Frances Bell’s Blog

I have been scratching my head to see why the term Edupunk raises vague and irrational feelings of irritation and suspicion in me.   I love the philosophy of bricolage, workarounds and experimentation that it seems to encompass.  After all the ‘poster boy’ for Edupunk, Jim Groom, has been blogging his experiments and thoughts on BuddyPress (brought to me via Joss Winn).  This is the front runner for technology support for a new module called Emerging Technologies, delivered to 450 budding Edupunks on Salford Business School in September (so I am personally grateful to Jim and Joss for their ideas and work).   Here is a selection of my grumpy tweets from yesterday, from http://search.twitter.com/search?q=francesbell+edupunk - I think just have to get over this by blogging my way through it!

Selection of my tweets on Edupunk

On Monday, there was an Emerging Mondays session on Edupunk that I missed as I was travelling with no Internet access, and so there was a little twittering about it.  I empathised with Liam Green-Hughes’  characterisation of Edupunk as a bit “Dad at Disco” uncool.   I listened to the recording of the session enjoying the thoughtful and ambitious work that is being done at TU Graz by Martin Ebner and colleagues. I also checked out Steve Wheeler’s post about what he would have said if his mike had worked.  Having checked out these and previous responses on Edupunk, I realise that I have missed a dimension that Chris Sessums captures in his response to a blog post on a previous Edupunk sessions

“Edupunk embodies this notion of educators as artists, those who intentionally trace and explore traditional boundaries and human expression. The edupunk meme signifies more than just a tart phrase pasted on the media landscape. To truly understand its meaning, you have to live it.”

That is really important, to capture the creative outlets that an edupunk approach offers to teachers and other learners.  I am prepared to live it, and am privileged to work with students in higher education who are negototiating challenging boundaries in learning, work and society.

Jim Groom’s original Glass Bees post gives an incisive analysis of the link between capital and cultural change

“I don’t believe in technology, I believe in people. And that’s why I don’t think our struggle is over the future of technology, it is over the struggle for the future of our culture that is assailed from all corners by the vultures of capital. Corporations are selling us back our ideas, innovations, and visions for an exorbitant price. I want them all back, and I want them now!”

So was I completely off beam?- I don’t think so. We could espouse the creative, experimental philosophy of edupunk by using web services like twitter and Blogger but still be vulnerable to the appropriation of content that we might wish to move elsewhere but can’t.  That is what is so appealing to me about the Buddy Press environment - although the platform can be hosted in an educational institution, the data is under the control of the individual user.  Students and staff can, with a little support, port their blogs to their own domain.  Thus, the identity they create on Buddy Press can be continued (unlike their usual experience with university accounts deleted 3 weeks after graduation).

In a follow up post, Jim Groom said

“I don’t police or control data, nor am I so concerned about scaling enterprises or the next generation of Web 2.0 tools as sold by corporations or systems of technical complexity and control. The idea is to make real, localized, and human connections that echo out into some kind of circumscribed eternity.”

If Edupunk were concerned only with the latter, then I think that Edupunks would need to join forces with those who are critiquing the control of data and the scaling of enterprises.  I do think we need hard-nosed critique of commercialism around all areas of educational technology not just monopolistic providers of Virtual Learning Environments like Blackboard.  What Tom Woodward called Client Enslavement is also called Supplier lock-in, and that sacrifice of power can happen wherever monopolies prevail - with proprietary VLEs, with ‘free’ Web 2.0 services that are bought out in the game of Googlopoly, and even possibly with Open Source software.

In any case, since we (and our students) are making choices about which particular lash up of proprietary and OS software, own-hosted and web service, controlled and given data we use, we need to acquire the knowledge, evaluation and reflection skills that will help us weave our way through it.

Edupunk is only the beginning!