I may be poking the bear here, but I’ve been following the discussion of EduPunk and have a few questions I’d like to raise. I’ll admit that I haven’t given this as much thought as I’d like to, and I also admit to being naive in the ways of the world, but can EduPunk ever be mainstream? The way it seems to be defined now, I don’t think so. If not, how can the majority of faculty be brought into the good practices EduPunk espouses? I think this question is related to the point JJulius makes here.
If the crux of EduPunk is radical first adoption of cutting edge technologies, whatever they are, then no. But if it means radically rethinking how we conduct higher education, then perhaps.
Is the purpose of EduPunk to provoke a change in mainstream academia? Okay, then what do we call those who adopt the new paradigm? What do we call the system that our IT staffs design to make the new paradigm easy to use and scalable?
I can imagine a learning management suite of tools, small pieces, loosely joined, that faculty are trained to choose from as they build their own course environments, and I can imagine that these environments are linked, like a bee hive to form a university’s online persona. I can imagine the tool suite having many default settings based on what the majority of faculty are using, but also allowing innovators to choose alternatives to better fit their own teaching needs. Would this be EduPunk or just Blackboard Version 15? If it results in most faculty using better teaching practices, don’t think it ultimately matters.
Allowing for choice and a variegated options that the professors and students explore, rather than the administration purchases out of expediency, may go a long way towards invoking a different logic for teaching and learning on university campuses.
I think the small pieces loosely joined idea is key to this change, and Bb 15 would only ever reproduce the logic of the tools in the most paltry of ways because of their business model. They aim to own you, now to afford you possibilities Why can’t professors use what they want, and we shape an infrastructure that is syndication based, and connects people and ideas using feeds throughout the beehive accordingly?
The notion of choice, options, and innovations are at the heart of some of the ideas circulating, but more than that some kind of community through which these ideas become bigger than any one tool, and about a shifting notion of communicating and conducting a sustained intellectual discourse. I do admit that I don;’ know what EDUPUK is, and the term may not be all that useful in the end, but I think you have had more experience with the spirit of that idea than most.
Moreover, as a professor, what do you value more—an engaged group of instructional technologists who are ready to talk about everything from philosophy to the Internet Archive to Wikipedia to WordPress?,–or a corporate box that will afford you perhaps a fraction of what you want to do? Point is, it is a human interaction around teaching and learning in an interesting moment that is most valuable, A way to frame the discussion of the mad rush of tools that cascade onto the web like Niagra Falls. I like the idea of experimenting with folks, and establishing a faith-based relationship where failure and success are part of the same logic, and the commitment to experimentation comes before the logic of convenience.
And I have seen it work at UMW, and I believe if a logic liek this goes mainstream anywhere, it could definitely be there. I am proud to work for “the man” at UMW, because of folks like you, and I come to work daily not with a vengeful sneer, but with the idea that someone, somewhere on campus is going to push past the pale yet again. And I have yet to be disappointed. So, let’s go!
I think both of these discussions converge nicely as a statement of the broader project imagined, as a new vision of the educational endeavor that transcends tired models and/or builds upon, develops, indeed “mashes” elements of successful methods to bring new levels of creativity into being. Here “failure and success [as] part of the same logic” rings nicely with a vision of collaboration and innovation.
I also like the idea of readily available defaults combined with multiple avenues and maximum flexibility for innovators, experimenters, and those with a (seemingly) random inspiration or need for a new kind of frame. Of course the catch with Bbd is a simple one: they define the possibilities, not the mad hatters (or PUNKS) or the broader creative crowd that’s fiddling merrily with the stuff. I still think the EduFUNK model sits well alongside its punk partner… one has to love a vision of a crowd as the band and, indeed, the arena as the stage.
As web applications effectively start to offer single sign/authentication (e.g. via OpenID) and open up their APIs (ideally using services like OpenAuth – the machine level equivalent of OpenId), then all sorts of integrated mashup environments become possible.
The weakest from of couping is no coupling, of course – just multiple applications open in different browser tabs/windows. My own stringle (string’n’glue PLE) experiment provided a way of bundling separate apps into the same context by bookmarking them to delicious and tagging them in a particuar way (eg http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/stringle )
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