The Reverend just posted a link to a great video produced by EDUCAUSE, which is basically a discussion between Jim Groom and Gardner Campbell on edupunk. It’s well worth viewing. I’m going to be passing it around here on campus.
3 thoughts on “now THIS is edupunk”
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This is great! I really enjoyed how Jim boiled it down for everyone. There is a lot of frustration out there, but this is channeling that energy into something productive.
I think Jim is right about how the term edupunk really touched a nerve with so many instructional designers and educational technologists of all manner. Maybe, as Gardner says, the metaphor is a bit awkward but I disagree that punk culture was manufactured. It was certainly made fashionable by Malcolm McLaren using the Sex Pistols, but I never thought they were the true essence of punk – more of a carnival sideshow really.
But I think edupunk was a good label for the feelings that a lot of us had. It got us talking/blogging/tweeting about our dissatisfaction with the paradigms of closed content management systems. It reminds me a bit of ‘eduglu’ in that it might be a myth or MacGuffin, but it does lead to the search fo alternatives to the status quo. I think that the stuff that Alec Couros is doing with open teaching might be an exemplar of the sort of teaching/learning that we are striving for.
And I love Jim using Whitman and Emerson to explain some of the existence of edupunk.
It just occurred to me that one could say that the “punk” nature of edupunk is as much the disdain for DIY efforts as the DIY efforts themselves. The controversy, contention and conflict is an inherent part of the idea that leads to conversations like in this video.
I look forward to the rest of the conversation.