EduPunks Say School Yourself! Their DIY movement is reinventing how, and why, we learn. 'We're using our own tools.' [Editor's note: The Tyee is proud to co-publish with Rabble.ca a multi-part investigation of Maker Culture -- the do-it-yourself movement fast evolving in North America and beyond.
This is episode ten of 11, running Fridays.] One night in 2008 at a Brooklyn bar, a drunk Jim Groom coined a term that has changed the way the world looks at education. The word is EduPunk and it sums up the need for educational reform -- reform that, to some extent, has already begun. Ordinary people are taking their education into their own hands. "What we're doing now as EduPunks is we're kind of taking the same concept, the same ethos of the punk era and we're applying it to education," says Steve Wheeler, a self-proclaimed EduPunk educator at the University of Plymouth. What does that mean? "You try to do it cheap, you don't kind of overthink it.
Define, please Who needs credentials? "We've got to accept that," he explains. Introducing Edupunk. Jim Groom recently coined the term "edupunk" to refer to a scrappy, DIY spirit in some sectors of educational technology.
Edupunk, he writes, is opposed to capitalist co-optation of the labor of educators and progressive educational technologists. He highlights "a scary reality that often gets overlooked (or is it intentionally downplayed?) In educational technology," namely that the Utopian, blue sky ideas of technology as a singular harbinger of possibility and liberation ignores the cold and all-consuming role that capital plays in the shaping of technology as means of control.
Now I understand that this struggle is by no means unilateral, and that for every instance of technology as a means to consolidate power for capital, there is another instance in which that same technology can be used to undermine the fallacious logic of capital’s vision of progress.[...] He elaborates by using BlackBoard as an example of capitalist predation gone awry: D'Arcy Norman shares his view of edupunk: Introducing Edupunk ~ Stephen's Web ~ by Stephen Downes. How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education. D'Arcy Norman dot net. On thinking about edupunk, it strikes me that I’ve been drawn to a group of people that have embodied it for years.
People that are open. That prefer to DIY. People who share, remix, mashup, and generally operate in the spirit of what is now being called edupunk. Here are my edupunk heroes, who inspire me every day (in no particular order). There are lots of other people that inspire me constantly, but when I think EDUPUNK, these are the people that really push me. Jim Groom Reverend Jim. Brian Lamb DJ Wiki. Jennifer Dalby Viral professional development. Alan Levine 50 ways to tell a story? Alec Couros Alec’s ego is big enough.
Stephen Downes Anarchy and individual empowerment, modeled by a person employed by the federal government of a G8 nation. Cole Camplese The director of an edtech unit at a huge university, who hacks WordPress themes for fun and publishes to blogs, wikis, podcasts, and various other community sites with impressive frequency and depth. A "b" blog.