com/browse/credential
14The advantages of a blockchain credentials system over a traditional, centralized, proprietary system include: the co-ownership of records by issuers and recipients; vendor-independent verification; the ability to issue to multiple blockchains; portability; privacy; interoperability; ease of use and scalability (Grech, 2018).
15The US Government's Office of Educational Technology manages a Directory of Blockchain Efforts in Education at: https://usedgov.github.io/blockchain/directory
16https://www.blockcerts.org/ The initial design for Blockcerts was based on prototypes developed in collaboration by the MIT Media Lab and Learning Machine (now Hyland Credentials)
17Detailed information on Hyland's official website: https://www.hylandcredentials.com/
18http://www.cimea.it/en/diplome-in-breve.aspx
19https://www.sonyged.com/
20https://odem.io/odem-trust-network/
21https://www.ledgerinsights.com/education-orgs-ibm-blockchain-credentials/
22See https://ec.europa.eu/cefdigital/wiki/display/CEFDIGITAL/CEF+Digital+Home
23https://ec.europa.eu/futurium/en/europass/europass-digital-credentials-infrastructure
24https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/trust-services-and-eid
25How the EU is using blockchain to build a citizen-centric European Internet. Access at: https://www.ledgerinsights.com/how-the-eu-is-using-blockchain-to-build-a-citizen-centric-european-internet/
26Provisioned as a service (a set of services), EBSI is made up of two main layers: the Core Infrastructure layer and the Use Case Application layer. The Core Infrastructure layers include the Infrastructure (compute, storage and network systems), the Chain and Storage layer (initially provisioned with two concrete blockchain implementations—Hyperledger Fabric and Hyperledger Besu—and data storage capabilities) and the Core Services and Interfaces layer (providing interfaces for on-chain and off-chain services). The Use Case Applications layer provides the business domain contents for specific use cases.
27The EC also refers to ELM as "the Europass EDCI Data Model."
28Blockchains will become increasingly nuanced. For instance, Corda is an open source blockchain project, designed for business, with one key differentiator: it does not periodically batch up transactions needing confirmation into a block and confirm them in one go. Instead, Corda confirms each transaction in real-time. There is therefore no need to wait for other transactions to come along or a "block interval." Transactions are confirmed immediately. This means that the transaction is not dependent on any others, increasing both privacy and scalability. So, Corda is both a blockchain and not a blockchain.
29A recent article from the Economist has cited cases where following lockdowns and quarantine, young girls are consistently being forced into marriage or withdrawn altogether, placing them at risk of never returning to school, available at https://www.economist.com/international/2020/07/18/school-closures-in-poor-countries-could-be-devastating
30Woolf envisaged a business model whereby academics worldwide can create and manage a borderless, geographically-agnostic, collaborative university with cross-cultural curricula using some variant of blockchain tokens and smart contracts.
31Although we refer specifically to the higher education sector in this paper, most of the reasons we cite could apply to an overall resistance to the adoption of the blockchain in almost any education sector.
32The lead author was the architect of the nation state Blockcerts pilot in Malta, and currently a partner in a Horizon 2020 project looking at the impact of emerging technologies on digital education, and a consultant to the European Commission on the EBSI project.
33https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2019-10-08-gartner-2019-hype-cycle-shows-most-blockchain-technologies-are-still-five-to-10-years-away-from-transformational-impact
34https://www.biometricupdate.com/202009/european-digital-identity-vision-outlined-by-ec
35https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/09/05/covid-19-strengthens-the-case-for-digital-id-cards
36Also see del4all.eu
37The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on jobs and incomes in G20 economies: Report by International Labor Organization (ILO) and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) accessed at: https://www.ilo.org/global/docs/WCMS_753607/lang--en/index.htm
38An electronic data exchange solution empowering individual to control their own student data and exchange throughout lifespan, across borders for various purposes.
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Keywords: blockchain, self-sovereign identity, digital credentials, DLT, policy, education, identity
Citation: Grech A, Sood I and Ariño L (2021) Blockchain, Self-Sovereign Identity and Digital Credentials: Promise Versus Praxis in Education. Front. Blockchain 4:616779. doi: 10.3389/fbloc.2021.616779
Received: 13 October 2020; Accepted: 28 January 2021;
Published: 30 March 2021.
Alan Sherriff, Consultant, London, United Kingdom
Prerna Tambay, Consultant, London, United Kingdom
Richard Tighe, Oxfam, United Kingdom
Andreas Freund, Independent Researcher, San Diego, CA, United States
Copyright © 2021 Grech, Sood and Ariño. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Alex Grech, alex.grech@um.edu.mt; Ira Sood, ira.sood@tuni.fi


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text:
Bibliophile Labyrinth Adventures
This podcast is about the love of books. It covers everything from comic books to the classics. At its most basic level it's about the adventure of searching out another great reading experience. From comic books to pulp fiction, classic literature to fantasy and science fiction, this podcast celebrates the joys of literature, and the hunt for the next great read!
Piers Anthony's Sos the Rope 1968
Updated about 25 days ago.
In the first episode of Bibliophile Labyrinth Adventures we take a look at fantasy/science fiction author Piers Anthony's second novel, Sos the Rope. Plus a little Bob Dylan!
about 25 days ago.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


For an example of this, we need look no further than the man who has met his premature demise at the hands of a bear shortly after trying to take a selfie with the large predator. It feels almost condescending to say to people that this is a terrible idea – and while you may have seen some successful attempts online, bears are wild animals – and they can and will f**k you up.
The man, Prabhu Bhatara, was driving his SUV when he stopped to take a leak. It is believed that after spotting the animal he intended to take a selfie with it. Despite the warnings of his passengers, he could not be assuaged from his fatal course.
The aftermath is there for you to see in the video, and just as the title says, this video should not be watched by anyone who doesn't want to see a bear mauling a man to death. Helpless bystanders could only watch as the bear savaged the man. The video lets you see the moment Bhatura's thrashing and fighting comes to an end. The bear continues to throw his corpse around like a ragdoll.
Final thought: It's a sobering prospect to think that a moment of reckless behaviour can result in such a horrifying death. We've got our own share of dangerous critters here in Ozzyland – as do many other countries. No matter how much you think this stuff won't happen to you, don't take a silly risk that'll leave your family mourning your loss.


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Cinematic myths and historical facts
Tom Shakespeare
Fri 4 Feb 2011 19.05 EST First published on Fri 4 Feb 2011 19.05 EST
Christopher Hitchens' incisive piece (Unspeakable truths, G2, 1 February) about the blatant rewriting of history by the film The King's Speech is timely and welcome. However, the film's success is not only due to its appeal to British people's reactionary need for reassuring fairy stories around monarchy and class. These myths, in the film, intersect with those around gender.
Surely another reason the film has wowed so many (often male) critics is because it offers a romantic and heroic myth about being a man. The damaged king, who by artistic sleight of hand is Everyman, can be restored to full potency when he gets his voice back. Then he can lead his people into war. We on the left need to look at the stories our culture tells about gender – in a recession so often the most comfortable for both sexes to believe in.
• Re your editorial (Unthinkable? Historically accurate films, 29 January), I can see where you're coming from with this – facts are sacred – but you need to be clear that movies are entertainment, not historical documents. It is an ancient tradition in drama to play "what if?" and to tinker with historical reality for dramatic effect. It goes back to ancient Greece – think of Aristophanes' The Frogs, for example, and the little bottle of oil that crops up everywhere. Or Schiller with his epic and entirely imaginary meeting between Elizabeth and Mary Stuart in the play of that name. Or Hochhuth in more modern times. And there's the arch-manipulator Shakespeare, of course. Who now believes that Macbeth was actually a fairly decent ruler by contemporary standards and you could go to stay at Lady Macbeth's and be confident of getting up for breakfast? And Richard III – the proverbial wicked uncle, murdering his way to the top; except he wasn't and didn't. His bad press is largely due to William having to tailor his play to satisfy the Tudor regime and edit out any suggestion that it was Henry VII who was the usurper.
Robert Ward
• Christopher Hitchens' assault on the historical accuracy of The King's Speech reminded me of the recent criticism of the ballet sequences in Black Swan – technically correct but regrettably missing the point.
A film is primarily entertainment, and by this measure both films are a great success. The purpose of art is not to create a photorealistic record of life, but rather to take liberties with reality to the extent that our minds and our hearts are stimulated and something deeper within us is stirred and unlocked.
I would agree that The King's Speech fails as a historical record but it is certainly a triumphant work of art.
Tony Hughes
Stockport, Cheshire
• Mr Hitchens' criticism of the portrayal of Churchill in The King's Speech is fair. Less fair are his attacks on George VI and the monarchy for their support of Chamberlain and distaste for Churchill, since this only reflected the conventional view of parliament and British society.
Chamberlain after Munich was seen as having averted world war and was applauded for it. Churchill was seen as an irresponsible outsider and a warmonger. Labour had a strong pacifist element and no coherent alternative. With hindsight we can see that the British government was mistaken but, as Mr Hitchens points out in the article, it is not as if a king can campaign against his own government. If George VI was wrong to mistrust Churchill, how much more wrong would he have been to criticise a popular and powerful prime minister at his peak?
As Churchill remarked after the death of Neville Chamberlain: "It is not given to human beings, happily for them … to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events. In one phase men seem to be right, in another they seem to be wrong." Mr Hitchens, who will likely go down in history as "a consistent friend of conceited, spoiled" George W Bush, would do well to remember the wisdom and humility of these words.
Neville Chamberlain


