Open thinking » Edupunk, Meaning, Identity. I have been wanting to jump onto the topic of edupunk for quite a while now, but I am happy that I waited. Since Jim Groom’s initial post, there has been a lot of debate around the term … but I won’t get into that. This post is really not about entering into that conversation. The term resonated with me, so please let me indulge in this bit of selfish, and very incomplete, introspection. D’Arcy Norman proclaimed me an edpunk, and I am in excellent company. This proclamation resulted because of the work I did with my recent graduate course, EC&I 831 where I (with the help of Rob Wall) broke a lot of rules regarding course “delivery”. I have spoken about the course quite a few times since it has formally ended, and the question I am asked most often is “how did you get away with that?”. To Rob and I, the facilitation model came naturally, it made sense to be open and transparent.
The term edupunk comes to me at an ideal time. Many parents believe that this is education. From Wikipedia: My edupunk heroes | 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. The Glass Bees at bavatuesdays. With my no-internet, hippie-like vacation to Montauk behind me now, I can return to the bava and continue the excruciating futility that is my life online. I enjoyed the time away because I was able to do something I hadn’t done in too long, i.e., read a few books that have nothing to do with a course I was either taking or teaching.
One of the books I read that has me both excited and scared is Ernst Jünger’s 1957 novel The Glass Bees (Gläserne Bienen). I got this novel back in 2000 when it was re-published by the New York Review of Books, and it sat on my shelf for almost eight years. And I am now convinced it had to sit there for that long. For this book wouldn’t have meant half as much to me had I read it before my full-fledged, self-obsessed foray into the land of the lost, a.k.a the internet, almost four years ago. I happened upon this novel last week when I was searching for something to read on my shelves. What is BlackBoard doing? Enter stage left: EDUPUNK! Changing Expectations: Educational Publishing. Changing Expectations: Educational Publishing If you follow any North American edublogs, you probably can't fail to have noticed a whole flurry of recent posts on "Edupunk".
Capturing the spirit of the times, Jim Groom's call to arms last week inspired many, confused some, and even offended a few... There's a wealth of good posts on the topic, of which I've especially liked EDUPINIONS (for the student voice), @Injenuity for the zen-like response, question setting edupunk or eduhacker, and Doug Belshaw (for not liking it at all;-) The Chronicle of Higher Education need thanking for legitimising the term to the extent it helped get it into wikipedia, Downes for providing some clarification and D'ArcyNorman, who seriously freaked some of us out on Saturday morning... If it's a badge you're after, Scott Leslie's done 'em...;-) (but who's doin' the t-shirts?
;-) The following works best on full screen view and with the volume turned up LOUD! Tags: edupunk. 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: