Blockchain arrives on college campuses

The University of California, Berkeley’s Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology (SCET) is one of the first institutions to offer university courses on blockchain technology. Specifically, SCET’s Blockchain Lab facilitates collaboration between new ventures, industry scholars, and academics to evaluate, validate, and execute innovative blockchain projects.

“Academics feel a lot of pressure to maintain their status as ‘world-class experts’ in some narrowly defined field,” said Po Chi Wu, visiting professor at UC Berkeley and instructor of Blockchain Lab. “Just keeping up with the advances in their field is challenging enough and demands all their time and energy.”

Ikhlaq Sidhu, founding director and chief scientist of the Sutardja Center, suggests the hesitation of universities in providing blockchain related courses stems from their uncertainty in differentiating short-lived trends emerging technology trends from long-lasting ones.

“We expect a wave of blockchain solutions that will solve a new set of social issues to disrupt the current world order,” said Sidhu and Alexander Fred-Ojala, research director of Data-X, “Not teaching about blockchain would be equivalent to ignoring internet technology when it emerged 25 years ago.”

For more information on Sidhu and Fred-Ojala’s take on the future of blockchain, click here.

Read the whole story at Wired

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