Our Annual Percentage Yields (APYs) are accurate as of 04/24/2019. Rate is variable and may change after the account is opened.
Our Annual Percentage Yield (APY) is accurate as of 04/24/2019. The APYs for other banks are provided by mybanktracker.com and are accurate as of 04/19/2019. The APYs in this table are for the state of California.


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Alison Wood
Jenn Leach
Writers' Blokke
I made $500/hr writing last month — Here are my best tips
It's true, I made $599.99 per hour for writing 10 hours during the month of November. I wrote for Medium and made $5,999.00 from my content.
Tim Denning
The Writing Cooperative
Repeat After Me: There Are Lots of Platforms I Can Write and Be Successful On
Now us writers are spoilt for choice. Everybody wants our skills and talents. — Writers have been screwed for most of history. We got paid peanuts. Our chance of success was extremely low. The internet built an entirely new world, and for the longest time, (mostly) forgot about writers. But hey, if you could make videos or record podcasts then you could become a…
Income Reports
Income Report: How I Made $3,233.38 In October 2021
I broke 3k for the first time in my life. — Welcome to Octobers' income report. This is where I share my earnings for the past 30 days. I do this because I think sharing income is interesting, affirming, and helps inspire people to ask for more. Not everyone likes talking about money but that's because of outdated beliefs that talking…
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Life is too short not to go after your dreams and build a life that is right for you. https://linktr.ee/alisonmwood
Jennifer Dunne
Kitty Williams
Jessica Wildfire


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FBReader ist ein freies E-Book-Betrachterprogramm. Es wurde ursprünglich für Zaurus-Organizer entwickelt und läuft mittlerweile auch auf zahlreichen anderen mobilen Hardware-Plattformen (PDAs, Mobiltelefone, PlayStation Portable, Nokia Internet Tablets) und auf Desktop-Systemen (GNU/Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, BSD). Mit FBReaderJ gibt es eine Java-Portierung, die auch auf Android-Systemen lauffähig ist. Es kann bidirektionalen Text darstellen. Bücher können direkt aus (komprimierten) Archivdateien (tar, zip, gzip, bzip2) gelesen werden und auch direkt aus dem Programm heraus aus verschiedenen Internet-Quellen bezogen werden. Die App ist parallel im Google Playstore und in F-Droid erhältlich.

