no more band-aids
Edupunk isn’t real, in and of itself. It exists only as a concept for people to use as scaffolding when discussing priorities and alternatives in education.
It doesn’t matter what’s inside the suitcase, only that it exists, and that we chase it relentlessly.
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.
I’m listening to the EdTechPosse podcast 4.3, and they’re talking a bit about “edupunk”. I fired a few comments into Twitter, but wanted to flesh them out a little more.
“Edupunk” is not about a bunch of middle-aged geeks reliving their youth. Back in the day, I was much too much of a dork to be a part of punk. I was never a punk as a kid. I’m not “reliving” anything. Edupunk is more than just reminiscing some form of adolescent anarchy. It’s not just trying to recapture lost youth. Although, if there is that angle for some people, more power to them.
“Edupunk” is not about the name. One could call it Super Happy Fun DIY Smiley People and it would be the same thing. The name has been more of a source of confusion than anything – but it has been valuable in that it did cause much conversation about the topic that wouldn’t likely have happened if it had been called Super Happy Fun DIY Smiley People. The *punk portion of the label was also important because it pushed conversation in the direction of tearing down walls and breaking down hegemony. That is important, and needs to be talked about. We need to be talking about these topics that make us uncomfortable.
“Edupunk” did not die a week after the initial discussion. It just went underground. The wordsmithers and people who were hung up on dissecting the “*Punk” portion of the name sucked the soul out of it, and, at least for myself, I’ve decided to just ignore all conversation on the topic and just do it. (says the guy listening to a podcast discussing edupunk, writing yet another blog post on edupunk…)
Anyway, here closes my last post on the topic. No more talking about it. Time to get back to work.
This is a response to Cole Camplese’s great post “Should it all be Miscellaneous” – which was, itself, a response to the Penn State Web Conference (which, in turn, sounds like it was a fantastic gathering of PSU folks).
Go read Cole’s post before reading any further. It’s worth it. I’ll wait.
Really. I’ll wait. Go read it. Seriously.
OK. You’re back. Took long enough. Great post, eh? Here are my thoughts in response:
I’m in the early stages of planning what could turn into a pretty large scale community project on campus. My gut reaction was to craft a website using our CMS of choice. I wanted to keep it as organic as possible, letting people in the community do pretty much anything they want with it. But, now I’m seriously wondering if even that would be too constraining. I’m now thinking about just having individuals and groups set up blogs wherever they like (with several suggested services provided to help guide them) and let them publish whatever they want, however they want, wherever they want.
The downside of that approach is that it’s difficult for people to get a feel for the activities of the community at a glance, or for new people to get up to speed. It’s messy and noisy, but that’s one of the reasons the approach is attractive. Maybe I try rolling out some form of Eduglu service to pull the various bits back together in context, and track links and conversations? hmm…
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.
Reverend Jim. The poster boy for edupunk. Jim’s been kicking out the jams on this stuff for years, running completely against the traditional establishment. He teaches courses without an LMS. He mashes up wikis and blogs. He incites radical DIYism in everyone he meets. Jim’s hardcore exploration of DIY and individual publishing have made me rethink the nature and value of enterprise systems (they still have a very important role, but not in the way I used to think they did…)
DJ Wiki. The man who lives in a realtime mashup. His work with the OLT interns is absolutely amazing. He’s taken a group of students as interns, and has essentially pushed them into the role of professional edtech developers, conference facilitators, and so much more. He provides guidance, and lets them explore. And the stuff they come up with as a team is mindboggling. Brian’s mastery of media and depth of literary knowledge are simply stunning, and only matched by his openness and willingness to share.
Viral professional development. Jennifer has been working to help instructors at BTC to adopt pragmatic openness – starting by sharing as much of her professional development activities as possible. She set up an Elluminate play session today for several of the BTC instructors, and invited people from outside (via Twitter) to participate. As a result, we had an interesting discussion while playing and exploring a new tool. It was a casual way to safely learn a piece of technology, while modeling the power of the Network. Very cool stuff. Jen is brave, open, and able to connect people in a way I’ve never seen before.
50 ways to tell a story? Serious edupunk. Inspiring hundreds (thousands?) of people literally around the world to take DIY storytelling into their own hands and craft, publish and share their own stories. Alan’s been living edupunk for as long as I’ve known him (and that goes way back to the early 90’s when he ran the Director Web community website!) Alan has always been a trailblazer, an experimenter, and a pioneer of community based collaboration.
Alec’s ego is big enough. I’ll just link to my previous post on Alec.