Der Name der Anwendung ist von dem im russischen Sprachraum sehr populären Dateiformat FictionBook abgeleitet.

Unterstützte Formate
FBReader erkennt folgende Formate und gibt sie formatiert auf dem Bildschirm aus:
 EPUB
 FictionBook (fb2)
 Plucker
 Open eBook (OEB)
 Mobipocket-Format (DRM-freie Dateien)
 OpenReader
 Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)
 Plain text
 u. a. (siehe Projektseite)

Geschichte
Im Januar 2005 wurde die erste (Zaurus-)Version veröffentlicht. Im Dezember kam eine Maemo-Portierung für Nokia-770-Geräte heraus. Ende Juni 2007 wurde FBReader in Debian aufgenommen. Am 13. April 2008 wurde auch eine Vorschauversion einer Java-Portierung (FBReaderJ) veröffentlicht. Mittlerweile wird der FBReaderJ als "FBReader for Android" bezeichnet.
Für Android werden auf Google Play nunmehr eine kostenlose und eine kostenpflichtige Version mit etwas erweiterter Funktionalität angeboten, u. a. keine Werbung im Plugin Bookshelf.

Weblinks

 Offizielle Webpräsenz (englisch, russisch)
 Quellcode von FBReaderJ auf GitHub (englisch)

Einzelnachweise

Freie Büroanwendung
E-Book
Android-Software

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


Home / Uncategorized / What is an acceptable level of plagiarism?
Turnitin compares electronically submitted papers to a database of academic publications and other papers that have been submitted into the system to identify matching text. It is then the responsibility of the academic, the person marking your paper, to use the Originality Report to judge whether plagiarism has occurred.
One of the questions we are constantly asked is – "What is an acceptable level of plagiarism?" What they mean is "What is an acceptable percentage on their Turnitin originality report?" The answer to this question is not straightforward.
Has the student ensured that quotes are enclosed in quotation marks and correctly referenced?
Are the things that are matching commonly used terms, for example the full names of legislation. Something like The Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999 is going to show as matching but does not constitute plagiarism.
Commonly used words, phrases, and jargon may be matched by Turnitin. This is normal and should be taken into account when viewing the Originality Report.
Is the matching text all from one or two sources a wide range? If it is only from one or two then the academic is more likely to suspect plagiarism.


Profile 70mm wide and 20mm deep» 4mm bevelled mirrormass» Antique silver solid wood profile wim insel smoked glass bevelled mirror panels.
Item Mirmr size Overall Size Pk Qty Barcode 70mm wide and 25mm deep. 4mm bevelled mirror glass.


lilmissa quick and swift transaction. seller will update venue and timing. thanks for being so flexi!!
xhello Seller was not in SG so I had to deal with her mom. However deal went well, so thanks!
halo3 Great buyer n pleasant transaction!
Brand New BULOVA Automatic Eminence Villa Ladies watch - stainless steel case - mother of Pearl face - 10 Genuine rhodolites - top sapphire crystal - 50m water resistant - swiss made I've included pictures from a google search of the same model but with blue sapphire crystals for reference.


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require 'warden/basic_auth/version'
require 'warden/strategies/basic_auth'

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


The New York Times bestselling companion to the Showtime documentary series now streaming on Netflix, updated to cover the past five years.
In this riveting companion to their astonishing documentary series—including a new chapter and new photos covering Obama's second term, Trump's first year and a half, climate change, nuclear winter, Korea, Russia, Iran, China, Lybia, ISIS, Syria, and more—Academy Award–winning director Oliver Stone and renowned historian Peter Kuznick challenge prevailing orthodoxies to reveal the dark truth about the rise and fall of American imperialism.
Oliver Stone made such iconic films as Platoon, Wall Street, JFK, Born on the Fourth of July, Natural Born Killers, Nixon, Salvador, and W.
Peter Kuznick is professor of history and director of the award-winning Nuclear Studies Institute at American University and is currently serving his fourth term as distinguished lecturer with the Organization of American Historians. He has written extensively about science and politics, nuclear history, and Cold War culture.


Smith's trial was previously scheduled for Oct. 23 of last year prior to the Supreme Court appeal.
Whether or not Montgomery police officer Aaron Cody Smith can be tried for the murder of Greg Gunn, an unarmed black man killed steps away from his Mobile Heights home, will be determined Aug. 9.
Should the immunity hearing fail to show Smith's use of force was justifiable, the jury selection and trial will begin four days later on Aug. 13.
The new trial dates were set last week, two years since Smith was charged with the murder of Gunn. It's the latest development in a court process that has been mired in three judge changes and the defense's Alabama Supreme Court appeal for a fourth.
Smith shot Gunn sometime after 3 a.m. on Feb. 25, 2016. Gunn, who neighbors said was walking home from a card game, was stopped by Smith, who did not turn on his police lights or body cam, according to preliminary hearing testimony by State Bureau of Investigation agent Jason DiNunzio who interviewed Smith once 3½ hours after the shooting and again six days later.
After reportedly putting his hands on Smith's vehicle and submitting to a pat-down, Gunn fled and Smith chased. The two ran 50-75 yards down McElvy Street. Smith attempted to radio for backup but was unsuccessful. In the ensuing fight, Smith tased Gunn three times, beat him with a metal baton and eventually shot Gunn five times. According to Smith testimony recounted by DiNunzio, Gunn picked up a wooden paint roller stick prior to the shooting. No fingerprints were found on the wooden painter's stick, according to DiNunzio's testimony.
Gunn was shot in the front yard of his next door neighbor, Colvin Hinson.
"He was banging on the window and calling my name as loud as you could call it, his voice raising more and more," Hinson said the morning of the shooting.
DiNunzio said Smith told him he never had charges against Gunn at any point during the stop.
Broken glass was found among Gunn's possessions. Smith's attorney Mickey McDermott alleged after the preliminary hearing that Gunn was under the influence and DiNunzio said the glass "could have been" a crack pipe.
Smith's defense filed discovery motions in June 2017 to find out if the glass was tested for drugs or fingerprints.
On Monday, Smith's defense filed several more motions of discovery seeking forensic testing of the paint pole, the forensic photo log from Gunn's autopsy, the ballistics report of the weapon used and rounds removed from Gunn, and the recovered round not fired by Smith's gun.
The defense also requested the policy and procedures for SBI interrogations.
Montgomery County Circuit Judge Greg Griffin is the fourth judge to preside over the case after three previous judges recused themselves. Smith's defense attempted to force Griffin to recuse himself after Griffin complained on social media about being stopped by a Montgomery police officer while Griffin was out walking.
Smith's trial was scheduled for Oct. 23 of last year prior to the Supreme Court appeal.
Smith was placed on paid administrative leave following his March 2016 arrest.
In January, the Montgomery Advertiser filed a public records request with the city of Montgomery for the names, ranks and salaries of all Montgomery Police Department employees on paid and unpaid leave. The city denied the request. In February, the Advertiser requested the number of Montgomery police officers currently on administrative leave. MPD declined to provide the number.