Anarchy and individual empowerment, modeled by a person employed by the federal government of a G8 nation. Stephen’s been pushing toward personal publishing and DIY for years – long before most of his colleagues (including myself) understood where he was going. I first met him several years ago while working on the EDUSOURCE national learning object repository project. He was talking about stuff back then that we’re only now starting to see come true, most notably the use of RSS as the syndication format. Stephen is one of the few people whom I trust to see through rhetoric and hype, to break something down to the simplest components, and to see how things relate to an individual’s ability to control their own destiny. OLDaily. gRSSHopper. hardcore edupunk.
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. Cole constantly pushes the people he works with, and the people in his Network, by encouraging people to collaborate and contribute. He’s the one who first saw the value in Twitter, when I initially dismissed it as silly and banal. He gets community in every sense of the word.
I am humbled by what these incredible people do. And am trying to figure out if and how I contribute back to the edupunk culture. I suppose 366photos is pretty edupunk (but not particularly strong on the edu- side of things). I suppose helping push Drupal, Moodle, Mediawiki, etc… on campus is a bit edupunk. And eduglu could definitely be called edupunk – but it’s still just a McGuffin, so likely doesn’t count for much at the moment.
Still, when I consider the work that these people do on a regular basis, my head spins.
Instead of talking about edupunk, or philosophizing about what defines punk culture, Alec just went ahead and lived it. His EC&I 831 course was serious hardcore edupunk, before the term was coined.
He ran a grad course, completely in the open. He invited a whole bunch of people to join the class, where students and guests discussed and explored ideas and strategies, and shared the combined output. He modeled some serious DIY chops, drawing on more free (and non-free) bits of tech than I could track, and pushing the students into the driver’s seat as part of the process.
The course had structure and definition, but was also fluid and organic. Responsive. Adaptive. Open. It was an edtech course, using insane amounts of tech, but the magic was in the non-tech aspect of the course – that students were in control (but not out of control).
Alec Couros is seriously hardcore edupunk, and hopefully his students will have picked up on some of that. Imagine what will happen when his students unleash that philosophy in the classroom…
The cool and exciting thing is that Alec isn’t the only one doing this stuff! Will people that go through this kind of course be able to go back to “traditional” courses? What will happen, down the road, when these people start running the show? Interesting times…
Jim’s been talking about edupunk a fair bit lately (starting with the killer post The Glass Bees, then Permapunk and finally tying in the awesome Murder, Madness, Mayhem wikipedia project), and Jen wrote up a piece that dovetails nicely into the concept. There’s something about the edupunk concept that is resonating deeply in me.
It’s a movement away from what has become of the mainstream edtech community – a collection of commercial products produced by large companies. Edupunk is the opposite of that. It’s DIY. It’s hardcore. It’s not monetized. It’s not trademarked. It’s not press-released. It’s not on an upgrade cycle. It’s not enterprise. It’s not shrinkwrapped.
It’s about individuals being able to craft their own tools, to plan their own agendas, and to determine their own destinies. It’s about individuals being able to participate, to collaborate, to contribute, without boundaries or barriers.
And it’s not new. The early days of the “edublogosphere” had a definite edupunk vibe to it. Long before that, we had seen edupunk, and it was awesome. I remember when Hypercard was commonplace. When teachers and students would regularly build and adapt their own interactive applications, games, and databases to support classroom activities. Without fanfare or infrastructure or strategic planning or budgets. When Hypercard was killed, it was an end of a renaissance era of DIY edtech.
But, the key to edupunk is that it is not about technology.
It’s about a culture, a way of thinking, a philosophy. It’s about DIY. Lego is edupunk. Chalk is edupunk. A bunch of kids exploring a junkyard is edupunk. A kid dismantling a CD player to see what makes it tick is edupunk.
I’m not about to suggest that technology isn’t important or relevant to edupunk – of course it is. But only as an enabling piece of infrastructure. Technology can empower individuals, amplify actions, and connect communities. But without the edupunk philosophy underlying it all, it’s just a bunch of technology. Uninteresting and irrelevant.
One of the coolest classrooms I’ve ever been in is the Engineering Design Lab at the University of Calgary. It’s a classroom from the outside, but is really nothing but rows of workbenches, armed with any tools and materials imaginable. Drawers full of Lego for building prototypes. Cabinets full of Mechano for piecing together simple machines. A full machine shop for building more complex ones. It’s a place where the students are not only allowed, but encouraged to explore and create. Working in groups to create and solve problems. Critical thinking. Inquiry. Experiential. And it is the most hardcore edupunk class I’ve seen.