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Congo-Kinshasa: Is Your Phone Tainted By the Misery of the 35 000 Children in Congo's Mines?
madarakaonline November 1, 2018 Uncategorized
By Siddharth Kara
Our computers and phones keep us connected but a key ingredient in them keeps children as young as six locked in a vicious cycle for about R26 a day.
Until recently, I knew cobalt only as a colour. Falling somewhere between the ocean and the sky, cobalt blue has been prized by artists from the Ming dynasty in China to the masters of French Impressionism. But there is another kind of cobalt, an industrial form that is not cherished for its complexion on a palette, but for its ubiquity across modern life.
This cobalt is found in every lithium-ion rechargeable battery on the planet – from smartphones to tablets to laptops to electric vehicles. It is also used to fashion superalloys to manufacture jet engines, gas turbines and magnetic steel. You cannot send an email, check social media, drive an electric car or fly home for the holidays without using this cobalt. As I learned on a recent research trip to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, this cobalt is not awash in cerulean hues.
Instead, it is smeared in misery and blood.
Elodie is 15. Her two-month-old son is wrapped tightly in a frayed cloth around her back. He inhales potentially lethal mineral dust every time he takes a breath. Toxicity assaults at every turn; earth and water are contaminated with industrial runoff, and the air is brown with noxious haze.
Elodie is on her own here, orphaned by cobalt mines that took both her parents. She spends the entire day bent over, digging with a small shovel to gather enough cobalt-containing heterogenite stone to rinse at nearby Lake Malo to fill one sack. It will take her an entire day to do so, after which Chinese traders will pay her about $0.65 (R9.50). Hopeless though it may be, it is her and her child's only means of survival.
More than half of the world's supply of cobalt is mined in the "copper belt" of the south-eastern provinces of DRC, a 2016 report by Amnesty International says.
According to the government agency charged with oversight of the informal or "artisanal" mining sector, at least 20% of this supply is mined by locals like Elodie, called creuseurs, Amnesty says. The remainder is produced by industrial mines that are typically operated by foreign companies following the collapse of the state-owned mining company, Gécamines.
Across the south-eastern provinces, I observed that Chinese companies run many of the industrial mines in the region. The Chinese also appear to run most of the "buying houses" that purchase cobalt from children such as Elodie. Every one of the 23 buying houses I documented in detail were operated by the Chinese, and I must have seen a hundred more with Chinese traders inside.
Chinese processors then mix cobalt from industrial and artisanal sources during a preliminary refining stage to produce crude cobalt hydroxide, which they drive to ports at Dar es Salaam and Durban for export to China.
After additional refining in China, the cobalt is sold to major component manufacturers and consumer electronic companies across the world.
These companies are collectively worth trillions of dollars. Yet according to Amnesty International in a report at the end of 2017, none of them are making sufficient efforts to ensure that their riches are not being built on the backs of the oppressed women, men and children of the Congo who toil in putrid conditions, endure pitiful wages, grave injury and risk death to mine their cobalt.
I documented the horrors at 31 artisanal mining sites in the south-eastern provinces, including several previously undocumented sites in remote mountains near the Zambian border. Based on the data I gathered, I estimate there are more than 255 000 creuseurs mining cobalt in DRC, at least 35 000 of whom are children, some as young as six.
While market prices of cobalt have spiked 300% in the past two years, none of that increase makes its way down to creuseurs like Arthur. The 16-year-old boy joined a group of young men who spent two months digging a tunnel 26m straight down before they hit a heterogenite vein. Now they descend into darkness each day, spending up to 24 hours at a time in narrow tunnels unable to stand, hacking away for cobalt. Every minute is suffused with dread, because many tunnels have collapsed in Kasulo, burying alive everyone inside.
At the surface, I follow the men from Arthur's tunnel with several sacks of cobalt to one of the dozens of Chinese buying houses nearby. The entire neighbourhood has in fact been walled off, in an effort to keep people from documenting the perilous conditions.
The cobalt under Kolwezi is purer than at Elodie's site, so the traders at the nearby buying house pay a higher rate for each kilogramme. It works out to roughly US$1.80 (R26) a day in income for Arthur, but he is unlikely to get to keep all of it. Numerous local creuseurs told me that children like Arthur are forced to pay bribes to the local government functionaries who are supposed to ensure there are no children working at sites like Kasulo.
In mine after mine, I witnessed heartrending suffering at the bottom of global cobalt supply chains.
The companies that source cobalt from DRC are surely aware of the appalling conditions under which the mineral is mined in some sites in the country. Aside from the Amnesty reports, labour abuses linked to cobalt mining in the region have been widely documented by human rights groups and by media organisations across the world.
Yet while major consumer electronic and automobile brands state they do not tolerate child labour in their supply chains, none have invested enough resources or time into ensuring that they can adequately address the human rights abuses that could be lurking in the products they sell to millions across the world. They have consistently shifted responsibility for human rights abuses in the Congo on to their Chinese suppliers.
In the absence of full accountability, suffering can run riot. No company should be able to jettison their responsibility for the vicious and unjust treatment of the people who mine cobalt and other minerals simply because they are separated from them by a few thousand miles, and a few layers in their supply chains.
From stone to phone, they must be accountable.
Any company sourcing cobalt from DRC must establish an independent, third-party system of verification that all mineral supply chains are cleansed of exploitation, cruelty, slavery, and child labour. They must invest whatever is needed to ensure the decent pay, safe and dignified working conditions, healthcare, education and general wellbeing of the people whose cheap labour they rely on.
There is little we can do as consumers at present, apart from refusing to buy their products until they take sufficient action.
A gust of wind swept across Elodie's mine, swirling toxic dust over every inch of child and infant. Her son awoke, crying meekly. She wiped the grit from his face and sat in the dirt to feed him.
She asked me what I was going to do when I left her and her baby.
I wanted to tell Elodie I would try to help. I wanted to tell her that despite all the evidence to the contrary, there were people in the world who cared about her and her son.
But I left in silence. I knew these words would be worthless.
Siddharth Kara is an adjunct lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and a visiting scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health. This piece was originally published in The Guardian's Global Development section.
SOURCE: https://bhekisisa.org/article/2018-10-29-00-is-your-phone-tainted-by-the-misery-of-the-35000-children-in-congos-mines-1/
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The present investigation deals with enumeration including diversity, ecology and conservation of the family Orchidaceae of greater Sylhet region of Bangladesh. Extensive field trips were made at 11 different sites of this region during early monsoon, late monsoon and winter seasons. Relevant literature and different herbaria were consulted to gather information about the orchids of this region. Orchidaceae is represented in greater Sylhet by 75 species under 49 genera. Out of these, 25 species are terrestrial, 48 are epiphytic, one is saprohytic and one is hemiepiphytic. Presence of 37 monotypic genera indicates a narrow diversity in Orchidaceae of this area. The present investigation revealed that 26 orchid species are restricted and distributed only in Sylhet region in Bangladesh. The currently accepted taxonomic nomenclature, synonyms, habit, flowering time, present conservation status and geographical distribution are provided under each taxon.


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Supermac's chief vows to bring four star hotel to Longford as part of second phase of multi million euro project
Businessman says construction likely to commence by summer
Liam Cosgrove
liam.cosgrove@longfordleader.ie
Supermacs founder Pat McDonagh has pledged to add a four star hotel to his plans to construct a major plaza style service station in Longford.
Supermac's boss Pat McDonagh has pledged to add a 100 bedroom hotel to his proposed Obama style plaza in Longford town after planning approval for its development was given the green light.
The Leader broke details surrounding Longford County Council's decision to rubber-stamp designs to erect a large scale service station at Lisnamuck, off the main Ballinalee Road earlier today.
ALSO READ: BREAKING: Major Longford jobs boost on cards as Supermac's given go-ahead for Obama-style plaza
Mr McDonagh, himself, said he was oblivious to the news when contacted early this morning, preferring instead to refrain from commenting until he had received official notification over the news.
The Galwegian later made contact with the Leader to express his delight over the decision before going on to outline his future intentions to develop a four star hotel as part of the project's second phase.
"I have to say I am delighted with the news," he said.
"It's a positive step forward and will allow us to develop the site further down the road for a hotel."
Mr McDonagh, who only last week, announced plans to create 200 additional jobs at three additional Supermac's outlets, said any plans for a new hotel would come with all the trappings associated with a four star development of its type including leisure centre and conference facilities.
He also reaffirmed the new plaza would create 80 full time jobs when fully operational with anything up to 120 construction jobs at peak development stage.
"This is a first step," he said, in reference to planning approval being sanctioned.
"We have a plan in mind for the whole site. What it shows is the potential that Longford and other county towns around the country clearly have.
"Dublin has become over-saturated which means rural towns have the chance to benefit and with the likes of Center Parcs opening soon, it's time now for Longford to take centre stage."
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